Africa and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History (Transatlantic Relations) volume 1, 2, and 3

Africa and the Americas

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Other titles in ABC-CLIO’s

Transatlantic Relations Series

Britain and the Americas, by Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson France and the Americas, by Bill Marshall, assisted by Cristina Johnston Germany and the Americas, by Thomas Adam Iberia and the Americas, by J. Michael Francis Ireland and the Americas, by James P. Byrne, Philip Coleman, and Jason King

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Africa and the Americas Culture, Politics, and History A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia VOLUME I EDITED BY

Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette Melissa Fullmer Editorial Assistant

Transatlantic Relations Series Will Kaufman, Series Editor

Santa Barbara, California Denver, Colorado Oxford, England

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Copyright © 2008 by ABC-CLIO, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Africa and the Americas : culture, politics, and history : a multidisciplinary encyclopedia / edited by Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette. p. cm. — (Translatlantic relations series) 3 v. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-85109-441-7 (hard copy : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-85109-446-2 (ebook : alk. paper) 1. America—Relations— Africa—Encyclopedias. 2. Africa—Relations—America—Encyclopedias. DT31.A43 2008 303.48'2706—dc22 2007035154 12

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Production Editor: Kristine Swift Production Manager: Don Schmidt Media Editor: Jason Kniser Media Production Coordinator: Ellen Brenna Dougherty Media Resources Manager: Caroline Price File Management Coordinator: Paula Gerard ABC-CLIO, Inc. 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an ebook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. This book is printed on acid-free paper ∞ Manufactured in the United States of America

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CONTENTS Series Editor’s Preface, xiii Editor’s Preface, xv Topic Finder, xxi Chronology of Africa and the Americas, xxix Introductory Essays, 1 Demography, Diaspora, and International Relations, 3 Culture and Religion, 11 Economics and Trade, 19 Arts, Literature, and Sport, 29 American Revolution, 96 Amistad Case, The, 99 Ananse, 100 Ancestor Worship, 102 Angola, 104 Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela, 106 Annan, Kofi, 107 Anthropology, 108 Antigua and Barbuda, 111 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 112 Apprenticeship (British Empire), 113 Architecture, 116 Architecture, Plantation, 118 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 122 Arms Trafficking, 124 Art, African, 126 Atlantic World, 132 Attucks, Crispus, 137 Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de, 137 Aviation, 139

Abolitionism, 39 Abolitionism, British, 43 Achebe, Chinua, 46 Africa, North, 48 Africa, Precolonial, 50 Africa, West, 57 African Institution, The, 64 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 65 African Squadrons, 68 African Union, 69 Afrocentrism, 71 Afrofuturism, 72 Agriculture, 73 Agriculture, Sustainable, 77 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 79 Akan, 81 Akram, Wali, 82 Algeria, 82 ‘Ali Pasha, Muhammad, 83 Ali, Muhammad, 84 Ali, Noble Drew, 86 America, Central, 87 American Colonization Society, 93 American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, 95 American Missionary Association, 96

Bahamas, 141 Bakhita, Josephine, Saint, 144 Baraka, Amiri, 146 Barbados, 149 v

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vi CONTENTS Barnet, Miguel, 150 Barotseland, 151 Bauzá, Mario, 152 BBC Caribbean Service and Caribbean Voices, 153 Benin, Republic of, 155 Bennett, Louise, 157 Berlin West Africa Conference, 157 Bermuda, 159 Beyala, Calixthe, 160 Biafra, 161 Biotechnology, 162 Birchtown (Birch Town), 165 Black Arts Movement, 165 Black Athena, 167 Black Classical Singers, 169 Black Panther Party, 171 Black Power Movement, 175 Black Star Line, 177 Blucke or Bleucke or Bluck, Stephen, 177 Blyden, Edward Wilmot, 179 Boatbuilding, 181 Bolivia, 182 Brand, Dionne, 185 Brathwaite, Kamau, 186 Brazil, 188 Brazilian Carnival, 191 Brazilian Culture, 193 Brindis de Salas, Virginia, 195 Britain: People of African Origin and Descent, 196 British Empire, 200 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 205 Brouwer, Leo, 206 Brown, William, 207 Brussels Act, 208 Bunche, Ralph, 209 Burial Ground (New York City), African, 210 Burial, African Practices in the Americas, 211 Burkina Faso, 214 Burundi, 216 Cabral, Amilcar, 219 Cabral, Cristina Rodríguez, 220 Calabar, 221 Calypso, 223 Cameroon, 225 Canada (Africadian Culture), 228 Candomblé, 231 Cape Coast Castle, 231 www.abc-clio.com

Cape Verde, 233 Caribbean Artists Movement, 234 Caribbean Community and Common Market, 235 Caribbean Literature, 237 Carnival, Latin American, 241 Carver, George Washington, 242 Casas, Bartolomé De Las, 243 Castas Paintings, 244 Castro Ruz, Fidel, 246 Catholicism, 249 Ceddo, 251 Central African Republic, 251 Central Intelligence Agency, 253 Césaire, Aimé, 255 Chad, 257 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 258 Chikaba (Venerable Therese Juliana of Saint Dominic), 259 Chile, 261 Christianity (African American), 262 Christophe, Henri, 263 Cities, 264 Civil Rights Movement, 267 Civil War, American, 272 Clemente Walker, Roberto, 274 Cliff, Michelle, 276 Code Noir, 277 Coetzee, John Maxwell, 279 Coffee, 282 Cold War, 282 Colombia, 286 Colonial Armies in Africa, 290 Colonialism, 293 Colored Farmers National Alliance, 300 Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 300 Columbian Exchange, 301 Columbus, Christopher, 303 Comoros, 304 Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, 305 Condé, Maryse, 306 Congo (Brazzaville), 308 Congo (Kinshasa), Democratic Republic of the, 309 Congolese Independence, 312 Côte d’Ivoire, 313 Creole Revolt, 314 Creole/Criollo, 315 Crisis, The, 316 Cruz, Celia, 317

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CONTENTS Cuba, 318 Cuban Music, African Influence in, 321 Cuban Ritual Music, African Influence in, 325 Cudjoe, 328 Cuffe, Captain Paul, 329 Cush Kingdom, 330 Dabydeen, David, 331 Dadié, Bernard Binlin, 332 D’Aguiar, Fred, 333 Dan Fodio, Uthman, 334 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 335 Danish Empire, 336 Danticat, Edwidge, 338 Dash, Julie, 340 Debt Cancellation, 340 Decolonization, African, 343 Delany, Martin Robinson, 345 Democracy, African, 347 Democracy, Latin American, 351 Denver African Expedition, 356 Dessalines, Jean Jacques, 357 Diamonds, 358 Diaspora, 360 Diaspora, Demography of, 362 Dinka, 366 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 366 Djebar, Assia, 368 Djibouti, 370 Doe, Samuel K., 371 Dominican Republic, The, 372 Dongala, Emmanuel Boundzeki, 375 Douglass, Frederick, 376 Drama, African American, 378 Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), 381 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 382 Dutch Empire, 385 Dutty, Boukman, 390 Duvalier, François, 391 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 393 EBONY, 395 Ecology, 397 Economic Community of West African States, 400 Ecuador, 401 Efik, 403 Egypt, 404 Egypt, American Mercenaries in, 409 Egyptian Soldiers in Mexico, 410 www.abc-clio.com

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Ekwensi, Cyprian Odiatu Duaka, 411 Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 412 Emancipation Proclamation, 413 Emecheta, Buchi, 414 English, African American Vernacular, 415 Enlightenment Philosophy, 416 Environmentalism, 419 Equatorial Guinea, 421 Equiano, Olaudah, 423 Eritrea, 424 Ethiopia, 427 Ethnicity, 430 Evolution, Human, 434 Exodus, 436 Exploration and Explorers, Africa, 439 Falasha (Beta Israel), 443 Fanon, Frantz, 444 Farrakhan, Louis, 446 Fauset, Jessie, 447 Fédeon Rebellion, 448 Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, African, 449 Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic, 453 Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, U.S., 457 Fetu of Cape Coast, 465 Film (Africa), 466 Film (Atlantic), 468 Film (Caribbean), 470 Film (Latin America), 472 Film (North America), 475 Film (South America), 477 Five Percent Nation, 479 Flying Africans, 479 Folklore, African, 482 French Empire, 485 Fugitive Slave Law, 490 Fulani, 492 Gabon, Republic of, 493 Gabriel, 495 Gambia, The, 497 Garvey, Amy Jacques, 499 Garvey, Marcus, 500 Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 502 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Movements, Africa and African Diasporic, 503

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viii CONTENTS Genocide, 510 Georgia’s Sea Islands, 515 Ghana, 516 Ghana Empire, 522 Gilroy, Beryl Agatha, 523 Glissant, Edouard, 525 Globalization, 526 Good Neighbor Policy, 528 Goyemide, Etienne, 529 Green Revolution, 530 Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw, 532 Guillén, Nicolás, 532 Guinea, 533 Guinea Dance, 535 Guinea-Bissau, 540 Gullah, 542 Guyana, 543

Jamaica, Women’s Role in, 641 James, Cyril Lionel Robert, 645 Jazz and the Blues, 646 Jazz, African, 651 Johnson, Charles R., 652 Johnson, James Weldon, 653 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 655 Jones, Claudia, 657 Journal of Negro History, 658 Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sor, 659 Judaism, 660 Juneteenth, 663 Kanem-Bornu Empire, 665 Kaunda, Kenneth, 665 Kente Cloth, 666 Kenya, 667 Khoisan, 668 Kincaid, Jamaica, 669 King Jr., Martin Luther, 671 Kongo, 673 Kru Sailors, 674

Hair, 545 Haiti, 546 Haley, Alex, 548 Hansberry, Lorraine, 549 Harlem Renaissance, 552 Hausa (People), 554 Head, Bessie, 555 Health, Public, 556 Hip-Hop, 563 Hip-Hop, Cuban, 567 Hip-Hop, Women in, 568 Hughes, Langston, 572 Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Prevention, 573 Human Rights, 582 Humanitarian Assistance, 588 Hurston, Zora Neale, 593 Hutu, 595 Igbo, 597 Ike, Vincent Chukwuemeka, 598 Imbuga, Francis D., 599 Immigration, United States, 601 Imperial Germany, Black Entertainers in, 610 Industrialization, 613 Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, 618 International Development, 624 International Monetary Fund, 625 Ironworking, 627 Islam, African American, 628 Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 637 Jamaica, 638 www.abc-clio.com

Laing, Kojo, 677 Latin American Literature, 678 League of Coloured Peoples, 682 League of Nations, 683 Lesotho, 685 Lewis, Mary Edmonia, 686 Liberation Theology, 687 Liberia, 692 Libya, 695 Literature, African, 695 Literature, African American, 698 Locke, Alain LeRoy, 703 Long Island: African Americans and Native Peoples, 704 Lopes, Henri, 706 Lorde, Audre, 708 Lost Boys of Sudan, 709 Louverture, Toussaint Bréda, 710 Lumumba, Patrice, 713 Mad Mullah, 717 Madagascar, 717 Madhi, 719 Malawi, 719 Malcolm X, 721 Male Revolt, 723 Mali, 724 Mandela, Nelson, 726

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CONTENTS Manzano, Juan Francisco, 727 Marley, Robert Nesta, 729 Marrant, John, 731 Marshall, Paule, 732 Marson, Una, 735 Martí, José, 736 Masai, 737 Mauritania, 739 Mauritius, 740 Mays, Willie Howard, 741 McKay, Claude, 743 Médecins Sans Frontières, 745 Mercantilism, 746 MERCOSUR, 748 Mexico, 750 Mexico (Afro-Mexican Identity), 753 Microfinance, 755 Middle Passage, 758 Military Forces, 760 Miller, Samuel T., 763 Mohammad, Warith Deen, 764 Monroe Doctrine, 765 Montaigne, Michel de, 767 Monuments and Memorials, Slavery, 769 Moody, Harold, 770 Morant Bay Rebellion, 771 Morejón, Nancy, 773 Morocco, 774 Morris, Mervyn, 776 Morrison, Toni, 777 Movimento Negro Unificado, 779 Mozambique, 780 Mullen, Harryette, 782 Museums and Transatlantic Slavery, 783 Music, African, 786 Music, African Popular, 790 Mutabaruka, 796 N’Krumah, Kwame, 797 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad, 798 Namibia, 799 Nanny, 802 Nation of Islam, 803 Ndebele, 807 Négritude, 809 Negro Leagues, 811 Neocolonialism, 813 Netherlands Antilles, 815 Niagara Movement, 818 Nicaragua, 818 Niger, 822 www.abc-clio.com

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Nigeria, 822 Nigeria, Drama in, 826 Nigerian Traditional Dances, 828 Noirisme, 830 Non-Aligned Movement, 832 Notting Hill Carnival in London, 834 Nova Scotia, African American Diaspora in, 836 Nova Scotia, Black Refugees in, 837 Nwapa, Flora, 838 Obeah, 841 O’Farrill, Arturo “Chico”, 842 Ogun, 843 Oil, 844 Okigbo, Christopher, 845 Okri, Ben, 847 Organization of American States, 848 Orisha, 850 Oroonoko, 852 Ousmane, Sembene, 852 Pageant, The African American, 855 Paige, Leroy Robert, 858 Palm Oil, 859 Pan-African Conference, 861 Pan-Africanism, 862 Paraguay, 865 Peace Corps, 868 Peacekeeping and Military Interventions, 870 Pentecostalism, 875 Péralte, Charlemagne Masséna, 877 Peru, 879 Pétion, Alexandre Sabès, 881 Philip, Marlene Nourbese, 882 Phillips, Caryl, 883 Plantations and Plantation Systems, 884 Popular Music, American Influences on African, 887 Portuguese Empire, 894 Postcolonial Studies, 895 Pre-Columbian America, 898 Price-Mars, Jean, 902 Prince, Mary, 904 Puerto Rico, 906 Qaddafi, Muammar al-, 909 Quakers, 910 Quaque, Philip, 912 Quilombo, 913 ABC-CLIO

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x CONTENTS Race, History of, 915 Radio Martí, 918 Rastafari, 918 Reggae, 921 Reggae, African, 922 Religion (Africa), 924 Religion in Africa and the Americas, Demography of, 929 Reparations (Slavery and Colonialism), 932 Reproductive Health and Family Planning in Africa, U.S. Influence on, 938 Restavek, 946 Rice in the African Diaspora, 947 Robinson, Jack Roosevelt, 952 Rosas de Oquendo, Mateo, 954 Royal African Company, 955 Rwanda, 956

Socialism, 1011 Sokoto Caliphate, 1015 Somalia, 1016 Songhay (Medieval Empire), 1017 Soukous, 1020 Soulouque, Faustin, 1021 South Africa, History and Politics, 1023 Soyinka, Wole, 1026 Spanish Empire, 1027 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1032 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1033 Sudan (Darfur Region), 1034 Sundiata, 1036 Sundiata Keita and Sundiata Epic, 1037 Suriname, 1038 Swaziland, 1039

Sadat, Muhammad Anwar el-, 959 Sailors, 961 Saint Kitts and Nevis, 963 Saint Kitts and Nevis Revolt, 966 Sambo’s Grave, 967 Sanchez, Sonia, 968 Santos Arrascaeta, Beatriz, 968 São Tomé e Príncipe, 970 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 971 Schomburg, Arthur Alfonso, 972 Selassie I, Haile, 973 Selvon, Samuel Dickson, 974 Senegal, 975 Senghor, Leopold Sedar, 979 Seychelles, 980 Shabazz, Betty, 981 Shakur, Assatta, 983 Shakur, Tupac Amaru, 983 Shange, Ntozake, 984 Sharpeville Massacre, 987 Sierra Leone, 988 Sierra Leone Company, 990 Sisulu, Walter, 991 Slave Forts, 992 Slave Narratives, 994 Slave Revolts/Maronnage, 997 Slavery (Economics), 1000 Slavery (History), 1004 Smalls, Robert, 1007 Smith, Mikey, 1008 Smithsonian African Art Museum, 1009 Soccer, 1010

Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 1041 Tanzania, 1042 Taylor, Charles, 1043 Tchicaya U Tam’si, 1044 Technology Transfers, 1046 Television in Africa, American Influence on, 1049 Terrorism, 1052 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 1058 Titanic, 1059 Togo, 1060 Toomer, Jean, 1061 Trade, Fair, 1062 Trade Zones, African, 1065 Transculturation, 1066 Travel Writing, 1068 Trinidad and Tobago, 1070 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, 1072 Truth, Sojourner, 1075 Tubman, Harriet, 1076 Tunisia, 1077 Turner, Nat, 1078 Tuskegee Airmen, 1079 Tuskegee Institute, 1080 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, 1080 Tutsi, 1081 Tutu, Desmond, 1082

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Uganda, 1087 United Nations, 1089 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 1093 ABC-CLIO

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CONTENTS United States Colored Troops, 1094 Universal Negro Improvement Association, The, 1095 Uruguay, 1096 Urbanization, 1100 United States Agency for International Development, 1105 Vesey, Denmark, 1107 Voice of America, 1109 Voodoo, 1109 Walcott, Derek, 1113 Walker, Alice, 1114 Warner-Vieyra, Myriam, 1114 Washington, Booker T., 1115 Wedderburn, Robert, 1117 Weimar Republic, Black Entertainers in the, 1118 West Indies Federation, 1121 West, Cornel, 1123

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Wheatley, Phillis, 1124 Wideman, John Edgar, 1126 Wilberforce, William, 1127 Williams, Francis, 1129 Williams, Henry Sylvester, 1130 Williams, James, 1132 Williams, John A., 1134 Wolof, 1136 World Antislavery Conventions, 1840, 1843, 1137 World Bank, 1139 World Health Organization, 1141 World Trade Organization, 1142 World War I, 1143 World War II, 1146 Wright, Richard, 1150 Yoruba, 1155 Zambia, 1157 Zimbabwe, 1158

Index, 1163 About the Editors, 1215

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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE The transatlantic relationship has been one of the most dynamic of modern times. Since the great Age of Exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the encounters between the Old World and the New have determined the course of history, culture, and politics for billions of people. The destinies of Europe, Africa, North and South America, and all the islands in between have been intertwined to the extent that none of those areas can be said to exist in isolation. Out of these interconnections comes the concept of the “Atlantic World,” which Alan Karras describes in his introductory essay to Britain and the Americas in this series: “By looking at the Atlantic World as a single unit, rather than relying upon more traditional national (such as Britain) or regional (such as North or South America) units of analysis, scholars have more nearly been able to re-create the experiences of those who lived in the past.” This perspective attempts to redefine and respond to expanding (one might say “globalizing”) pressures and new ways of perceiving interconnections— not only those rooted in history (“the past”) but also those that are ongoing. Just one result of this conceptual redefinition has been the emergence of Transatlantic Studies as an area of inquiry in its own right, growing from the soil of separate area studies, whether European, North American, African, Caribbean, or Latin American. Students and scholars working in Transatlantic Studies are embarked on a new course of scholarship that places the transatlantic dynamic at its heart. In this spirit, the Transatlantic Relations Series is devoted to transcending, or at least challenging, the boundaries of nation and region as well as of discipline: we are concerned in this series not only with history but also with culture and politics, race and economics, gender and migration; not only with the distant past but also with this morning. The aim, in a phrase, is to explore the myriad connections and interconnections of the Atlantic World. However, while the Atlantic World concept challenges the isolation of smaller, national perspectives, nations do continue to exist, with boundaries both physical and conceptual. Thus, this series acknowledges the intractability of the national and the regional while consistently focusing on the transcending movements—the connections and interconnections—that go beyond the national and the regional. Our mode of operation has been to build an approach to the Atlantic World through attention to the separate xiii www.abc-clio.com

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vectors between the nations and regions on both sides of the Atlantic. We do this through offering the six titles within the series so far commissioned, devoted, respectively, to Africa, Britain, France, Germany, Iberia, and Ireland in their engagements with the Americas. In each case, the transatlantic exchanges are those of all kinds: cultural, political, and historical, from the moment of first contact to the present day. With that organizing principle in mind, the object is to offer an accessible, precisely focused means of entry into the various portals of the Atlantic World. Finally, a word about the origins of this series. In 1995, Professor Terry Rodenberg of Central Missouri State University invited scholars and teachers from eighteen universities on both sides of the Atlantic to establish an educational and scholarly institution devoted to encouraging a transatlantic perspective. The result was the founding of the Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies (MCTS), located in the Dutch city whose name, through its eponymous treaty, resonates with transnational associations. Since its foundation, MCTS has continued to bring together students and scholars from a host of worldwide locations to explore the intricate web of Atlantic connections across all disciplines: it has been a dynamic encounter between cultures and people striving to transcend the limitations of separate area and disciplinary studies. I am pleased to acknowledge the extent to which the Transatlantic Relations Series grows out of the discussions and approaches articulated at MCTS. Therefore, while the separate titles in the series will carry their own dedications, the series as a whole is dedicated with great respect to Terry Rodenberg and the students and scholars at Maastricht. Will Kaufman University of Central Lancashire Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies

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EDITOR’S PREFACE The encylopedia of Africa and the Americas is part of the Transatlantic Relations Series and, like its counterparts, provides entries about the many past and present historical, political, and cultural relationships that tie both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The first part of this preface offers a brief description of what you will find inside and how those materials are organized. The second part provides some ways to think about exploring the transatlantic world of Africa and the Americas for readers just starting to explore the topics found here. In order to encompass the transatlantic world, this reference work contains four kinds of entries. Many of the entries in this encyclopedia deal directly with distinctively transatlantic topics, such as the slave trade, the plantation system, and reparations for slavery and colonialism. Others provide important contexts, such as the American civil rights movement, the fight for women’s equality, and the history of colonialism, for understanding those connections. Still other entries offer a view of the African Diaspora in the Americas, its struggles, and its rich results, from the transfer of African knowledge into the Americas (“Technology Transfers”) to the Harlem Renaissance. Finally, many entries explore and compare important processes that have a distinctive impact on Africa and the Americas, such as industrialization, environmentalism, HIV prevention, terrorism, and globalization. As a whole, these volumes offer a sense of the richness of the continents on both sides of the Atlantic and their long-standing connectedness. The geographic scope alone of this project is vast: at 11,724 square miles (30,400 square kilometers), Africa is the second largest continent in the world, after Asia. North and South America are third and fourth, respectively. In light of the vast physical and historical area to be discussed, this encyclopedia seeks to cover the large transatlantic world in a variety of ways. Historically, we provide entries that run from the early days of transatlantic slaving voyages in the fifteenth century to the present day of post-independence Africa. Some entries have been included that will also help readers understand the contexts of precolonial Africa and pre-Columbian America. In terms of subjects, we have sought to cover history, culture, and politics in the broadest sense. You will find here many traditional entries about important people, places, and events, such as Bob Marley, South Africa, and World War II. You can also read about different religious and cultural beliefs, such as Islam and Santeria, as well as discover a useful overall demographic picture for the predominant faiths in Africa and the Americas (“Religion in Africa and the Americas, xv www.abc-clio.com

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Demography of ”). At the same time, there are entries that many readers might not expect. These include ordinary objects and parts of life: “Rice in the African Diaspora,” for example; “Hair”; and “Burial, African Practices in the Americas.” Natural processes are included: “Evolution, Human,” for example, and “Ecology.” You will also find entries on complex economic, political, and social topics in such articles as “Microfinance”; “Cold War”; “Arms Trafficking”; “Health, Public”; “Agriculture, Sustainable”; and “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Movements, Africa and African Diasporic.” This rich variety of entries will allow readers to think about Africa and the Americas from many different angles. For readers seeking broad overviews of Africa and the Americas, this encyclopedia includes introductory essays. Each essay offers a way of envisioning the broad context of the transatlantic world of Africa and the Americas and provides brief references to key entries. For readers new to these aspects of Africa and the Americas, we encourage using these introductory essays as a springboard to future study. The number of possible topics that could be included in a reference work such as this is enormous and grows daily. Because of this, you might find that we do not have a specific entry on the topic that you are looking for. For users of the electronic version of this encyclopedia, we recommend searching for key words related to what you need to find. It is likely that you will find some part of what you are looking for in a larger entry.

THE AFRICAN DIASPORA AND THE TRANSATLANTIC WORLD In studying the transatlantic world of Africa and the Americas, it is vital to recognize the great diversity of the African continent, as well as of the Americas and the Caribbean. It is also important to keep in mind that the interactions and movements of peoples, cultures, and ideas that have occurred across the Atlantic since the fifteenth century have been both voluntary and forced. These transatlantic interchanges are a key part of the story of how the modern world was forged, not by any one nation alone, or even any one continent, but through continental and global networks of peoples and cultures: by the medieval African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay through trade in gold, salt, and knowledge; through the spread of Islam in Europe, Africa, and the Americas; through capitalism and religious proselytizing in tandem with the rise of European nations vying for political and economic power through colonialism; through slave labor that fueled the early days of industrial economies; through the rebellion of enslaved and oppressed populations to defend their humanity and assert their right to political self-determination; and through the continued and persistent ties of black cultures to national and global politics, economics, and peoples. The transformations brought about by the gradual development of a global economy were irrevocable for all involved, and it is critical to understand the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. While many benefits accrued to Europe and white settlers in the New World and Africa, the human cost was considerable. The greatest negative impact was suffered by the African societies that endured the transatlantic slave trade and the indigenous populations of the New World, both of whom experienced a catastrophic loss of population calculated in the millions. For the indigenous peoples of www.abc-clio.com

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the New World, Spanish and Portuguese contact introduced a spate of diseases to which they had no immunity, resulting in the decimation of the indigenous population from Mexico to Brazil. Consequently, Spanish industries in the New World began to rely increasingly on the labor of enslaved Africans. Despite a higher immunity to common European diseases, however, the mortality rate for Africans in the Americas was still extremely high. Conservative estimates indicate that from ten to twenty million Africans died in holding pens and in the Middle Passage from African ports to plantations in the Americas. This estimate does not include the countless others who died in the forced marches from the interior to the slave ships. Mass enslavement, following the decimation of indigenous peoples in the Americas, was, in turn, a major part of the foundation of growing European and, later, U.S. strength on the world stage. The colonialism that followed the growth of European power was the second largescale transformation of transatlantic relations. Formalized by the Berlin West African Conference of 1885, the “scramble for Africa” saw the division of the continent into British, French, German, Belgian, Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian colonial territories. King Leopold II of Belgium described the continent as a “magnificent African cake” and the Berlin conference imposed boundaries without regard for preexisting cultural, ethnic, and linguistic regions. Furthermore, through a policy of “indirect rule,” British colonial administrations constructed and maintained fictitious local “traditions” that set indigenous ethnic groups against each other, while France’s policy of “direct rule” forbade indigenous cultural practices and languages and imposed French practices in their place. Today’s complex political map of Africa is a consequence of European colonialism. Many of those colonial boundaries form the borders of contemporary independent African nations, even as cultures, languages, and religions still often cross those borders. The transformation of Africa and the Americas through their global ties cannot be described exclusively through loss, however. Nor can the stark contemporary gap between the affluence of much of North America and the relative poverty of much of Africa be seen as simply “the way things always were.” The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia are important examples of black successes and more generally an attestation to the fact that preceding the legacy of enslavement, black peoples have had a history that is worthy of study. The ancient kingdoms and empires of Mali, Songhay, and Ghana are prominent examples of accomplishment that have become familiar only more recently to scholars of Africa and the African Diaspora. Both examples are important. Ancient Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia demonstrate that African dispersal occurred well before the slave trades of Eastern Africa and the transatlantic, and that in antiquity the spread of African culture and ideas influenced other regions and civilizations. The empires of Mali and Songhay facilitated the spread of Islam and founded a tradition of knowledge and learning, some of it written, as in the case of Timbuktu. The student of the African Diaspora and of the transatlantic world more generally should be aware that Africans and African-descended peoples have taken an active role in determining their lives as a people, not only in the period of antiquity as leaders of civilization, but also in the modern era of enslavement and colonialism, as rebels and leaders in the cause of freedom and basic human dignity. Africans and African-descended people www.abc-clio.com

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xviii EDITOR’S PREFACE

fought slavery and colonialism culturally, artistically, and politically as well as militarily. Individuals engaged in many kinds of rebellion against oppression: acts of resistance ranged from subversive acts such as stealing and running away for brief periods of time, to formally contesting slavery’s legality and assisting abolitionists, to organized rebellion and revolt. The most famous of these revolts was, perhaps, the Haitian Revolution that resulted in the first independent black-led nation in the Americas. At a later time, African and Caribbean anticolonial movements, the U.S. civil rights and black nationalist movements, and the global movement for human rights would all influence each other. Creative responses to domination and enslavement have extended beyond rebellion and revolution. African American literature was born out of the violence and racism to which its authors were subjected. For its earliest authors, African American literature was a response to the hypocrisy of nations who professed Christianity, European Enlightenment philosophies, and humanistic principles while owning slaves and profiting from slavery. Eighteenth-century authors used their writing as interventions in the ongoing debate about the humanity of black people relative to whites, a debate that did not consider that black persons themselves might take part in the conversation. Literature has a critical role historically and in this encyclopedia. Literacy was a tool to prove one’s humanity and to dismantle the master’s house using his own tools, as the critic Audre Lorde once put it, from its earliest forms (by, for example, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar) to present-day works (by Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, David Bradley, and Colson Whitehead, among many others). In addition to engaging literacy and other values of the Western world, the African American literary tradition rests on prominent “nonliterary” forms of art in the black world, such as folklore, music, dance, and oral literature. These art forms have been essential to creating culturally specific worldviews in African societies and to re-imagining and adapting those views to the experience of New World slavery. African cultures have firm roots in oral tradition: the epic of Sundiata, celebrating the eponymous first ruler of the Mali Empire, is one such example and one of the oldest surviving epics, alongside Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The spirituals, jazz, and blues are all New World musical responses to slavery and its aftermath, not transcendent of the experience but a way to survive it. Trickster figures from the Akan and other West African cultures were adapted to folklore in a New World setting, where animals play out master and slave roles. Folklore of “flying Africans” addressed the yearning for escape from slavery and the desire to return home. Dance was transformed: it became a cloak for the practice of martial arts in the case of Capoeira. These cultural forms of expression have not always been appreciated as art. Until recently, colleges, universities, and secondary schools debated whether African American art, culture, and politics were legitimate subjects of study. Concomitant with the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s, black activists confronted the cultural biases that undervalued not only these subjects but also the presence of black people in the educational system, as students and teachers. One result of this activism was the creation of Black Studies programs nationwide at many universities and colleges. Many of these programs continue to thrive and have helped to develop an understanding of concepts of race, supporting scholarship in the area of black studies as www.abc-clio.com

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xix

they have evolved in outlook to address a black world population. African and African American scholars have revised and reconfigured these approaches to address cultural exchanges between black peoples and other groups in a range of historical periods; to recover and revalue an African past of great civilizations; to understand the demography behind the black Diaspora; to understand how institutional policies shape the lives and aspirations of individuals; and to create an alternative canon of black authors’ works. In short, all of the disciplines—history, art, literature, science, sociology, political science, religious studies, anthropology, agrarian studies—are brought to bear on studies of Africa and the African Diaspora: interdisciplinary approaches reveal the multifaceted nature of black experience. In tracing the movements and dispersion of African and African-descended peoples throughout the world, it is important to consider the movement, both physical and intellectual, of black peoples back to the African continent in an effort to reconnect with a cultural homeland. African, Caribbean, and African American artists have engaged the idea of multifaceted black identity in a variety of ways, depending on background and circumstance as well as on the individual imagination of each. Significantly, their efforts to reconnect coincide with artistic “renaissances” such as the New Negro Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement, as well as with political movements in civil rights, Black Power, and independence. Early twentieth-century African American authors Langston Hughes and Arthur Schomburg used their written works to emphasize the value and importance of the African past in shaping a sense of contemporary African American life and art. Mid-twentieth-century African American visual artist Elizabeth Catlett engaged the idea of Afro-Mexican identity in her work. In the last years of his life, W. E. B. Du Bois renounced his American citizenship and became a citizen of Ghana. Black Panthers in flight from U.S. prosecution resettled in East African nations. Many worldwide black intellectual movements have intervened in world culture and politics, creating positive concepts for black cultural identity and rejecting domination, such as “Négritude,” “Pan-Africanism,” “Noirisme,” and “Black Power.” In addition, a working critical and theoretical vocabulary has grown out of terms, some of which were coined by the thinkers of these movements, including “double consciousness,” “Atlantic World,” “black Atlantic,” “transculturation,” “postcolonialism,” and “neocolonialism.” These terms for the critical study of the African Diaspora originated in different decades, nations, and schools of thought, and demonstrate the active engagement with, and importance of, black communities around the world in understanding world history, politics, and culture. Ultimately, while there is a shared experience of colonial domination and enslavement as part of black history around the world, there is also extraordinary diversity within the black community, and no one set of experiences is universal. Students of Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas must consider the particular contexts of their subject, while also searching for the aspects of cultural retention, cultural transformation, and cultural innovation that define the relationship between Africa and the Americas. Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette www.abc-clio.com

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xx EDITOR’S PREFACE References Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Boahen, A. Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Davies, Carol Boyce. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994. Davies, Carol Boyce et al., eds. The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Genovese, Eugene. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gomez, Michael. Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Irele, F. Abiola. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. James, Winston. Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America. New York: Verso, 1998. Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Miller, Christopher L. Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS 700

750–1200

Advancement in transportation through the use of camels rather than horses permits long-distance travel over the Sahara Desert. The Sahel—a region of West Africa south of the Sahara— becomes established as an important area of trade connecting Africa, Europe, and Asia and a center of politics, culture, and religion as well. Three major empires—Ghana, Mali, and Songhay— develop from this hub. They are referred to collectively as the Sahelian kingdoms; all of them develop global connections within Africa and with Europe and Asia. Ghana Empire, dominated by the Soninke, a Mande-speaking people. It becomes known as “the land of gold” as the market intermediary of gold trade between the north and south. Its decline begins in 1075 with the invasion of the Almoravids, Berbers from the north.

1200–1500 Kingdom of Mali, covering most of West Africa. Sundiata, one of its greatest leaders, is praised for uniting the Malian Empire. Its decline begins in the 1400s, largely because of a succession of weak kings and the decentralization of its influence.

1350–1600 Songhay Kingdom, which existed under the Kingdom of Mali, begins to break away and establishes itself in 1350. Songhay was larger than Mali and was centered along the Niger River. The city of Timbuktu becomes a key center of Islamic learning and attracts scholars from around the world. The empire becomes so large it is hard to govern and falls because of a series of revolts. 1468

The Songhay Empire appears in the regions of present-day western Sudan and Mali, increasing in strength to reach its peak in the sixteenth century.

1482

Arrival of the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cam in the territory of the Kongo kingdom, which extends from the south of present-day Gabon to the northern parts of present-day Angola and east into the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo’s interior. Portugal founds the slave fort Elmina, along with 13 to 15 others. Under British control, Elmina will become one of the largest forts in the transatlantic slave trade.

1492

Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, initiating the dramatic biological, cultural, and human exchange between

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xxx CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS Africa, Europe, and the Americas known as the Columbian Exchange. 1510

1519

1526

The first African slaves arrive in Hispaniola, to work in mines and on plantations. The first Africans arrive in Mexico as explorers and servants during the conquest period of Spanish America’s history, 1519–1540. The earliest documented rebellion of African slaves in the Western Hemisphere takes place at San Miguel de Guadeloupe; slaves rebel against the Spanish.

1534

The first Africans arrive in Uruguay with Pedro de Mendoza, a Spanish explorer of the River Plate.

1536

Diego de Almagro claims the region of present-day Chile for the Spanish crown, making it a colony of Spain. He brings the first blacks to Chile on this voyage, initiating the importation of slaves to supplement the indigenous labor force.

1538 1577

1584

1595

1596

Raleigh’s The Discovery of the Large and Bewtiful Empire of Guyana inaugurates British travel and historical writing about the Caribbean.

1605

London colonists fail to establish settlements on Grenada and St. Lucia.

1606

James I grants a charter jointly to the Virginia Company of London and the Plymouth Company to establish a permanent settlement in the Chesapeake Bay region, prospect for gold, and seek out a waterway to the Orient.

1609

On behalf of the Dutch East India Company, Henry Hudson charts parts of the river subsequently named for him.

1612

Bermuda is formally established as England’s second permanent colony in the Americas.

1616

Still searching for El Dorado, Sir Walter Raleigh angers King James I by attacking a Spanish settlement in present-day Guyana. The king will have Raleigh beheaded two years later.

Portuguese carve out the first sugar plantation in present-day Brazil. Sir Francis Drake sets sail on his legendary voyage of piracy and discovery through the Strait of Magellan, along the Pacific coast of South America, and north to Drake’s Bay, beyond presentday San Francisco. He will claim the western American coast for England (as New Albion) and become the first Englishman (the second person after Ferdinand Magellan) to circumnavigate the globe.

English settlers attempting to settle Tobago are driven off the island by Carib attackers. 1617

Raleigh mounts his second marauding attack on Trinidad.

1619

Jamestown tobacco planters import the first Africans, sold as “indentured servants,” to the American colonies. Virginia’s House of Burgesses first meets in July.

1620

Sir Walter Raleigh dispatches an expedition to the coast of North Carolina. Upon learning of the fertility of the region from his captains’ reports, he names it Virginia in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. Walter Raleigh attacks and plunders Trinidad in his search for El Dorado, the legendary City of Gold.

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Bermuda settlers establish self-government through an elected assembly, the second colonial parliament in the New World after the House of Burgesses. Having steered off its original course, the former wine ship Mayflower briefly anchors off present-day Provincetown, Massachusetts, following a two-month voyage from Southampton, England. Anglican Separatists and non-Separatists

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS xxxi on board the ship draw up the Mayflower Compact providing for the temporary government of the colony by “a civill body politick” and majority rule. 1621

1624

1625

The Dutch West India Company is founded to regulate trade to Africa and America—and to extend the Dutch war against Spain to the matters of access to raw goods, control of Caribbean colonies, and control of the transatlantic slave trade. The first English plantation settlement in the Caribbean is established at Sandy Bay, St. Kitts (St. Christopher). The French will arrive on the island one year later. The earl of Carlisle is granted a royal charter to colonize the Caribbean islands of Barbados, Montserrat, Nevis, and St. Kitts. The charter is later extended to include Anegada and the remaining Lesser Antilles. Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrims, condemns Spanish cruelty against the indigenous peoples of America and includes the Codex Mendoza, the first publication in England of a Mexican pictographic manuscript.

1626

Captain Maurice Thompson inaugurates English slavery in the Caribbean with the first shipment of African slaves to St. Kitts.

1627

England seizes Barbados from Spain, establishing its most profitable American colony in the seventeenth century.

on sugar production facilitated by slave labor. 1634

The Netherlands Antilles begins as a Dutch colony under the government authority of the West India Company.

1638

English colonists plant their first successful settlement on St. Lucia in the Caribbean.

1639

A revolt on St. Kitts and Nevis occurs. The uprising of approximately sixty enslaved Africans sets a precedent for aggressive resistance to French New World slavery.

1641

Indigenous Carib wipe out the English settlement on St. Lucia.

1647

A group of religious refugees from Bermuda, the Eleutheran Adventurers, establish the Bahamas’s first permanent English settlement.

1648

Dutch forces occupy the Caribbean islands of Anegada, Tortola, and Virgin Gorda, denying the English claim. English religious dissenters from Bermuda begin to colonize the Bahamas.

1655

England stakes its first claims to Dominica and St. Vincent. 1628

Anthony Hilton, fleeing from a murder plot on St. Kitts, establishes the first English settlement on Nevis.

1632

Antigua and Montserrat are settled by English adventurers. Following the success of Barbados, the colonies will thrive

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An English expedition under William Penn and Robert Venables captures Jamaica and the Cayman Islands from the Spanish—a poor substitute for the intended targets of Hispaniola and Cuba. Already populated by thousands of Maroons (escaped slaves), Jamaica will soon support the largest slave market in the Americas. Swedes build their fort, Carolusburg, in what is present-day Ghana. It changes hands numerous times before the English gain control of it in 1664, renaming it Cape Coast Castle. It becomes the administrative center of England’s African trade (under the Royal African Company) and is instrumental in creating England’s Gold Coast Colony in the nineteenth century.

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xxxii CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS 1660

Virginia codifies the institutional legalities of slavery, supporting the colony’s growing dependency on forced labor provided by the African slave trade. Declaring that baptism does not necessitate freedom, Virginia law will determine an individual’s status as free or enslaved through matrilineal identification. 1661

addresses a growing debate concerning the morality and legality of enslaving fellow Christians.

The English crown’s monopoly in slaving begins with the Royal Adventurers in Africa.

Edward D’Oyley becomes English captain-general and governor-in-chief of Jamaica. Under D’Oyley, the island begins its long tradition as a haven for buccaneers who prey on Spanish ships sailing in and out of Port Royal. The colonial authorities will largely ignore the buccaneers because their activities distract the Spanish at a time when the English are in no position to protect the West Indies.

1672

Rice comes to colonial America from Ghana. It is introduced to South Carolina shortly after its establishment as a colony. 1674

Slave importation Bermuda.

1676

A Quaker settlement is established in West New Jersey.

1678

Emigrants from Bermuda establish the first English settlements in the Turks and Caicos Islands. They engage in whaling and the production of timber and salt.

1680

African slaves are first brought to the coastal islands off Georgia and South Carolina from the West Indies.

1682

William Penn introduces Quakerism to America.

1685

French king Louis XIV promulgates the Code Noir in March. Its sixty articles set legal precepts on how slaves should be treated. The code, applied to French colonies in the Americas, is designed to ensure slave obedience and reduce the likelihood of revolts.

1688

Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave marks the starting point for a succession of plays and novels reflecting Britain’s growing concern for social conditions amongst the slave societies in the Americas.

English settlers from Antigua colonize Barbuda. 1666

1667

English forces drive the Dutch from Tortola and assume precarious control of the Virgin Islands. English occupation is not firmly consolidated until 1694. The Treaty of Breda is signed by England and the United Provinces of the Netherlands, formally ending the second Anglo-Dutch War. The Dutch formally recognize English control of New Netherlands. The Bahamas are granted to the English proprietors of Carolina. Antigua and Barbuda are formally colonized by Britain.

1670

The Treaty of Madrid grants England title to Jamaica. The Virginia Slavery Act decrees that slaves baptized as Christians prior to importation are not liable to permanent enslavement. The act specifically

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King James II’s Royal African Company takes up the monopoly of the African slave trade, eventually leading to Jamaica’s status as one of the largest slave markets in the world. With an enormous population of slave labor, the island will soon become the world’s leading producer of sugar cane.

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Irish Catholics fleeing religious persecution establish the first significant European settlement on Anguilla.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS xxxiii 1689

King William’s War begins, the first in a series of North American wars between England and France that will last over 125 years and include the seven-year period from 1756 to 1763 known as the French and Indian Wars. While the French are supported by Native American groups in Canada and Maine, the British (largely colonial troops) are supported by the Iroquois. Hostilities are mainly concentrated on the northern coast of North America and in the Upper Hudson-Upper St. Lawrence valleys; the British colonies on St. Kitts and Nevis are also embroiled.

1690

England claims the first recorded landing on the uninhabited Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina.

1692

The English settlement of Port Royal, Jamaica, is destroyed by an earthquake.

1698

Five ships carrying 1,200 Scottish settlers land at Darien, on the Isthmus of Panama, in an ill-fated attempt to establish a Scottish colony (New Caledonia) in Latin America. After two years of severe hardship, illness, and attacks by the Spanish, the bankrupt colony is surrendered to Spain in 1700.

Breton, and Nova Scotia). The cession does not stem the tide of French Catholic and Huguenot settlers. The Treaty also cedes French St. Kitts to the British. 1717

The Bahamas become an official British colony.

1720

The first of the Maroon Wars erupts in Jamaica, where escaped slaves organize to fight white militia and secure land grants for settlement. Old Calabar towns of Obutong and Aqua Akpa (also known as Duke Town) in present-day Nigeria become involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1720 and 1830, 1 million slaves were taken from the port towns, mostly on British vessels.

1732

A group of philanthropists headed by General James Oglethorpe establish Georgia as a charity colony for London’s poor and also as a barrier against French and Spanish settlement. Georgia’s authoritarian government at Savannah will outlaw slavery, rum, and land sales. Initially focused on silk and wool, Georgia’s economy will eventually turn to rice and cotton production facilitated by slave labor.

1733

The Molasses Act places duty on molasses obtained outside of Britain. The act is designed to ensure continued profitability for British-owned sugar plantations throughout the West Indies by placing prohibitive duties on the importation of sugar and molasses from outside of British possessions.

1739

The Stono Slave Rebellion commences in South Carolina with assaults upon plantations on the main road to Florida, where the Spanish have promised freedom to slave fugitives from the British territories. Nearly one hundred slaves participate in the rebellion under the leadership of a man named Jemmy. The local militia ruthlessly crushes the rebels, hanging the heads of executed

The Royal African Company’s monopoly on the slave trade ends. 1703

The Methuen Treaty between Britain and Portugal grants commercial preference to British merchants in Brazil.

1708

Blacks now outnumber whites in Carolina.

1710

Boston merchants begin the importation of African slaves into Massachusetts.

1713

The Treaty of Utrecht ending the War of the Spanish Succession grants to Britain the asiento, the monopoly on importing slaves from Africa to the Spanish possessions in the Americas. The Treaty also cedes to Britain the French territories of Acadia (the modern Canadian provinces of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Cape

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xxxiv CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS 1733, introduces a three-cent tax on foreign refined sugar and places higher levies on non-British textiles, coffee, indigo, and wine. In addition, the act prohibits the importation of foreign rum and French wines.

slaves on landmark posts throughout the colony. New laws will be passed in South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland that provide formal guidelines for the treatment of slaves. The First Maroon War ends with Cudjoe’s Treaty, authorizing the Maroons to develop autonomous communities in the hills of Jamaica’s Cockpit Country. The Maroons guarantee the return of runaway slaves in exchange for security from British raids. 1750

1765

In British Guiana, settlers establish Burnaby’s Code, a mode of democratic self-regulation that will continue until 1840. Meanwhile, slaves in the colony launch the first of three rebellions against their British enslavers.

1766

The first (temporary) British settlement is established on the Falkland Islands.

Through the Treaty of Madrid, Spain buys back the asiento—the Atlantic slave trading monopoly—from Britain for £100,000. The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa replaces the Royal African Company. It will facilitate the coastal slave trade during both the pinnacle and abolition of England’s slave trade in West Africa.

1760

Tacky’s Slave Revolt breaks out in Jamaica.

1762

A British invasion force arrives at Cojímar (15 miles east of Havana, Cuba) to challenge Spanish dominion; a ten-month British occupation of Havana follows. Britain also seizes the Spanish stronghold of Manila in the Philippines.

1763

The Treaty of Paris between France, Britain, and Spain ends the Seven Years’ War (known as the French and Indian War in North America). France cedes to Britain all its territory east of the Mississippi River. Britain returns the key islands of the French West Indies but gains important Windward Islands such as Grenada and Dominica. Spain cedes Florida to Britain in order to secure the return of Havana. Britain is required to protect the Catholic institutions of the territories it acquires.

1764

The Colonial Currency Act is designed to prevent payment of debts in England with depreciated colonial currency; the measure creates a shortage of currency in the colonies.

The Bahamas annex the Turks and Caicos Islands. 1767

Philadelphia becomes the largest city in the American colonies. Conflict arises, however, because Pennsylvania’s grant encroaches on New York and Maryland territories. British surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon will resolve the issue by mapping the famed MasonDixon Line.

1770

A crowd of about 400 people attack a British guard post protecting the Boston customs office. Against the orders of his captain, a British soldier fires into the crowd, followed by others, resulting in the deaths of five people. American propagandists reconstruct the event as the “Boston Massacre.”

Britain’s Sugar Act (Revenue Act), an expanded version of the Molasses Act of

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In response to the Boston Massacre, the new ministry of Lord North repeals all the Townshend Duties except the tax on tea. Although the repeals initiate conciliatory gestures by colonial merchants, continued British pressure for colonial compliance results in further escalation of the conflict.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS xxxv 1772

In the Somerset case, the king’s High Bench outlaws slavery in Britain. The decision guarantees emancipation to slaves who enter the British Isles, but does not apply to slaves held abroad in the British colonies. A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince is published, the first slave narrative in English.

1773

In British Guiana, a five-month-long slave uprising is crushed by British military reinforcements from Jamaica.

1774

Fearful of the impact of war upon the West Indian economy, Jamaican planters petition King George III for reconciliation with the rebelling American colonists.

1784

Black Loyalist immigrants to Nova Scotia now number 3,500. 1785

1779

George III issues a royal proclamation formally declaring the American colonies to be in a state of rebellion.

1786

The slave ship Zong throws 132 living slaves into the sea to secure insurance money for “lost freight.”

1782

Sir Joseph Banks, the royal botanical adviser, introduces nutmeg to Grenada. It will transform the economy following the collapse of the sugar industry.

1783

Birch Town is founded by Loyalist Stephen Blucke, a settlement of black Loyalists who are refugees from the War of Independence, in Nova Scotia.

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The Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor is established in London on behalf of black Loyalist refugees from North America. Britain acquires logging rights from Spain in what becomes British Honduras (Belize).

1787

The British commander in the South, Sir Henry Clinton, issues the Philipsburg Proclamation declaring that all slaves captured while working for the American rebels would be treated as spoils of war and sold or distributed for the benefit of British soldiers. Slaves fleeing to the British army would be allowed to pursue any occupation they desired within the army.

1781

Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda establishes a base in London, where much of the planning for the eventual independence of Latin America is carried out. John Marrant’s A Narrative is published, describing his spiritual journey and search for God. It is now considered a seminal African American text— an early example of the tradition of African American autobiography.

The Virgin Islands are officially established as a British colony. 1775

Admiral Horatio Nelson arrives in Antigua to oversee the development of the Royal Navy’s West Indian base.

The first transports of “Black Poor” set sail from Britain for West Africa, where their initial settlement will develop into the nation of Sierra Leone. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species is published in London. In response to the U.S.’s Northwest Ordinance barring slavery from the territory comprising today’s Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Parliament legislates the right of American slaveholders to emigrate to Canada.

1789

Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African is published in London.

1791

In May the French National Assembly decrees that colored people of free parents in Haiti will have legal equality

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xxxvi CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS Henry Harvey, General Ralph Abercromby, and 7,000 regulars are stopped by the Creole militia at San Juan. The British forces withdraw after thirteen days.

with white landowners; the decree is reversed and rescinded in September 1791. The rebellion of slaves in what will be called the Haitian Revolution begins. The Sierra Leone Company is established as a joint-stock enterprise of British philanthropists, who effectively take over the failing colony of Sierra Leone. 1792

Nearly 1,200 disillusioned black Loyalists leave Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone, having encountered systematic discrimination and the loss of land and civil liberties in Canada.

1793

Upper Canada’s Act to prevent the further introduction of Slaves challenges the importation of slaves from the United States into British North America.

A British naval force captures Trinidad, belonging to the Audiencia of Venezuela, creating the first of many irritants to British-Venezuelan relations. 1799

Grenada is restored to Britain from the French. 1794

British forces invade St. Domingue to gain control of the French colony and reestablish slavery, two years into the slave rebellion that will give birth to the independent nation of Haiti in 1804.

1795

The Second Maroon War breaks out in Jamaica.

The state of New York passes the Gradual Manumission Act, which frees those slaves born after July 4, 1799, once they reached the age of twentyeight (males) or twenty-five (females). 1800

On Grenada, French African planter Julien Fedon launches a fifteen-month rebellion against British rule, aided by an alliance of “free colored” and slaves.

1796

In Britain’s final serious attempt to take Puerto Rico from Spain, Admiral Sir

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Five hundred disillusioned Jamaican Maroons abandon Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone. Black settler discontent in Sierra Leone leads to rebellion, which is quelled by the coincidental arrival of British soldiers accompanying the Maroons from Nova Scotia.

On St. Vincent, Victor Hugues launches a yearlong “black Carib” rebellion against the British, which will lead to the enforced exile of over 5,000 black Caribs from the island. The West India Regiment, one of the earliest armies recruited in the Americas and composed of slaves, is formed. It is employed to police Britain’s West Indian possessions but is also used in recently acquired areas of West Africa.

Gabriel, enslaved property of Thomas Prosser, organizes a rebellion in Virginia. The goal is to approach the capital, Richmond, and take the governor, James Monroe, hostage, along with most other whites, in order to force the demands of slaves and free blacks for freedom and an equitable division of white property. His plan collapses because of poor weather and an informant’s telling a white slave owner of the plot. Gabriel is hanged in 1800. It is estimated that between 500 and 600 slaves knew of the plan.

Gabriel Prosser leads a slave insurrection. 1802

Spain cedes Trinidad to Britain. In January, Napoleon sends his brotherin-law, General Charles Leclerc, to Saint Domingue with a large fleet and 26,000 men to defeat the rebellion led by Toussaint Louverture.

1803

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Jean Jacques Dessalines defeats French general Rochambeau on November 18,

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS xxxvii the slave trade among British subjects throughout the Empire. Following the adoption of this Act, the United States passess a law abolishing participation in the international slave trade that is finalized in January of the following year.

1803 at the Battle of Vertieres, forcing Napoleon to abandon control of Haiti, to sell the vast territory of Louisiana in the present-day United States, and scrap his plans for extending the French Empire to the New World. A slave rebellion breaks out in Montevideo, Uruguay. Almost two dozen enslaved and freed blacks conspire to leave the port city and settle on a small island in the River Yi. The settlement is attacked and defeated by the forces of the Spanish governor. 1804

1806

1808

A British prize court in the Bahamas rules that the U.S. merchant ship Essex was legally seized in 1799 for violation of maritime neutrality. American politicians view the ruling as part of an undeclared British war on American commerce. An unauthorized British force of nearly 2,000 occupies Buenos Aires, Argentina, in a bid to block both French designs and Spanish authority in Latin America. A campaign by Creole militia under Santiago De Liniers to break the occupation of Buenos Aires ends with a British surrender.

1807

Henri Christophe establishes a separate state in the north of newly independent Haiti in February; Alexandre Pétion declares himself president of the southern and western parts of the country in March.

In January, Haiti declares independence. Jean Jacques Dessalines is selected as its governor-for-life. Uthman Dan Fodio, the first Sokoto Caliph, leads the Fulani jihad against the Hausa kingdoms, 1804–1810.

1805

The African Institution, an antislavery group, is formed as a result of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade.

The Sierra Leone Company turns over the colony to the British government. 1810

1811

The largest U.S. slave rebellion to date, subsequently called the Louisiana Rebellion, occurs. Led by a native of Haiti, at least 180 and possibly as many as 500 slaves march toward New Orleans, but federal troops quell the rebellion. Paraguay achieves its independence from Spain.

1813

The Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade is passed by Parliament, outlawing

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Britain negotiates a preferential tariff advantage for exports to Brazil. Simón Bolívar, the Latin American revolutionary leader, bases himself in London.

Having captured Montevideo, Uruguay, British forces again attack Buenos Aires. Again, a Creole counterattack forces a British retreat and capitulation. British diplomats help to persuade the Portuguese royal family to flee a French invasion force and seek exile in Brazil. The Royal Navy escorts the Portuguese court from Lisbon to Brazil.

Britain’s arch enemy, the French emperor Napoleon, seizes the Spanish crown, forcing Britain to reverse its ancient hostility to Spain. Now Britain props up Spanish colonial authority by refusing to support Creole secession and independence movements in Spanish America.

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Beginning with Trinidad, slaves in the British Empire are systematically registered as a means of regulating the remaining internal Caribbean slave trade and to prevent smuggling.

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xxxviii CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS 1814

1816

recognizes Brazilian independence in January 1826.

The Netherlands cedes three South American colonies—Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo—to Britain at the close of the Napoleonic Wars. France cedes St. Lucia, Tobago, and Dominica to Britain at the close of the Napoleonic Wars.

Denmark Vesey conspires to take control of Charleston, Virginia, gathering somewhere between 600 and 900 supporters. The plan is leaked and Vesey, with others, is publicly hanged.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church is officially established by Bishop Richard Allen.

Liberia is established as a colony for freed American slaves by the American Colonization Society.

The American Colonization Society (ACS) is formed. 1817

Chile’s ports are opened following the overthrow of Spanish rule, in which the British Royal Navy under Admiral Thomas Cochrane participated.

1818

At Aix-la-Chapelle, the European powers agree actively to suppress the slave trade. The United States does not sign the agreement and refuses permission for British patrols to search for slaves on vessels flying the American flag. Consequently, slave traders of all nationalities take to flying the Stars and Stripes to avoid prosecution.

1823

Chile frees all of its slaves. It is the first Spanish American republic to do so. 1824

Chile achieves independence from Spain. 1819

Jamaican-born Robert Wedderburn opens a Unitarian church on Hopkins Street in Soho, London, using the church to advocate for democracy, general emancipation, and free speech.

1820

Paralyzed by a debilitating stroke, Henri Christophe, dictator of northern Haiti, kills himself (allegedly with a silver bullet) in order to escape the armed rebellion with which he is faced.

1821

1822

The Anglo-Argentine Treaty establishes a formal relationship of equality between British citizens and Argentines in Argentina, paving the way for expanded commercial relations. British entrepreneurs arrive in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, beginning twenty-four years of ownership of the Real del Monte mining firm by the British Company of the Adventurers. Captain Basil Hall’s Extracts from a Journal Written on the Coasts of Chile, Peru, and Mexico is published.

1825

In the war for Venezuelan independence from Spain, a British legion distinguishes itself for bravery at the Battle of Carabobo. Brazil wins independence from Portugal, assisted by British mercenaries and Royal Navy forces under Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane. Britain formally

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U.S. president James Monroe enunciates the Monroe Doctrine in a message to Congress, declaring that the United States would not interfere in the affairs of Europe, nor would it seek to overturn existing European colonies in the Americas, but that it would vigorously resist any further European incursions into the Western Hemisphere.

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Frances Wright establishes the Nashoba community in Tennessee for the education and manumission of slaves. Britain signs a treaty of commerce with Colombia. The British-Venezuelan Treaty of Friendship and Commerce grants Britain most-favored-nation status and custom tariffs 5 percent lower than other countries.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS xxxix Samuel Sharpe leads the Christmas slave uprising in Jamaica. The rebellion rages for a month, ending in the executions of over 350 rebels.

On the heels of unprecedented speculative fever in Latin America (the Bubble Mania), the London stock market collapses, setting in train the great debt crises of the nineteenth century. By 1828, every Latin American country except Brazil will have defaulted on its loans to European banking houses, including the London-based Baring Brothers, Barclay Herring Richardson, and Rothschild. 1826

In Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the slave Nat Turner gathers from 60 to 80 men and plans to overtake the ammunition stores of Southampton, Virginia. Between 57 and 65 white people are killed; over 200 African Americans are killed in retaliation by whites, regardless of their involvement, and federal troops are sent in to quell the rebellion. Turner eludes capture for two months, but he is eventually publicly hanged. A lawyer for the state hears his confession and commits it to print.

The Anglo-Brazilian Treaty designates the Atlantic slave trade as piracy, thus giving the Royal Navy the legal grounds to suppress it. Britain signs a treaty of commerce with Mexico. 1833 A Scottish colony is established at Topo, Venezuela; it will fail within the year due to the settlers’ inability to adapt to the land and climate.

1827

1828

Britain pays £250,000 to the United States in compensation for confiscated American “slave property” during the War of 1812.

The British West Indian Emancipation Act (Colonial Slavery Abolition Act) is passed by Parliament, abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire effective the following year. The former slaves in the West Indies are left landless.

Mediation by the British envoy Lord Ponsonby ends a conflict between the Argentine Confederation and Brazil, creating an independent buffer state, Uruguay, that prevents the extension of Brazilian sovereignty to the River Plate while ensuring that Buenos Aires cannot control both banks of the river.

1829

The newly independent Mexican government formally abolishes chattel slavery.

1830

A Royal Navy squadron blockades the port of Callao near Lima, Peru, in order to enforce British trade rights.

1831

The former Dutch colonies of Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo are consolidated into British Guiana.

Colonial authorities establish the British Windward Islands Administration, comprised of Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines. Rejecting Argentina’s claims to the Falkland Islands after Spanish withdrawal, Britain reclaims the islands as a crown colony and British naval forces arrive to protect the seal fisheries located there. 1834

Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave Related by Herself is published in London.

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The American Anti-Slavery Society is founded on the heels of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Both are modeled on the British Anti-Slavery Society (founded in 1823), with which links are established.

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Antigua, Bermuda, and the Virgin Islands emancipate all slaves effective immediately, with no period of apprenticeship. A period of apprenticeship (1834–1838), a transitional four-year period between slavery and its full abolition, begins for most of Britain’s remaining slave-based colonies.

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1835

Britain signs a treaty of commerce with Venezuela.

exacerbates tensions with the United States for the next twelve years.

U.S. secretary of state John Forsyth reaffirms that the American government will not be bound by a European ban on slave trading.

The British government engages German naturalist Robert Schomburgk to map the borders of British Guiana. His work is completed in 1844, drawing immediate protest from the Venezuelan government over the lands west of the Essequibo River. This marks the beginning of the Venezuela Boundary Dispute.

The Male Revolt in Bahía, in presentday Brazil, involves African Muslims of many ethnicities (including Hausa) who band together in a failed attempt to overthrow the slave system. 1837

The Sokoto Caliphate is solidified, including regions of what is now Nigeria, Benin, Niger, and Cameroon. 1838

European powers (the Ottoman Empire and France) allow the Muhammad ‘Ali dynasty of Egypt to be established. Its last ruler is King Farouk, who is dethroned and exiled in July 1952.

Britain signs a treaty of commerce with the Peru-Bolivian Confederation.

1842

The emancipation of African slaves in British Guiana is completed. The first indentured servants from India arrive on Trinidad. Slavery is abolished in Jamaica.

1839

In its policing of the Atlantic slave trade, the Royal Navy begins searching and seizing Portuguese slave ships as well as the slave ships of other nations flying under the Portuguese flag.

1840

The World Anti-Slavery Convention in London refuses to recognize women delegates. Consequently, U.S. feminists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, having met at the London convention, resolve to organize the first women’s rights convention. It will be held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.

Following the Peruvian government’s nationalization of the guano industry, the London merchant house of Antony Gibbs and Sons is awarded the sales monopoly for Britain. By the late 1850s, Gibbs will control much of the global guano market. Britain signs a treaty of commerce with Uruguay. The Paraguayan government issues a “free womb” law that provides for the emancipation of slaves when they reached adulthood. The free AfroParaguayan population experiences a growth spurt.

Britain signs a treaty of commerce with Bolivia. 1841

Slaves onboard the Creole, sailing from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to New Orleans, seize control of the ship, killing one person, and demand to be taken to the nearest British colony. The Creole reaches Nassau, in the Bahamas, and Britain’s refusal to arrest, extradite, or provide compensation for the slaves

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The Webster-Ashburton Treaty establishes the current border of Maine and New Brunswick, grants the United States navigation rights on the St. John River, and provides for joint U.S.British cooperation to suppress the Atlantic slave trade.

1845

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A combined Anglo-French force lays a blockade of Buenos Aires in order to prevent Argentina’s intervention in the Uruguayan civil war. The blockade continues until 1848. Parliament passes the Aberdeen Bill authorizing the Royal Navy to pursue suspected slavers into Brazilian ports.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS xli Numerous violations of Brazilian sovereignty result in bitter domestic resentment, but in 1850, Brazil finally outlaws the importation of slaves.

seize the port of San Juan del Norte and expel all Nicaraguan officials. 1849

U.S. abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, is published. He travels to Ireland and Scotland, where he is enthusiastically received. 1846

Frederick Douglass travels to England, where he meets with leading British abolitionists including Ellen Richardson, Mary Estlin, Thomas Clarkson, and Julia Griffiths. They help convince Douglass to start a newspaper and raise the money to buy his freedom. Parliament passes the Sugar Act that removes protective tariffs on sugar imports from outside the British Caribbean, dealing a heavy blow to Caribbean sugar producers.

Britain signs treaties of commerce with Costa Rica and Guatemala. 1850

Consolidating various abolitionist societies into a single nondenominational organization with the purpose of ending slavery, the American Missionary Association is founded. It will help found ten historically black colleges in the United States. 1847

1848

Liberia gains independence from the American Colonization Society, making it Africa’s oldest independent nation and the second oldest independent nation of black citizens (Haiti being the oldest). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends the Mexican-American War begun in 1846. Mexico loses two-fifths of its territory—most of the present-day U.S. Southwest. Previously, Britain encouraged Texas not to join the Union, attempted to improve Mexico-Texas relations, and agreed to construct and sell warships to Mexico for defense against the United States. Now the question is: “What will England say?”

Britain and the United States sign the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which fails to settle their differences over each other’s presence in the Mosquito protectorate and the Panama isthmus. Britain signs treaties of commerce with the Dominican Republic and Peru. The U.S. Senate passes the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring U.S. marshals to help slave owners recover fugitives and imposing fines on any person found guilty of harboring a runaway. The law increases sectional tension, leading to the Civil War.

1851

Congress decrees the abolition of slavery, effective in 1852. Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an antislavery novel. It will become the nation’s second best seller, after the Bible. Sojourner Truth delivers her speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?”

1853

In a bid to increase their influence on the Mosquito Coast, British settlers

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Britain forces Nicaragua to sign a treaty recognizing British rights over the Miskito Indians and establishing a protectorate over their territory. In an attempt to counterbalance British influence in the region, Nicaragua and the United States sign the Hise and Squier treaties, which give the United States an exclusive right of way across the Isthmus of Panama and the right to fortify the route. In return, the United States promises to protect Nicaragua from other foreign intervention.

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A British-American claims commission awards $110,330 as compensation to the U.S. slave owners demanding the return of the Creole mutineers. William Wells Brown’s Clotel: or, the President’s Daughter, the first African American novel, is published.

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xlii CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS Richard Burton’s The Lake Regions of Central Africa is published; it is an example of travel literature written about Africa by its British explorers.

Final emancipation for Uruguayan slaves takes effect. Abolitionist principles are incorporated into the new national constitution. 1855

1856

The southern U.S. filibuster, William Walker, establishes a brief dictatorship in Nicaragua, where he restores slavery and calls on the United States to annex Nicaragua as a slave state. Britain encourages the other four Central American governments to send troops to Nicaragua to oust Walker, who will face a Honduran firing squad in 1857.

1861

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs, is published under the pen name of Linda Brent.

1862

The Peruvian government transfers the guano export contract from the Gibbs monopoly to a group of Peruvian merchants, breaking the British control of the guano trade. The British minister to Brazil, William Christie, orders a six-day blockade of Rio de Janeiro in retaliation for the arrest of British sailors. The British refusal to apologize or pay compensation leads the Brazilian government to suspend diplomatic relations. Britain seeks conciliation.

Britain and the United States experience a war scare over their respective differences in Central America. In the face of the British guano monopoly, and claiming unfair British trading practices, the U.S. Congress passes the Guano Islands Act to claim ninety-four islands, rocks, and keys in the Pacific and Caribbean.

1863

The first indentured servants from India arrive on Grenada. 1857

Dred Scott v. Sandford is decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. It defines the legal status of blacks in America and denies Congress the right to restrict slavery in the American territories. The decision defined the legal status of blacks, stating that blacks cannot become citizens of the U.S. and therefore may not sue in a federal court. It is disputed during the sectional crisis that leads to the Civil War.

1858

British railway engineer George Thompson begins the construction of Paraguay’s central railroad.

1859

Admiral Thomas Cochrane’s Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil is published.

1860

The American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission is established in March by U.S. secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton to determine the best course of action to improve the lives of freed African Americans. 1864

Following the ousting of the Blanco Party leadership and its replacement by the Colorado Party in Uruguay, assisted by Brazil, Paraguay goes to war with Brazil. The events will lead to the fiveyear War of the Triple Alliance.

1865

On June 19, Major General Gordon Granger, a Union officer, arrives in Galveston, Texas, with the announcement that the Civil War had concluded and all slaves were now free. His announcement inaugurated the celebration by African Americans of Juneteenth, which they still celebrate.

U.S. pressure succeeds in forcing Britain and Nicaragua to sign the Treaty of Managua, by which Britain transfers its sovereignty over the Miskito nation to Nicaragua, turning the protectorate into an “autonomous reservation.”

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Announced on September 22, 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation comes into effect, with a view to strengthening the Union cause abroad and preventing Britain’s intervention on the side of the Confederacy.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS xliii Edward Blyden, native of the Virgin Islands and resident of Liberia, moves to Freetown, Sierra Leone. From here he founds and edits The Negro, the first Pan-African journal in West Africa. He becomes convinced that Islam suits the African race better than Christianity. While resigning from the Presbyterian Church, in which he was a clergyman, he never formally adopts Islam. The one child of his who survives him, Isa Cleopatra, will give birth to Edward Wilmot Blyden III, whose Sierra Leone Independence Movement will help to win that nation’s independence from Great Britain in 1961.

The five-year War of the Triple Alliance (Paraguayan War) breaks out between Paraguay and the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. The War of the Triple Alliance begins. It will last until 1870. It is considered the most devastating war in South American history. Roughly one hundred British military advisers, engineers, and surgeons will assist Paraguay, while tens of thousands from the allied countries will fight as the Triple Alliance. Sir Richard Burton’s Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (1870) will raise European awareness of the desperate resistance of the besieged Paraguayans. The Morant Bay Rebellion of Jamaica occurs. Approximately 500 black Jamaicans confront a militia of some 30 men guarding the Morant Bay Courthouse. The militia shoots seven blacks. The crowd responds by killing eighteen guards. Black Jamaicans write letters and petitions defending their actions and calling for the eradication of injustice; the British governor decrees the execution of nearly 500 innocent black Jamaicans. 1867

The British-built Ferrocarril Mexicano railway is completed, linking Mexico City and Veracruz.

1876

King Leopold II of Belgium creates an international holding company, L’Association International Africaine, with the objectives of exploration and discovery of resources in the African continent and the mission to “civilize” African populations. The association quickly becomes an economicallydriven monopoly advancing Leopold’s interests.

Diamonds are found in Cape Colony. Until this point, most diamonds have come from India and Brazil.

1868

Bolivian dictator Mariano Melgarejo ties the British ambassador to a donkey and parades him through a jeering crowd. Upon hearing of this, Queen Victoria literally crosses Bolivia off her map, declaring: “Bolivia no longer exists.”

1870

A group of over forty black ministers and church leaders meets at Jackson, Tennessee, to form the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America (CMEC).

1871

1873

The Leeward Island Federation is established, comprising Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, the British Virgin Islands, Montserrat, and St. Kitts and Nevis.

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The U.S. presidential election expedites the end of Reconstruction in those Southern states where it still prevails, bringing the return of white rule to those states in 1877. This paves the way for the disenfranchisement of Southern blacks that begins in the 1890s. It also leads to the spread throughout the South, especially from 1890 to 1910, of the Jim Crow segregation of African Americans and whites, which is judicially addressed in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education, 1878 Henry Morton Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent is published. 1879

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xliv CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS ties and actively engage with Chile, following that nation’s privatization of the guano industry. The Cuban musical form of the danzon is publicly launched. It will quickly become the musical-cultural emblem of the country from 1879 to 1920. 1880

1881

Cuba abolishes slavery, the last country in the hemisphere—except for Brazil— to do so. Muhammad Ahmad proclaims himself Al Mahdi al Muntazar and raises an army known as the Ansar to throw off the rule of the Ottoman Egyptians in present-day Sudan. The mahdi will become an eschatological figure who influences Islamist thought, including that of Osama bin Laden.

1890

The Baring Crisis, in which Argentina defaults on major British loans, is resolved through renegotiation rather than British military pressure, marking a shift in British-Argentine relations.

1891

Civil War erupts in Chile, where the activities of John T. North, the Nitrate King, have made the nitrate zone of Tarapacá into a British enclave.

1894

The Venezuelan government commissions former U.S. consul William Scruggs to produce a pamphlet, British Aggression in Venezuela: The Monroe Doctrine on Trial, drawing the United States into the boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana.

1895

Following an aborted Miskito revolt during which Nicaraguan officials had arrested the British pro-consul, Britain demands reparations and prepares for war, sending steamships to Bluefields, and occupying Corinto. The United States declines to invoke the Monroe Doctrine.

The Tuskeegee Normal and Industrial Institute opens. Booker T. Washington is brought to the school; he stresses the need for practicality in education for African Americans. 1885

At the Berlin Conference, fourteen of the most powerful European nations divided and claimed the entire African continent for themselves. King Leopold II refers to Africa as a “magnificent . . . cake.” The Congo Free State is created, with King Leopold II as its autocratic ruler. His sadistic abuses of the African population are so extreme that when they are publicized, he is forced to turn the Congo over to the Belgian Parliament in 1908.

1887

1888

Venezuela suspends diplomatic relations with Britain due to a dispute over the boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana. Britain unifies Trinidad and Tobago into a single colony. Cecil John Rhodes forms De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., which has since dominated the diamond business worldwide.

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U.S. secretary of state Richard Olney dispatches a note to the Foreign Office demanding that Britain agree to submit the Venezuela Boundary Dispute to arbitration. The implication is that the United States possesses an inherent right to intervene in diplomatic questions relating to the Western Hemisphere, a restatement of the Monroe Doctrine. The British prime minister and foreign secretary, Lord Salisbury, protests to Washington that the United States has no right to interfere in the boundary dispute, representing a direct challenge to the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. In a special message to Congress, President Grover Cleveland reaffirms the Monroe Doctrine and requests immediate funds for an international commission to investigate and decide on the dispute. Booker T. Washington delivers his Atlanta Convocation Address. It will

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS xlv

1896

later become known as the “Atlanta Compromise” for supporting the segregationist practices imposed by whites.

By 1900 the French have established rubber plantations on 9 million acres in present-day Zimbabwe.

Prime Minister Lord Salisbury’s cabinet overrules him and decides that Britain should submit to U.S. arbitration in the Venezuela Boundary Dispute.

Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams organizes the first Pan-African Conference in London, laying the foundations for the Pan-African Movement.

The first organized resistance, by the Ndebele and Shona, emerges against European invasion in sub-Saharan Africa, taking place in present-day Zimbabwe. This became known as the first Chimurenga (struggle). The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” services for blacks and whites are constitutional, thus legally affirming racial segregation. 1897

Venezuela resumes diplomatic relations with Britain.

1898

The U.S. battleship Maine explodes mysteriously in the harbor of Havana, Cuba. British newspapers express the same degree of outrage as the American press, and the State Department receives condolences from British officials, including the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and the Lord Mayor of London.

1899

The Anglo-Boer War begins, lasting until 1902. Britain gains the support of ardent Anglo-Saxonists such as Theodore Roosevelt and John Hay. U.S. antiimperialists such as Mark Twain, Henry Adams, Carl Schurz, and Andrew Carnegie condemn the British and champion the Boers as underdogs.

1901

As Venezuela protests suspected rebel insurgency from British Trinidad during its civil war, President Cipriano Castro orders a suspension in the payment of the interest on the foreign debt, most of which is owed to Britain.

1902

The British and German ministers in Caracas threaten military action if compensation is not forthcoming for Venezuela’s illegal seizure of their ships and crews and for the claims of their nationals for redress of economic grievances. British and German gunboats enter Venezuelan waters and seize all the Venezuelan naval vessels they encounter. Britain, Germany, and Italy declare a formal blockade of the Venezuelan coast, with U.S. agreement. British and German gunboats bombard the port of Puerto Cabello in retaliation against a perceived public insult to the British flag by Venezuelans on shore. The will of Cecil John Rhodes establishes the Rhodes Scholarships to Oxford University for students from countries with present or former connections to the British Empire.

1903

Following U.S. president Grover Cleveland’s call for an arbitrated settlement of the Venezuela Boundary Dispute, a Russian-British-American tribunal awards 94 percent of the disputed territory to British Guiana. 1900

The first West Indian cricket team tours England.

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British and German gunboats bombard Fort San Carlos in Venezuela. Britain, Germany, and Italy lift the Venezuelan blockade in response to the announcement that Caracas will submit existing claims to the International Court of Arbitration at the Hague. The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois, is published.

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xlvi CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS Schomburg founds, with journalist John Edward Bruce, the Negro Society for Historical Research. Schomburg will amass a huge collection of rare materials documenting black experiences in the United States and England over the course of his life. This collection will become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library.

The Sokoto Caliphate falls to the British West African Frontier Force under Frederick Lugard. 1904

The Hague Court rules in favor of the blockading European powers and against Venezuela. In response, Latin American nations assert the Drago Doctrine, stating that foreign nations have no right to use military force to recover public debt.

1905

W. E. B. Du Bois founds, with Monroe Trotter, John Hope, and others, the Niagara Movement, with a platform calling for universal suffrage and equality in economic opportunity, education, and legal status for African Americans. The movement is the precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), formed in 1909.

1906

1909

1910

James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is published anonymously.

1913

Timothy Drew (Noble Drew Ali) launches an Islamic movement called the Moorish Science Temple. He will author his own “Holy Koran” in 1927.

1914

Following the outbreak of World War I, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson offers to mediate between Britain, Germany, and other belligerent powers.

William Joseph Seymour starts the Pentecostal movement in Los Angeles, California. It will gain in popularity, eventually spreading to Africa.

The Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell Company makes huge discoveries of oil around Lake Maracaibo, placing Venezuela on the road to becoming the world’s biggest oil exporter.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is established, with the objectives of equality of rights, justice in the courts, opportunity for education and employment for black Americans, as well as the eradication of prejudice and the advancement of the political interests of black citizens. The U.S. government sponsors a revolt against Nicaragua’s leader, José Santos Zelaya; he is forced into exile. The exclusive English department store, Harrod’s, opens a branch in Buenos Aires, reflecting the impact of the British and Anglophile community. In November, Lij Taffari Makonnen becomes emperor of Ethiopia and adopts the name Haile Selassie, meaning “Might of the Trinity.”

1911

1912

Lord Lugard of England, as governorgeneral of a region of Africa that combines the former empires of Oyo, Igbo, Bornu-Kanem, and Hausa-Fulani, names it Nigeria. Jamaican Marcus Garvey founds the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica. 1915

The U.S. occupies Haiti. One of the results is the emergence of the Haitian black nationalist movement known as Noirisme, which seeks to study the country’s African roots, with regard to language, religion, and folklore. Such study is best typified by Jean PriceMars’s Ainsi parla l’Oncle.

1916

Marcus Garvey arrives in Harlem, New York. He will establish a Harlem chapter of UNIA in 1917.

A Puerto Rican immigrant to the United States in 1891, Arthur Alfonso

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS xlvii 1917

American to produce a feature-length film.

After intercepting and decoding the Zimmerman Telegram, Britain transmits it to the United States in hopes of gaining an ally. The telegram from the German foreign minister promises to restore Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Mexico in return for a Mexican-German alliance against the United States.

Jessie Fauset assumes the position of literary editor of The Crisis, the NAACP’s literary magazine. She will hold the position until 1927, and through it nurture a number of young talents (such as Langston Hughes) while publishing her own novels.

The United States enters the war as an “associate” rather than as a declared ally.

The Red Summer of race riots erupts. African Americans are targeted with brutality, intimidation, and murder in over 21 cities across the United States.

Venezuela’s first commercial oil well begins producing. The East St. Louis riots, spawned from white racial hatred of African Americans, who had traveled north for work during World War I, claims the lives of thirty-nine African Americans and nine whites, while hundreds of African Americans are displaced from their homes by fire. Following the East St. Louis riots, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others organize the Silent Protest Parade, which marches along Fifth Avenue from Harlem to lower Manhattan. It protests American racial hatred of African Americans as well as President Woodrow Wilson’s hypocritical administration, concerned with democracy and equality abroad but not at home. 1918

Namibia becomes independent from Germany as a consequence of the Treaty of Versailles. South Africa administers Namibia under the League of Nations in an occupation that will last until 1990. 1921

Caribbean author René Maran’s novel, Batouala, is published. It will win France’s literary prize, the Goncourt.

1922

Egypt becomes independent of British colonial rule.

1923

The African American modernist literary work, Cane, by Jean Toomer, is published.

1924

Tunisian director Chemama Chikly makes Ain el Ghezal (The girl from Carthage), the first motion picture made by an African.

1925

The first Pan-African Congress is held in Paris. Another will follow in 1921.

The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, an anthology celebrating African American poetry, fiction, and essays written mostly by African Americans, is published.

The Treaty of Versailles is signed, dictating punitive terms to defeated Germany.

Noble Drew Ali opens the Moorish American Science Temple in Chicago.

Oscar Micheaux produces The Homesteaders, becoming the first African

C. Ernest Cadie leads the Denver African Expedition, a safari expedition

The Armistice ending World War I is signed. The Haitian, Charlemagne Massena Peralte, leads an unsuccessful attempt to oust U.S. troops from Haiti during the first U.S. occupation.

1919

Prohibition begins, lasting until 1934. The Bahamas becomes a major transit point for smuggling alcohol into the United States.

The Paris Peace Conference assembles to draft treaties of peace between the warring nations of World War I.

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xlviii CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS traveling from Cape Town to the Mandated Territory of South West Africa, to study the Bushmen (the San people). The expedition planned to find the “missing link” and to “capture” some “wild” Bushmen in order to bring them to the United States, but eventually settled for attempting to make a film and taking many photographs. The latter were used in U.S. school textbooks, promulgating and perpetuating the stereotype of the “wild” Bushman. 1927

Following his pursuit by J. Edgar Hoover for mail fraud, Marcus Garvey is deported as an undesirable alien.

1928

British Guiana is declared a crown colony.

The League of Colored Peoples is founded in London by Dr. Harold Moody and modeled on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 1933

Meeting in Paris, the Senegalese Léopold Sedar Senghor, Martinican Aimé Césaire, and Guyanese Léon Gontran-Damas found the literaryintellectual Négritude movement. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt develops his Good Neighbor Policy toward the nations of Latin America, rejecting the Monroe Doctrine policy that the Theodore Roosevelt, Harding, Taft, Wilson, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations pursued.

The West Indies cricket team plays its first ever Test match, at Lord’s in London. 1929

1930

In the Women’s War of Nigeria, women palm oil producers protest against the impact of falling prices, increased taxation, and government marketing cartels. Over 50 women are killed when police fire on protesters. The British secure a monopoly over the palm oil trade by establishing the United Africa Company. The first Empire Games open in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada with over 400 competitors from Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, and British Guiana.

1935

1936

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Britain and Argentina renew the RocaRunciman Treaty. Italy occupies Ethiopia, 1936–1941.

1937

Wali Akram establishes the First Cleveland Mosque, the only orthodox mosque in America to be run entirely by indigenous Muslim converts. Around the same time, he develops the Moslem Ten-Year Plan, a proposal to address the economic and educational needs of African American Muslims in the midst of the Great Depression.

1938

Trinidadian C. L. R. James publishes The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a historical study locating the Haitian Revolution in the tradition of the

Wallace Fard founds the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in Detroit, Michigan. South Africa enacts the Entertainment Law, forbidding the viewing of unapproved arts, including film and theater, and blocking freedom of expression in the creation of such works, particularly from a black perspective.

The BBC places a ban on the broadcasting of “hot music”—American jazz. The Anglo-Uruguayan Trade and Payments Agreement secures the promise of “benevolent treatment” for British interests in Uruguay.

The first World Cup is hosted by Uruguay in Montevideo; the universalized rules of England’s Football Association are applied.

1931

The Roca-Runciman Treaty supersedes the Anglo-Argentine Treaty of 1904: the two governments negotiate special arrangements for mutual access to each other’s markets.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS xlix Lamming, Sam Selvon, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and others—had been recognized by publishers and critics in England and America.

Enlightenment revolutions of France and America. 1939

1940

The Leeward Islands Federation is dissolved.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) stages the first successful “sit-in” demonstration against segregation in Chicago, IL.

Black classical singer Marian Anderson performs at the Lincoln Memorial, having been denied the use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

1944

Richard Wright publishes Native Son. It becomes a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and an immediate best seller.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank are created to aid multiple nations’ economic and health crises.

1946

The United States and (reluctantly) Britain sign the Anglo-American Air Services (Bermuda) Agreement, forcing major British concessions and enabling the first significant U.S. incursions into European civil aviation routes.

1941

Eritrea becomes independent of Italy. It will be colonized by Britain.

1942

Britain and the United States establish the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC) with the goal of protecting postwar Western Hemisphere security, developing regional integration, and promoting agricultural and other research in the Caribbean. It is renamed the Caribbean Commission in 1946.

The United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is implemented on December 14. 1947

The Voice of America gives its first European broadcast via BBC transmitters. The Allies launch Operation Torch to free French Northwest Africa from Axis occupation. 1943

Major league baseball in the United States becomes racially integrated. 1948

The American Forces Network (AFN) begins broadcasting to American troops stationed in Europe, giving many Britons their first taste of American jazz and blues music. The BBC is hesitant about having its monopoly breached, but in the end submits to assurances that AFN will only act as an auxiliary to the BBC’s own offerings. The first program of Caribbean Voices, operated by the BBC from London, is broadcast on March 11. When broadcasting ceases in 1958, many of the hitherto unknown talents—including V. S. Naipaul, Una Marson, George

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The Anglo-Uruguayan Payments Agreement transfers the ownership of Britishfinanced railways, trams, and waterworks to the Uruguayan government.

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In Angola, coffee plantations expand from 297,000 acres to 1.2 million acres between 1948 and 1961. South Africa adopts the segregationist and racist official policy of “apartheid.” It will not be reversed until 1994. The Organization of American States (OAS) is established in Bogota, Colombia, with the signing of its charter on April 30. Twenty-one Latin American and Caribbean nations, as well as the United States, are members. The organization will later expand to include Canada and nations of the English-speaking Carribean. President Harry Truman approves the desegregation of the U.S. military and creates the Fair Employment Board.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS

1950

In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court rules segregated schools unconstitutional, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks is the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize in any category. Ralph Bunche receives Nobel Peace Prize. He is the first African American to win it.

1951

Libya becomes independent of Allied Administration.

1952

Malcolm Little joins the Nation of Islam and changes his surname to “X”.

1955

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago native, is lynched in Mississippi.

Gamal Abdul Nasser leads the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy.

The Supreme Court orders the integration of schools “with all deliberate speed.”

Eritrea becomes independent of Britain. The novel Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, is published. It becomes one of the most influential and widely read novels of twentieth-century American literature. 1953

The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) orders the integration of buses, trains, and waiting rooms for interstate travel. Marian Anderson becomes the first African American to sing at the Metropolitan Opera on January 7.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visit Bermuda for a day—the first visit by a reigning British monarch.

Trinidadian Claudia Jones, a member of the American Communist Party, is deported from America for “un-American activities” after serving jail time for her political activities. She is barred from entering Trinidad. Needing medical help, she seeks asylum in Britain; in 1958 she organizes the first black indoor carnival, held in 1959.

Britain temporarily suspends the constitution of British Guiana after the popular election of Dr. Cheddi Jagan, leader of the People’s Progress Party, prompts fears of a Marxist takeover in the country. The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is formed. It includes the territories of present-day Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.

1956

Fidel Castro, with a handful of revolutionaries, attempts to attack Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista’s soldiers at the Moncada Army Garrison in Santiago de Cuba. Defeated, Castro is arrested, tried, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison; he is pardoned after serving just two years. 1954

The charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands grants the Netherlands Antilles and Surinam the status of equal and autonomous partners within the kingdom, signaling the official end of colonial relations.

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Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, prompting the Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Southern Manifesto against school desegregation is signed by 101 congressmen. Morocco, Tunisia, and Sudan become independent. Nigeria’s first commercial oil well, located in Oloibiri, in present-day Baylesa State, begins producing. The Lonely Londoners, by Trinidadianborn Ssmuel Selvon, is published. It is the first Caribbean novel to employ dialect in both dialogue and narrative.

1957

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Congress approves the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS li Federal troops are sent to Alabama to enforce school desegregation.

1960

Ghana becomes the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence from colonial rule.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded in part to advance a more radical political response to segregation and Jim Crow racism than the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). SNCC will lead freedom rides and protest American involvement in the Vietnam War. SNCC’s members include Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

The Southern Rhodesia African National Congress is formed. It is banned within two years. François Duvalier, nicknamed “Papa Doc,” is elected for a nonrenewable sixyear term as president of Haiti; he will have himself reelected in a fraudulent election in 1961. He will rule Haiti uninterrupted until his death in 1971.

Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

Martin Luther King Jr. becomes president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). 1958

The People’s National Movement announces that Trinidad and Tobago will seek independence outside of the West Indies Federation.

Guinea becomes independent.

Between 1960 and 2000, crop yields in the developing world drastically increase, a result described by scientists as the Green Revolution.

Nigerian Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart (1959), is published. Five years after the British Musicians’ Union lifts its ban on U.S. musicians, English jazz player Ronnie Scott opens his legendary jazz club in London. It becomes a mecca for U.S. jazz musicians.

Nigeria achieves independence from Britain. It becomes a republic in 1963. The French government grants independence to French Cameroon. Ahmadou Adhijo, leader of the independence party Union Camerounaise, becomes Cameroon’s first president.

The Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro, is successful in forcing out Fulgencio Batista. Argentine-born Ernesto “Che” Guevara is made a Cuban citizen. Radio Swan, financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, begins broadcasting to Cuba. Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded program, also begins broadcasting to Cuba. Considering its content to be propagandistic, Cuba will jam its signal.

A sit-in is staged by four black students at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The African nations Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Congo (Brazzaville), Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Somalia, and Togo become independent.

Ofeu Negro (Black Orpheus) is produced by French director Marcel Camus. It wins the Academy Award for best foreign film.

I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology, by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, is published. The work is influential in shaping pan-African thought in the era of African decolonization.

Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, is published.

Two works by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Preface to a Twenty Volume

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1961

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lii

CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS Suicide Note and the play Dutchman, are published.

1963

National support for civil rights swells after the police attack a Birmingham, Alabama, demonstration led by King.

With the help of the United Nations, British Cameroon organizes a referendum in which its northern half votes to join Nigeria and its southern half votes to join Cameroon.

A March on Washington demonstration for civil rights and jobs attracts more than 200,000. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Tanzania (then Tanganyika) become independent. 1962

President John F. Kennedy is assassinated.

An outbreak of rioting occurs after the U.S. Supreme Court orders the University of Mississippi to accept James H. Meredith as its first black student. Twelve thousand federal troops are employed to restore order and ensure his admission. The West Indies Federation collapses, following the secession of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, which declare their independence within the Commonwealth.

Kenya and independent.

Zanzibar

become

The Organization of African Unity is established. Ousmane Sembène makes his first film, Borom Sarret. It changes the course of African film production, and Sembène will become the most prominent African filmmaker of the continent. 1964

In the Bahamas, President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sign the Nassau Pact. To diffuse the crisis caused by President Kennedy’s unilateral cancellation of the British-American Skybolt weapons system, the U.S. government agrees to make Polaris missiles available to the United Kingdom. Britain passes the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, aimed at regulating the flow of non-European immigrants. Further acts will follow in 1968 and 1971. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is arrested for treason a second time and sentenced to five years in prison. In 1963, while in prison, Mandela is also charged with sabotage for plotting to overthrow the government through violence. In 1964, Mandela is convicted of sabotage and treason and is sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. Algeria, Burundi, Uganda, and Rwanda become independent.

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Martin Luther King Jr. writes “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

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Upon his return to the United States after visiting Mecca and performing the Islamic pilgrimage, Malcolm X breaks away from Elijah Muhammad and forms the Organization of AfroAmerican Unity, along with Muslim Mosque Incorporated, in New York City. Three civil rights workers are murdered in Mississippi by white segregationists during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. Martin Luther King Jr. receives the Nobel Peace Prize. Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Economic Opportunity Act. Cassius Clay wins the world heavyweight boxing title, converts to Islam, and changes his name to Muhammad Ali. The Museum of African Art is founded in Washington, D.C., by former U.S. Foreign Service officer Warren M. Robbins. It is renamed the National Museum of African Art in 1981.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS liii follow this publication with Black Skin, White Masks in 1967.

Malawi and Zambia become independent. The Bahamas are granted self-governing rule by the United Kingdom.

1966

François Duvalier has himself elected president-for-life of Haiti. As its dictator, he will rule until his death in 1971. His son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed “Bébé Doc,” will rule as dictator of Haiti from 1971 until 1986, when he will be forced into exile. 1965

At a London constitutional conference, Bermuda—still a sovereign British dependency—adopts a new constitution with universal suffrage and a twoparty parliamentary system. The constitution comes into effect in 1968. British Guiana becomes the independent nation of Guyana.

The era of major American military involvement in the Vietnam War begins, and continues to 1973.

Botswana and independent.

Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith unilaterally declares Rhodesia’s independence from Britain. The United States joins Britain in imposing sanctions.

Lesotho

become

Yakubu Gowon becomes military dictator of Nigeria (1966–1975). Jamaica Labrish, by Louise Bennett, is published.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson and President Lyndon Johnson agree to cease oil shipments to Rhodesia. Ian Smith retaliates by blocking oil shipments to Zambia; the United States and Britain mount a joint airlift of millions of gallons of petroleum for the Zambian copper mines.

Nigerian author Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, the first novel written in English by a woman from black Africa, is published. The Black Panther Party (BPP) is established, headquartered in Oakland, California. The Black Power concept is adopted by CORE and SNCC.

The Gambia becomes independent. Alex Haley publishes The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley.

The National Organization for Women (NOW) is founded.

On February 21, Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City.

Senator Edward W. Brooke, Republican of Massachusetts,becomes the firstelected black senator since Reconstruction.

Martin Luther King Jr. leads a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The Watts riot in Los Angeles is the most serious single racial disturbance in United States history.

Barbados declares independence.

1967

The Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) is founded by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose, and Andrew Salkey in London.

Martin Luther King Jr. announces his opposition to the Vietnam War. The worst race riot in U.S. history kills forty-three in Detroit; major riots occur in Newark and Chicago. Thurgood Marshall becomes the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice.

The Black Arts Movement is started by Amiri Baraka in Harlem.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturns laws against interracial marriage.

The Wretched of the Earth, an anticolonial treatise by Martinique-born author Frantz Fanon, is published. He will

The West Indies Associated States (or the Federated States of the Antilles) is established, comprising Antigua, St. Kitts

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liv CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS and Nevis (tethered to an unwilling Anguilla), Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. All seek voluntary “associated status” within the British Commonwealth, but the Federation will progressively dissolve as the members opt for independence.

1970

The Nigerian-Biafran War ends officially on January 15, 1970. Over two million Biafrans had died by the time of its surrender, including one million Biafran children as a result of starvation and disease-induced kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition.

1971

The U.S. Supreme Court approves busing as a method of desegregation.

The black majority of the Bahamas defeats the mostly white government that has held power since self-rule began in 1964. The Republic of Biafra comes into existence on May 30. A thirty-month civil war breaks out in July; it is the bloodiest war in modern Africa and the first black-on-black genocide of modern history.

François “Papa Doc” Duvalier dies in April. Power is passed to his son, JeanClaude (“Baby Doc”). While he rules as president of Haiti, his corrupt financial schemes and lack of bookkeeping and financial accountability drive the country into widespread, deep-rooted poverty. 1972

U.S. guitarist Jimi Hendrix moves to London, where he reinvents the blues as a psychedelic music form.

In spite of its British dependent status, Bermuda pegs its currency to the U.S. dollar.

Piri Thomas’s autobiography, Down These Mean Streets, is published. It describes the conflict between national identification as Puerto Rican and racial identification as black.

The Jamaican band, Bob Marley and the Wailers, is signed to Island Records, a key moment in the internationalization of reggae music.

The poet LeRoi Jones becomes a Kawaida minister, discards his slave name, and assumes the name Imamu Amiri Baraka (he later drops the title “Imamu”). 1968

The first feature-length Jamaican film, The Harder They Come, is released, starring the reggae singer Jimmy Cliff and featuring his and other artists’ music, bringing reggae to a worldwide audience.

Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis.

News of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study breaks. The American public is outraged to discover that the African American male subjects had been denied therapeutic treatment, available since at least the 1940s.

Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles. Equatorial Guinea, Mauritius, and Swaziland become independent. 1969

Moummar al-Qaddafi successfully overthrows the monarchy in Libya and is installed as Libya’s leader on September 1. He has ruled the country since then.

1973

While sleeping in their apartment, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Black Panther Party members, were assassinated by the Chicago police.

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Shirley Chisholm is the first black woman to run for U.S. president.

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The Bahamas gains full independence from the United Kingdom on July 10. The Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) is established by the Treaty of Chaguaramas on August 1, with the purpose of providing economic and social integration to Caribbean nations after the failure of

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS lv President Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, pledges American support for a settlement that would bring peace and majority rule.

the West Indies Federation. There are currently 15 full members. Roberto Clemente becomes the first Hispanic baseball player to be inducted into the National Hall of Fame.

Trinidad and Tobago declare themselves a republic and replace the queen with a president as head of state.

The Falashas (or Beta Isra’el, as they call themselves) of northwestern Ethiopia are recognized as Jews by the Sephardi chief rabbi; they will be recognized by the Ashkenazi chief rabbi in 1975. 1974

The Soweto Rebellion in South Africa begins. While protesting the governmentenforced system of apartheid, blacks are shot in the back by government troops. Bishop Desmond Tutu will now support the global boycott of South Africa.

Grenada declares independence. Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie is overthrown in a military coup.

Western Sahara and the Seychelles Islands become independent. Through a 1975 deal organized by Spain, Morocco acquires two-thirds of Western Sahara and Mauritania one-third. The Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) declares itself in 1976 to represent the Saharan people; Mauritania renounces its territorial claims in 1978 and as a consequence Morocco moves to occupy the one-third of their former territory. As a consequence, SADR refugees flee to southern Algeria, where they are permitted to settle. The debate over territory, autonomy, and sovereignty continue in 2007 between Morocco, Algeria, and SADR.

Jamaican-born Linton Kwesi Johnson publishes Voices of the Living, which marks the start of British reggae, or “dub,” poetry. 1975

Upon his death, Elijah Muhammad’s son, Wallace Deen Muhammad, is named as the new leader of the Nation of Islam. Wallace redirects the Nation toward orthodox Islam. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is formally created with the signing of the Treaty of Lagos on May 28. It includes 15 African states. Angola, Cape Verde, the Comoros Islands, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe become independent.

Roots: Saga of an American Family, by Alex Haley, is published. It celebrates Haley’s African heritage and his family’s determination to survive the ravages of 200 years of slavery. It is an immediate best seller, with purchases of over 1 million copies in its first year. Roots earned Haley both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The book prompted a television miniseries in 1977.

Ntozake Shange’s play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, is published. It opens the following year and thrusts the author into immediate prominence; Shange’s work becomes the second play by a black female author, after Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, to reach Broadway. 1976

As the guerrilla war against white rule in Rhodesia continues under Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, British prime minister James Callaghan offers to oversee a constitutional conference to negotiate Rhodesia’s independence.

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British Jamaican Linton Kwesi Johnson names himself “dub-lyricist” and helps to develop a still-lively tradition of black British spoken word poetry. 1977

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A year after London renounces the Anglo-American Air Services (Bermuda)

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lvi CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS Agreement of 1946, Britain and the United States sign the Bermuda II Agreement, which establishes a more equal framework for British-U.S. airline competition.

from the Clinton Correctional Center and is granted political asylum in Cuba, where she still lives. In 1991 the FBI offered a $1 million bounty for her return to the United States.

Louis Farrakhan forms a new Nation of Islam, revolting against the new leadership of the Nation under Wallace Dean Muhammad.

Alice Walker edits I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader.

Novelist and activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o is imprisoned without trial for one year by Kenya’s independent government under President Jomo Kenyatta. The imprisonment is the result of his involvement in directing his play, I Will Marry When I Want, about the neocolonial exploitation of the Kenyan working class.

Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta’s novel, The Joys of Motherhood, is published. 1980

Zimbabwe claims independence, with Robert Mugabe as its first prime minister. Mugabe has remained the country’s only ruler, as executive president, since 1987.

Djibouti becomes independent. 1978

The U.S. Supreme Court disallows quotas for college admissions but gives limited approval to affirmative action programs.

1981

1979

Emmanuel Dongala, novelist, poet, and playwright, forms the Théatre de l’éclair, now one of the best-known theater companies in Congo. 1982

St. Lucia declares independence. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin win the Nobel Peace Prize for their diplomatic negotiations in the IsraeliPalestine conflict, which led to Egyptian recognition of Israel and Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula. Charged and convicted of the murder of a state trooper despite evidence to the contrary, Black Panther member Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard) escapes

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Belize—formerly British Honduras— declares independence. Antigua and Barbuda declares independence.

Dominica declares independence. A royal commission recommends independence for Bermuda. The Brazilian Movimento Negro Unificado is founded as the culmination of a rally protesting the death under torture of black worker Robson Silveira da Luz at police headquarters; the expulsion of four black athletes from the Tiete sport club; and the killing of black worker Nilton Lourenco by a policeman.

UNESCO begins publishing a series of continental histories, beginning with The General History of Africa.

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A group of Argentine scrap-metal dealers land on the British island of South Georgia and hoist the Argentine flag. The Falklands War begins with Argentina’s military seizure of the Falkland and South Georgia islands. Britain declares the 200-mile Falkland Island Maritime Exclusion Zone. The British submarine Conqueror sinks the Argentine carrier Belgrano and over 300 of its crew. (In February 1985, Clive Ponting, an assistant secretary at the Ministry of Defence, will resign after leaking documents alleging that when it was attacked, the Belgrano was outside the Maritime Exclusion Zone and heading away from the British fleet.)

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS lvii the U.S. presidency, winning 17 percent of the popular vote in the Democratic primaries.

An Argentine Exocet missile sinks HMS Sheffield, while British marines and Special Forces begin a sustained ground assault on East Falkland Island. The Argentine air force attacks Royal Navy positions. British forces move from their beachhead for the final assault on Port Stanley. The Falklands War ends with the surrender of Argentine forces at Port Stanley. The war has claimed approximately 650 Argentine and 250 British lives.

Vanessa Williams is crowned the first black Miss America. 1986

At the World Cup in Mexico City, England’s football (soccer) team faces Argentina in the final playoff, as they face each other in the World Cup tournament for the first time since the end of the Falklands War. Diego Maradona scores two goals to lead Argentina to victory, alleging that one had been scored by “the Hand of God.”

Sudanese John Garang leads a Dinka uprising against the Muslim-dominated, increasingly fundamentalist federal government of Sudan.

Following Sudanese president Nimeiri’s overthrow in 1985, elections are held. Tentative efforts are made to negotiate peace with the south.

Alice Walker receives the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple. 1983

The Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis becomes the last British Caribbean territory to declare independence, as well as the Western Hemisphere’s smallest independent nation.

As a mark of gratitude for U.S. assistance during the Falklands War, Prime Minister Thatcher allows British air bases to be used for American bombers attacking Libya.

The United States and supporting Caribbean forces invade Grenada to overthrow the hard-line Marxist regime of Bernard Coard. The American failure to consult the British government causes friction between the Reagan and Thatcher administrations.

1984

Nigerian author Wole Soyinka wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African to receive the award. Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid’s first novel, is published.

In September, Sudanese president Jafar Nimeiri announces the country will incorporate traditional Islamic punishments drawn from Shari’a (Islamic law). These laws will apply not only to Muslims, but to southern Sudanese and other non-Muslims as well.

1987

David Dabydeen’s first volume of poetry, Slave Song, is awarded Britain’s Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

1989

Toni Morrison wins the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. August Wilson wins the Pulitzer Prize for his Broadway play, Fences. Rita Dove wins the Pulitzer Prize for her poems, Thomas and Beulah.

August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom opens on Broadway. The Reverend Jesse Jackson is the first serious African American contender for

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday is officially celebrated as a national holiday.

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The National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), a guerilla force, splits into two factions with the execution of Liberia’s dictator Samuel Doe, one led by Charles Taylor, the other by Prince Johnson. This rupture incites a bloody five-year civil war that ends with Taylor’s election as president in 1997.

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lviii CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS Arab-African relationships in Sudan, previously complementary, develop into serious conflict as an Arab nationalist group comes into power with the intent of eradicating groups who retain their distinct culture and language alongside the Arabic that they have accepted as a lingua franca. Alienation from the Arab-dominated Sudanese government leads various groups to sympathize with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/ Army (SPLM/A). 1990

with it is begun in Liverpool. The exhibit, “Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity,” opens in 1994. Nigerian Ben Okri receives the Booker Prize for his novel, The Famished Road. Clarence Thomas, an African American, is confirmed as U.S. Supreme Court justice, despite Anita Hill’s sexual harassment testimony. 1992

Post–Falklands War diplomatic relations between Britain and Argentina are normalized.

Cameroon holds its first multiparty elections.

South West Africa achieves independence from South Africa and renames itself Namibia.

Riots spread through Los Angeles’s South Central following the acquittal of the policemen accused of brutally beating Rodney King.

After 27 years, Nelson Mandela is released from prison.

Carol Moseley Braun, Democrat of Illinois, becomes the first African American woman elected to the U. S. Senate.

Producer, writer, and director Julie Dash receives the Sundance Film Festival’s Best Cinematography award for Daughters of the Dust. August Wilson wins the Pulitzer Prize for his play, The Piano Lesson.

A St. Lucian, Derek Walcott, receives the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1993

Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage wins the National Book Award. 1991

An uprising in Somalia leads to ousting of dictator Siad Barre. In the final period of his regime, all foreign aid was halted; after Barre is deposed, there is widespread hunger, and armed factions squabble over scarce food supplies. Jean-Bertrand Aristide becomes president of Haiti, decisively winning with over 67 percent of the vote. He is overthrown in a September 29 coup by Raoul Cédras that Aristide and his supporters accuse President George H. W. Bush of supporting. Aristide flees to Venezuela. The development of the first major museum display to examine the transatlantic slave trade and the slavery associated

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The United States intervenes in Somalia, calling it a “humanitarian effort” to protect aid workers distributing food.

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A bombing of the World Trade Center in Manhattan kills six and injures over 1,000; it precedes and is linked to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the WTC as an act of Islamic terrorism backed by Al Qaeda. Toni Morrison receives the Nobel Prize for Literature. Poet Yusef Komunyakaa wins Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular. Maya Angelou reads “On the Pulse of the Morning” at President Clinton’s inauguration, becoming the first African American poet to participate in a U.S. presidential inauguration. Sani Abacha becomes the military dictator of Nigeria, which he rules to 1997. Eritrea becomes independent from Ethiopia and joins the United Nations.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS lix half of the island. The majority of the population is evacuated, and Britain imposes a Maritime Exclusion Zone.

A U.S. intervention in Somalia for peacekeeping leads to the deaths of 1,000 Somalians, including civilians and children, and 18 U.S. soldiers. The U.S hands over control of the intervention to the UN in May. In Burundi, Tutsis—the ruling ethnic group of the nation despite its minority population—yield power after a Hutu wins the country’s first democratic election. Killed in an attempted coup after serving only four months in office, his successor is killed in a suspicious plane crash in 1994. The Hutu leader of Rwanda is killed in the same plane crash. 1994

Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan organizes the Million Man March on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Colin Powell is the first African American seriously considered as a presidential candidate of a major party. 1996

Nelson Mandela is inaugurated as president of South Africa. He will serve as president for three years before retiring. Bishop Desmond Tutu is appointed head of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A civil war erupts in Rwanda. At least half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus are killed. Tutsi rebels win control, sending 1 million Hutus, fearful of revenge, into Zaire and Tanzania. The United Nations sets up refugee camps in Zaire. Following three years of failed diplomatic and economic sanctions, U.S. forces land in Haiti on September 19. Aristide returns to office on October 15.

Tanzania gives Hutu refugees less than a month to return to Rwanda; many flee in the other direction instead, to hide in the forests. Tanzanian troops head off the refugees and order them back; 300,000 return to Rwanda.

A U.S. occupation of Haiti begins, continuing into 2000. Rita Dove is named U.S. poet laureate.

1995

Rwandan Hutu militants, fearful of reprisals for the massacres of Tutsis who had taken up influential positions in the new government, force Hutu refugees to remain in exile in Zaire and Tanzania. In October–November, Zaire sinks into a crisis as civil war, sparked by TutsiHutu fighting, cuts off more than halfa-million Hutu refugees from food and medical supplies. The emissary named by the UN to negotiate a cease-fire warns of a possible regional war between Hutus and Tutsis and another genocide like the one in Rwanda. There is also a threat of epidemic and mass starvation. Canada, the United States, and other nations begin forming a peacekeeping mission when the rebels in Zaire—mostly Tutsi—take over the refugee camps, sending the refugees streaming home.

O. J. Simpson is accused of murdering his former wife and her friend. The ensuing trial grips the nation.

The British Royal Navy sends HMS Brave to the Turks and Caicos Islands to quell a civil uprising that in the end does not occur.

In a Bermuda referendum, voters reject independence from Britain by a margin of three to one.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide leaves the presidential office of Haiti at the end of his first term.

The Soufrière Hills Volcano erupts on Montserrat, destroying the southern

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1997

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Charles Taylor is elected president of Liberia.

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lx CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS Ghanaian Kofi Annan is elected secretary-general of the United Nations. He will be appointed to a second, fiveyear term beginning in 2002.

intelligence of chemical weapons links. Following the bombings, the world political community questions the reliability of this intelligence.

South Africa attempts to obtain more affordable versions of the anti-viral AZT treatment for the HIV virus, which is available in most Western countries. The attempt is blocked by the world pharmaceutical industry, which spearheads a lawsuit based on intellectual property rights.

Eritrean-Ethiopian border clashes turn into a full-scale war. 2000

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa’s African National Congress government writes to world leaders, calling for “an African solution to an African problem,” questioning scientific evidence linking the HIV virus with the AIDS disease and contrasting the disease’s emergence through heterosexual contact in South Africa and its emergence in gay communities in the West. Mbeki’s approach to the problem of HIV is strongly criticized by the world community.

The United States imposes sanctions against Sudan that prohibit trade between the two countries. 1998

Former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet is arrested in London, following an extradition request by the Spanish High Court in order to try Pinochet for human rights violations. Senior English law lords hearing Pinochet’s appeal fail to reach a decision. Britain experiences a wave of celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the emigrant ship, Empire Windrush, from Jamaica, carrying the first sizable group of West Indians to arrive in Britain after World War II. The secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, publishes the report, The Causes of Conflict and the Promotion of Durable Peace and Sustainable Development in Africa.

Eritrea and Ethiopia sign a cease-fire that calls for a UN force to monitor compliance and oversee the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Eritrean land. The two nations sign a peace agreement in Algeria, establishing commissions to mark the border, exchange prisoners, return displaced people, and hear compensation claims. 2001

The U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are bombed within minutes of each other. The death toll is 207 Kenyans, 11 Tanzanians, and 12 U.S. citizens; altogether, more than 4,000 are injured. Several of the injured will attempt without success to sue the United States for further compensation for their injuries. Four men linked to Al Qaeda will be convicted and sentenced to jail for life in May 2001 for their role in the bombings. 1999

The United States bombs factory buildings in Khartoum, Sudan, citing

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Former president Pinochet is released from British custody and flies home to Chile, where he is subsequently declared mentally unfit to stand trial.

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Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi is found guilty of the 1988 airplane explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, following a trial before a Scottish court in the Netherlands. He is sentenced to life imprisonment. Islamist militants fly hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth hijacked plane crashes in a Pennsylvania field. The terrorist atrocities result in the deaths of 2,973 victims by the official death toll. Following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS lxi and biological weapons of mass destruction against British targets within fortyfive minutes. U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell draws on this dossier to argue for the UN Security Council’s resolution authorizing “serious consequences” if Iraq refuses to disclose the weapons.

Pentagon, the United States declares war on terror on September 12. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan refuses to extradite Osama bin Laden, whose Al Qaeda terrorist network is suspected of carrying out the September 11 attacks. The United States spearheads a wave of assaults on Al Qaeda and Taliban positions, while Britain’s military response is channeled through the UN, NATO, and the European Union.

2003

A portion of the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba is used to imprison suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists, labeled “enemy combatants.” More than 500 people of 35 different nationalities have been held there for six years, as of 2007. Many detainees allege they have been subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman treatment. Kofi Annan and the United Nations receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Jean-Bertrand Aristide returns for a second presidential term in Haiti. Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul receives the Nobel Prize for Literature. Canonized on October 1, Saint Josephine Bakhita becomes the first African woman former slave to become a saint. 2002

In Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces are largely routed. U.S. and British troops remain in support of the transitional government for humanitarian and logistical purposes and as combat operatives against remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents. Chicago native José Padilla is arrested for plotting to explode a “dirty bomb.” He will not be indicted until 2005; when arraigned, this accusation will not be among the charges. The British government publishes a dossier asserting that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein could launch chemical

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With the official justification being the elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the United States and Britain launch Operation Iraqi Freedom—the Second Gulf War—in a bid to topple Saddam Hussein. Baghdad quickly falls to coalition forces, and Operation Iraqi Freedom is officially declared over after three weeks of fighting. The war has global repercussions as Arab nations from North Africa to Southeast Asia are assessed for their potential involvement with Islamist groups linked to Al Qaeda. U.S. ambassador L. Paul Bremer is appointed administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), effectively the government of occupied Iraq. BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan cites an unnamed senior British intelligence source in suggesting that the Blair government had exaggerated (or “sexed up”) the Iraqi threat in order to make the case for war. The Iraqi Governing Council is constituted with a broad-based membership from Iraq’s major religious and ethnic sectors. The UK’s chief expert in Iraqi weapons, Dr. David Kelly, commits suicide following the British government’s leaking of his name as Andrew Gilligan’s source. The senior British law lord, Lord Hutton, commences an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Dr. Kelly’s death. The CPA and the Iraqi Governing Council agree to full Iraqi governance and the dissolution of the CPA by June 30, 2004.

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lxii CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS U.S. forces capture Saddam Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit. British, American, and other coalition forces continue to face attacks by pro-Saddam insurgents.

connection with the May–June 2004 crisis that resulted in killings, rapes of adults and children, and widespread looting. 2005

While alternately admitting and denying national responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, Libya offers a multi-billion-dollar compensation package in return for the lifting of U.S. sanctions, which President George W. Bush announces early in 2004. Charles Taylor is indicted by an international court for war crimes. He accepts political asylum from Nigeria. The United States asks Jean-Bertrand Aristide to distance himself from Amiot Métayer. When Métayer is subsequently murdered, his supporters accuse Aristide of ordering him killed to improve his relations with the U.S. The boundary commission in the Eritrea-Ethiopia dispute rules that the town of Badme is in Eritrea. Ethiopia calls the ruling unacceptable. 2004

Prompted by the investigative work for two documentaries about the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, the U.S. Department of Justice announces that the case is officially reopened. Métayer’s brother launches a rebellion that spreads to the city of Cape Haitien. From there the rebels march on the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. At the prodding of his former French and U.S. supporters, Aristide leaves Haiti on February 29 for initial exile in the Central African Republic. (Aristide later claims he was abducted by U.S. troops.) Abdullahi Yusuf, reputedly an ally of Ethiopia, becomes Somalia’s interim president. International warrants for the arrest of Laurent Nkunda and Jules Mutebutsi are issued by the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in

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Hurricane Katrina, strengthening to a category five hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, makes landfall along the Central Gulf Coast near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, just east of New Orleans, as a category three storm and causes extensive devastation in life and commerce. It is estimated to cause $75 billion in damages and a death toll well over 1,000, with final figures not yet established. Areas affected include the Bahamas, South Florida, Louisiana (especially Greater New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle. Out of a Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed by the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) comes the inauguration of the new government of Sudan on July 9. Omar al-Bashir is sworn in as president and John Garang, SPLM leader, as first vice-president. Garang dies in a helicopter crash. Salva Kiir is named first vice-president by the SPLM; he will hold the post of president of Southern Sudan and commander-in-chief of the SPLA. Conflict and crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan is labeled an “unfolding genocide” by human rights groups. Colin Powell and Kofi Annan pay visits to the Western Sudan region. A UN panel recommends that the mass killings in the Darfur region be referred to the International Criminal Court (established in The Hague); tensions between allies grow, as the United States has not recognized the court in either principle or practice. A dire food situation exists in Eritrea, the result of several droughts. In October, Eritrea bans UN helicopter flights in its airspace.

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CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS lxiii hours after Islamist fighters flee the city.

The United Nations Security Council threatens Eritrea and Ethiopia with sanctions unless they return to the 2000 peace plan. Eritrea orders the expulsion of North American, European, and Russian peacekeepers from the UN mission monitoring its border with Ethiopia. 2006

Eritrea expels five UN staff as spies. A UN report says that Eritrea and six other countries have been providing supplies and arms to the Islamist administration in Somalia. Eritrea denies the report and issues its own report, which states that Ethiopia was arming the Islamist government.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf becomes Liberia’s first female president. She is also the first female president of the modern African continent.

In Burundi, the Forces nationals pour la liberation (FNL) and Force de la defense nationale (FDN) sign a comprehensive cease-fire agreement, following UNICEF’s efforts to demobilize, reintegrate, and prevent the recruitment of child soldiers. The recruitment of children continues to be a grave concern for the UN.

Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia and a war crimes fugitive in Sierra Leone, is captured in Nigeria on March 29. Taylor will be transferred to Liberian custody, and Liberia will transfer him for trial to the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. Ethiopia admits that its forces are fighting in Somalia. The operation against Islamist militiamen is called “selfdefensive.” The statement reveals that Ethiopia is backing Somalia’s interim government against Somalia’s Union of Islamic Courts.

A faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) forcibly recruits 4,700 refugees from camps located in eastern Chad, some of them children. 2007

A ceremony marks the beginning of Ethiopia’s withdrawal from Somalia on January 23.

Ethiopian-backed Somali government troops capture the capital, Mogadishu,

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INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

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DEMOGRAPHY, DIASPORA, AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Amadu Jacky Kaba

People of black African and European descent are the two racial groups most dispersed across the globe. They can be found in statistically significant to substantial numbers almost everywhere on earth. Professor Ali A. Mazrui has pointed out that just as the sun never used to set on the British Empire in the first half of the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century the sun never sets on blacks or people of African descent, because they are spread out in statistically significant to substantial numbers in many countries and regions across the world. Outside of their ancestral continent, black Africans or people of African descent have their largest concentration in the Americas, or the Western Hemisphere. The largest migrations to the Americas of people of black African descent have occurred in two stages in the past thousands of years: a relatively small degree of pre- and post-Columbus migration, and post–World War II or post–African independence migration. There may have been a relatively small, although potentially influential migration, of African people to the Americas prior to Columbus; however, these numbers are overshadowed by subsequent events. The large-scale migration of Africans that this encyclopedia is concerned with took place in the post-Columbus period during the era of the slave trade, which began to grow rapidly the beginning of the 1600s. From this period to the end of the nineteenth century, estimates of fewer than 10 million to almost 100 million black Africans were brought to the Western Hemisphere as slaves, along with a small number who arrived as indentured servants. Generally, a scholarly range of 12 million to 14,650,000 is used. It is also 3 www.abc-clio.com

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4 INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

important to recognize that there existed an internal movement of slaves in the Western Hemisphere, and from 1783 to 1810, roughly 170,300 slaves were brought to North America from the Caribbean and Africa combined The third, post–World War II wave of African migration to the Western Hemisphere began in significant numbers in the 1960s, with the majority of the migrants going to North America. Indeed, it has been reported that more black immigrants have come to the United States from Africa since the 1960s than the total of Africans brought to North America during the entire slave trade. This assertion is based on the claim that of an estimated 12 million Africans brought as slaves to the Western Hemisphere, less than 5 percent (less than 600,000) of that total came to North America, meaning that the rise of the black population of the United States has been mostly through natural increase, that is, birth. In 1960, for example, there were 35,000 post–World War II African immigrants in the United States, and by the year 2002 that figure had increased to just over 1 million. This may mean that the number of children born in the United States to these post–World War II African immigrants may be greater than the total number of black Africans brought as slaves to North America. Overall, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, due to internal demographic increase and continuing migration from Africa, the proportion of people of black African descent has increased to the point where they comprise at least one out of every five people in the Americas.

DEMOGRAPHY, IMMIGRATION, AND THE INCREASE OF PEOPLE OF BLACK AFRICAN DESCENT IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE The massive rise in numbers of people of black African descent in the Americas and the Caribbean has occurred mostly naturally, through birth, but a substantial portion of that increase has also occurred through post–World War II immigration, especially to the United States and Canada. Among the many racial and ethnic groups in the Western Hemisphere, people of black African descent have one of the highest rates of childbirth. This has resulted in a substantial increase in their populations all across the hemisphere. For example, in the United States, which has the second-largest black population in the Western Hemisphere (after Brazil), more black females have children than white females. In 2000, 44.8 percent of non-Hispanic white women age fifteen to forty-four in the United States were childless, while 39 percent of black women of the same age group were childless in that same year. In the Caribbean, which has a black majority population, as of 2005 the total fertility rate (children born per woman) was 2.16, slightly higher than the 2.1 children per woman that United Nations demographers indicate is required to replace or sustain a country’s population. In Latin America (where at least 20 percent of the people are of black African descent), that figure for 2005 is 2.75 children on average born per woman.

AFRICA’S TOTAL AND REGIONAL POPULATIONS Although Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, has the highest death rate among the regions and continents of the world, the continent as a whole continues to provide a substantial share of the estimated 80 million people added annually to the world’s total www.abc-clio.com

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population. For example, Africa’s total population increased by an estimated 18 million, from 823 million to 841 million, between July 2001 and July 2002. This means that during this period, Africa contributed 22.6 percent of the 80 million people added to the total world population. As of July 2005, Africa’s total population was estimated at 887.2 million. Utilizing the classifications of the five regions of Africa (Eastern, Middle, Northern, Southern, and Western Africa [see Appendix]), out of this number, the regional populations were: 275.9 million (31.1 percent) for Eastern Africa; 254.74 million (28.7 percent) for Western Africa; 199 million (22.4 percent) for Northern Africa; 106.4 million (12 percent) for Middle Africa; and 51 million (5.7 percent) for Southern Africa. As of 2005, the average fertility rate (children born per woman) was: 4.24 for all of Africa; 2.91 for Northern Africa; 3.06 for Southern Africa; 4.93 for Eastern Africa; 5.19 for Middle Africa; and 5.10 for Western Africa. The ten most populous countries in Africa as of July 2005 were: Nigeria, 128.8 million; Egypt, 77.5 million; Ethiopia, 73 million; Democratic Republic of Congo, 60.1 million; South Africa, 44.3 million; Sudan, 40.2 million; Tanzania, 36.8 million; Kenya, 33.8 million; Morocco, 32.7 million; and Algeria, 32.5 million.

PEOPLE OF BLACK AFRICAN DESCENT IN LATIN AMERICA (EXCLUDING THE CARIBBEAN) The twenty-two countries and territories that make up Latin America (excluding the Caribbean) are among the most racially diverse areas of the world. Various estimates exist as to the number or percentages of people of African descent in the region because of different methods of research; an accepted scholarly range is that there are between 90 and 150 million people of African descent in Latin America. In Brazil, Panama, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, people of black African descent comprise the majority. Research by this author shows that out of the estimated total of 490 million people in Latin America in 2001, whites made up 182,690,461 (37.3 percent); Mestizos (a mixed race of whites and Indians), 152,751,357 (31 percent); Amerindians, 58,265,533 (11.9 percent); blacks, 16,071,290 (3.3 percent); mixed (blacks mixed with Indians, whites, or Mestizos), 73,844,229 (15.2 percent); and other racial groups, 7,217,685 (1.5 percent). If the definition of blacks in the United States (any person with a fraction of black African blood) were used in Latin America, the black population would be at least 90 million (18.5 percent of the total 490 million people in July 2001). As of July 2005, there were an estimated 518.6 million people in Latin American countries combined. If one were to use the 2001 percentage (18.5 percent) of people of black African descent in Latin America to get the actual number of their total as of 2005, it would amount to 96 million. But since people of black African descent tend to have more children than whites, one could claim that the actual number would be at least 100 million. Using the definition of a black person in the United States, the countries in Latin America with statistically significant to substantial black populations as of July 2005 were Brazil, with 45 percent out of 186 million; Guyana, with 36 percent of 765,283; Colombia, with 21 percent of 43 million; and Uruguay, with 4 percent out of 3.4 million. www.abc-clio.com

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PEOPLE OF BLACK AFRICAN DESCENT IN THE CARIBBEAN People of black African descent constitute the majority of the population of the twentyfour countries and territories that make up the Caribbean. As of the year 2001, the total population of the Caribbean was estimated at 36.9 million, with an estimated 65 percent of this total population being people of black African descent. As of July 2005, there were an estimated 38.7 million people in the Caribbean. As of July 2005, the following Caribbean nations had these proportions of people of black African descent: 98 percent of the 2.7 million in Jamaica; 95 percent of the 8.1 million in Haiti; 85 percent of the 301,790 in the Bahamas; 62 percent of the 11.3 million in Cuba; and 58 percent of the one million in Trinidad and Tobago. Research by this author shows that as of 2003, there were at least 165 million (19 percent) people of black African descent out of the estimated 862 million people in the Western Hemisphere.

PEOPLE OF BLACK AFRICAN DESCENT IN NORTH AMERICA Apart from Brazil, the United States has the largest black African population outside of Africa. As of July 1, 2004, there were 39.2 million blacks or African Americans in the United States. In Canada, according to the 2001 Canadian census, of the 29,639,030 people in that country, people of black African descent comprised 662,215 (2.2 percent).

RELATIONS BETWEEN PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE AND AFRICA There are three types of international relations between Africa and people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere. The first is between governments in Africa and those in the Western Hemisphere. The second type of relations between Africa and the Western Hemisphere is between individuals or groups or organizations comprising mostly people of African descent in the hemisphere and governments, groups, and individuals in Africa. The third type of international relations between Africa and the Western Hemisphere is through mainstream human rights organizations, foundations, and other activist organizations that lobby their governments in the Americas on behalf of poor countries, including African nations. It is worth noting that people of African descent are involved in all three types of relations with Africa. For example, for the first type of relations with Africa, the U.S. government in the beginning of the twenty-first century has developed a very positive partnership with most African nations that includes signing favorable trade agreements with most of them, which has increased substantially the number of immigration visas issued to Africans, and intervening in Liberia’s bloody fourteen-year civil war. However, it is African Americans who have played an essential or important role in creating the environment for such positive relations between Africa and the government of the United States. Another important example of government-to-government relations between Africa and countries in the Western Hemisphere occurred between South Africa and www.abc-clio.com

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Haiti. During celebrations of Haiti’s two hundredth year of independence, the government and people of South Africa gave the government and people of Haiti $10 million. In addition, to prevent a very bloody civil war between the then president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and an armed rebellion in Haiti, the South African government offered asylum to President Aristide, which he accepted. The second type of relations between Africa and the Western Hemisphere is between individuals of African descent (including African immigrants) in the hemisphere and governments, civic organizations, and individuals in Africa. For example, in a summit in February 2003, the African Union (AU), a Pan African organization that includes Africa’s independent nations, recognized the African Diaspora as the sixth region of the organization. The African American nonprofit relief organization, Africare, is reported to have donated over $400 million of assistance to Africa. The African American female billionaire, Oprah Winfrey, has established a $10 million academic institution known as the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, and she has also spent $6 million on a program called Christmas Kindness in South Africa. The African American film actor Denzel Washington and his wife, Pauletta, are reported to have donated $1 million to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. African immigrants in the United States are also increasing their assistance to Africa in various important ways. By 2005, African immigrants were sending an estimated $1 billion home annually as remittances. Also, an Ethiopian immigrant businessman in the United States, named Noah Samara, in 1999 launched a WorldSpace satellite radio orbiting above Earth, known as XM Radio, which broadcasts daily educational programs, including programming from CNN and the BBC, to remote areas in East Africa. Although the technology was American, Africa utilized it before the United States, which launched it two years later, in 2001. The third type of relations between Africa and the Western Hemisphere is that between Africa and mainstream civic organizations and foundations in the Americas that provide all sorts of important assistance to African nations. One example of such organizations is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has provided millions of dollars in grants to various nonprofit organizations in Africa to solve medical and other serious social problems there. These organizations work with both the government of the United States and black individuals in the hemisphere to find the best ways to provide meaningful assistance for various problems confronting Africa.

CONCLUSION The large-scale migration of people of African descent to the Americas and the Caribbean began as the tragedy of the slave trade. However, the rise in population and the ongoing voluntary migration of people of black African descent in the Western Hemisphere shows that the history of African migration has not stayed one. Today, people of African descent, including African immigrants, in the Western Hemisphere are at the core of international relations between Africa and countries in the Americas. www.abc-clio.com

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APPENDIX: CLASSIFICATIONS OF REGIONS OF AFRICA Eastern Africa Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Reunion, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mayotte (overseas department of France) Middle Africa Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and São Tomé and Principe Northern Africa Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and Western Sahara Southern Africa Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland Western Africa Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, GuineaBissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Saint Helena (British overseas territory) Source: Country/regional classifications by the United Nations Statistics Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Retrieved on July 12, 2004. http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/ m49/m49regin.htm. References Akukwe, Chinua, and Sidi Jammeh. “Africa-Diaspora Partnership: Issues and Challenges.” African Renaissance 1, no. 2 (2004): 69–74. Akukwe, Chinua, Sidi Jammeh, and Melvin Foote. “Africa and Its Diaspora: Institutionalising a Durable Partnership.” African Renaissance 1, no. 2 (2004): 75–80. American Community Survey Profile 2002. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, Government Printing Office, September 2, 2003. Bachu, Amara, and Martin O’Connell. Fertility of American Women: June 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, Government Printing Office, 2001. Bernstein, Robert. Hispanic Population Passes 40 Million, Census Bureau Reports. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, Government Printing Office, June 9, 2005. Canada Statistics. “Visible Minority Groups, 2001 Counts, for Canada, Provinces and Territories.” 2001. http://www12.statcan.ca/english. Central Intelligence Agency. World Factbook. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2001–2005. Clark, Andrew F. “The Atlantic Slave Trade Revisited.” Journal of Third World Studies 22, no. 1 (2005): 273–284. Franklin, John H., and Alfred Moss Jr.. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. Kaba, Amadu Jacky. “Africa-U.S. Partnership in the 21st Century.” Chimera 2, no. 1 (2004): 18–25. Kaba, Amadu Jacky. “Africa’s Migration Brain Drain: The Costs and Benefits to the Continent.” Chimera 2, no. 3 (2004): 19–30. Kraay, Hendrik. “Transatlantic Ties: Recent Works on the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Abolition.” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 2 (2004): 178–195.

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DEMOGRAPHY, DIASPORA, AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 9 Mazrui, A. A. “The African Experience in Politics and Culture: From Monroe’s Doctrine to Nkrumah’s Consciencism.” Lecture delivered under the sponsorship of the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, in Barcelona, Spain, January 13, 2003. McMillin, James A. The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, Government Printing Office, 2001. “Visible Minority Groups, 2001 Counts, for Canada, Provinces, and Territories.” Statistics Canada. Retrieved on July 30, 2004. http://www12.statcan.ca/english. Wright, Donald R. “Recent Literature on Slavery in Colonial North America.” Magazine of History 17, no. 3 (2003): 5–9.

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CULTURE AND RELIGION Fabio Akcelrud Durão

In this essay, the abundance and variety of material on culture and religion in Africa and the Americas is meaningfully organized by framing culture according to three principles, namely (1) that if culture in general is in a process of continuous change, this assumes an extreme form in transatlantic exchange; (2) that culture is not completely autonomous, but always subject to some kind of material determination, the historical experience of slavery being only the clearest determining factor in Africa and the Americas; and (3) that cultural manifestations in general—but again, especially so in the region—contain, in themselves, something that transcends them, either through their form or through the effects they generate. Religious diversity, typical of Africa and the Americas, is explored by viewing religions in Africa and the Americas as changing in relation to their matrixes in Europe, Asia, or Africa; as part of an unending war for the minds of believers and for material resources; and as representing a unique realm for reconciliation in the transatlantic world taken as a whole. This essay shows that precisely through diversity and difference, opposition and conflict, Africa and the Americas are inescapably and inexorably interconnected.

CULTURE Few terms have been so open-ended in the humanities and social sciences as that of “culture.” Present everywhere, related to everything, it very easily loses all specificity and easily generates all sorts of contradictory statements. A great variety of points of view and increasing abundance of conflicting data become even more apparent when one focuses on the culture of Africa and the Americas as they constitute the Atlantic World. Three broad and basic principles may be useful to work out the mediation of this African American cultural profusion, without at the same time homogenizing the overwhelming wealth of differences that can be found in all cultures at any point in history and at any 11 www.abc-clio.com

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part of the globe. They could be termed the principles of constant mutability, inevitable determination, and immanent transcendence. The first principle, the presence of constant mutability, concerns the nonoriginal nature of all culture, regardless of whether the concept be related to an isolated instance, as in a given local or national culture, or conceived as the result of regional or even continental interaction. No cultural formation has ever been pure or “authentic.” That which is maintained, in a given ritual or celebration, must in the same movement both shape and accommodate those necessarily differing elements that always threaten to invade and spoil the reproduction of a given cultural practice. Thus, in spite of remarkable cases of constancy, it is safe to consider that transformation is more the norm than a deviance in the life of cultures, even (and sometimes especially) when members of a determinate group see themselves as perpetrators of a timeless and immutable tradition. Indeed, cultural transformation becomes an undeniable fact when, instead of focusing on a particular group or community, one tries to frame the Atlantic World. For in the immense process of voluntary and forced migration into the Americas—the largest in history, involving, apart from settlers, from 12 to 20 million African captives, depending on the estimates—cultures simply could not remain the same. Members from enslaved families were torn apart from each other, and individuals from varied, oftentimes rival ethnic and tribal groups were strategically mixed together and thrown into a completely different and threatening milieu. Among slaves, contrasting habits had to be negotiated into new forms of conviviality and be accepted by all, thus encouraging a relative cultural unification that could not be found in the diversity of their native Africa. At the same time, the innumerable Native American social formations, spanning from nomadic smaller groups to highly complex social organizations, as in the case of the Aztecs, witnessed the invasion of their lands and the subjection of their work force to an unknown rhythm of production. The fates of indigenous groups varied a great deal. In some regions they were simply exterminated or reduced to a minimum; this happened in both the “white” South (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay) and North America (United States and Canada), as well as in the Caribbean, where black slaves constituted the overwhelming part of the population. Elsewhere, Native Americans were dissolved in the constitution of racially mixed nations, as in the case of Brazil, or, finally, managed to survive to form the greatest substratum of the people, as in Bolivia or Peru. And finally, it is important to remember that Africa itself was not left untouched by transatlantic exchanges. If already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the slave trade brought about changes in social organization such as depopulation and increasing animosity among African peoples, in the nineteenth century Africa became a colonized continent too, a condition that for many critics persists until today. Africa thus began to share many of the problems experienced by Latin America—including political instability, increasing debt levels, and a gaping social fault line between rich and poor—even though Africa acted, and still does, as a supplier of labor force rather than its receptacle. Any single cultural phenomenon in Africa and the Americas may be viewed as bearing the imprint of this mixed and intrinsically violent process of formation, a process that only became more complex with the arrival of successive waves of European and Asian www.abc-clio.com

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immigration to the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When properly scrutinized, all cultural practices in the Transatlantic World—including also many of them that occurred in Europe—provide ample evidence of this history, from Cuban music to Afrofuturism, from pageants to classical music and drama. It is true that national differences created cultural particularities, and it is obvious that a North-South divide accounts for the inequalities in the volume of cultural artifacts produced in the richest country of the world, the United States, in comparison to an impoverished Latin America and an Africa plunged into misery. A clear view of this imbalance can be had, for instance, by simply comparing the number of films produced in each continent and their respective budgets. This poses a challenge, perhaps the greatest, to Afrocentrism: to call attention to the centrality of Africa without surrendering to cultural and historical reductionism. Be that as it may, it is important to keep in mind that even though it is tempting to imagine a place or time outside the mutual influence of Africa and the Americas, this temptation itself deserves to be scrutinized, quite frequently as a symptom of a world that for varying reasons has become unbearable. In fact, imaginary misrepresentations are decisive not only within particular cultural contexts in Africa and the Americas, but also in the overall process of transatlantic exchange. For both Latin America and Africa, albeit in unequal degrees, the United States and Canada often appear as perfect stereotypes of wealth and abundance, places where need has no meaning, while the opposite also holds, when the countries of the North project on the rest of the Atlantic World, without much heed for differentiation, the reverse of all that is lacking to them: exuberant and exotic nature and peoples as a counterimage to urban standardization and humdrum everyday lives. But, again, this imbalance and dissymmetry should be viewed as an argument for, rather than a proof against, transatlantic interconnection. It corroborates the claim that cultural identity is itself relational, thus not self-established or autogenetically created, but on the contrary dependent on a determinate other to constitute itself. The second important principle concerning culture in Africa and the Americas derives from the first principle of mutability or constant change. That culture is not an absolutely independent realm, being somehow related to material, concrete forms of daily life, and consequently contributing to the reproduction of society as a whole, is a claim generally accepted but which, once more, is all the more evident within the framework of the transatlantic world. It is often astonishing to realize that many of the cultural practices now viewed as in themselves autonomous, “naturally” associated to the identity of a given group or nation, emerged as strategies of survival in direct connection with their immediate environment. Brazilian capoeira, for instance, was first devised as a disguise for slaves to fight among themselves while appearing to dance. What today is a hybrid mixture of martial art and performance practiced worldwide had its roots in hardship, in the dehumanization of human beings. In many of the cultural manifestations discussed in the following entries, one can detect the coexistence of both a response or reaction to the surrounding environment and the presence of furtive utopic impulses: a desire for a better world, oftentimes expressed under the most adverse conditions, when even immediate subsistence cannot be taken for granted. The myth of the flying African, of slaves going www.abc-clio.com

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back home in the same way as birds, is an obvious example of this, insofar as it provided an imaginary compensation and utopic outlet for life under slavery. One should not think that partial social and economic determination play only a restrictive or shackling role in the lives of cultures in Africa and the Americas. For if cultures are not totally autonomous, neither are they completely reducible to specific ways of life or the reproduction of society. Without spontaneity and creativity, without the presence of something previously nonexistent, no culture can ever come into being. Interestingly enough, this additional “something” may often be found in a given artifact’s capacity to promote the conciliation of opposites in its very form, thereby presenting, by means of its expression, something transcending itself. In samba, for instance, the body is divided into two parts, the legs and waist in continuous movement and the stomach and chest dexterously kept static. It would not be difficult to associate this contrast to the experience of Afro-Brazilians concerning the duality inherent to their post-abolition relationship to the law and civil society as a whole: formally endowed with the same rights as whites, in reality they were far from being on equal footing with them. This spontaneous and creative moment attached to culture in Africa and the Americas does not have to be sought only in the formal aspects of cultural practices; it may also be found in the reaction or response they elicit. Take the singular passion for soccer in Latin America and Africa. Culture oftentimes loses its autonomy and spontaneity as it is absorbed by group or identity politics. This represented a danger for many of the movements of resistance, particularly against racial oppression, which in their desire to differentiate themselves from their (white) other adopted a prescriptive stance as to what members should do and how they should behave. By attempting to lead their group to what they thought would be the right way, activists could very easily see themselves in the position to dictate what the culture of their group should be like, especially if they wanted to purge it of extraneous elements. They thus ran the risk of acting against the very culture they fostered. But an opposite threat to that of cultural surveillance and censorship must also be taken into account, namely, the belief in the absolute naturalness of culture. In a world where cultural manifestations are so prone to be turned into commodities, simply to renounce reflection becomes tantamount to abandoning culture to the demands of the market. This tension between creative impulse and rational assessment is constantly present in the everyday practice of participants in virtually all cultural groups in Africa and the Americas; a proper balance is tenuous and varies a great deal from case to case. When, for instance, does Carnival lose its status of a popular, in-the-street and color-blind party to become a commercial enterprise, mainly for tourists? When do participants degenerate into spectators (even of themselves)? When does the happiness expressed in Carnival reverse into an imperative to be happy because the show must go on? To be sure, selling what they do is often for marginalized groups, not only in Africa and Latin America, but also even in the United States and Canada, the only way to survive. But they always run the risk of converting the market into the final objective of such cultural manifestations, profit occupying the place of self-expression. The unavoidably creative aspect of culture is thus a highly ambiguous element, for if it may feed an industry of culture, it also continuously attests to the inextinguishable presence of collective life in Africa and the Americas. www.abc-clio.com

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RELIGION In contrast to Europe, most of the former Soviet bloc, and a great deal of Asia (with perhaps the exception of India), where religion does not interfere directly in the public sphere, the region comprising Africa and the Americas is characterized by the deep-rooted and all-pervasive nature of its religious practices and beliefs. More than anything else, the strength of faith may be viewed as a common denominator placing the poorest and richest parts of the globe, Africa and the United States, on the same plane. Religion’s social comprehensiveness is paralleled by its diversity. The transatlantic world encompasses the greatest number and variety of religions in the world: from minority groups such as Jews, Buddhists, or Hindus through specifically local religions, to the main creeds of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. Interestingly enough, this geographic multiplicity has its own temporal counterpart in the simultaneous presence of beliefs and practices belonging to different periods of history, from old shaman-led and magical cults, which originated in, and were congenial to, a pre-industrial world, to capitalism-tailored sects whose functioning is not unlike that of business enterprises. And, again, this raises the interesting question about the survival of pre-modern religious worldviews, which according to more narrow-minded sociological theories, should have vanished a long time ago. It is true that so-called traditional religions, mainly in Africa, have been in a process of gradual disappearance and, as will be discussed, have undergone continuous transformation; nevertheless, their unremitting effectiveness and influence in large stretches of Africa and, in very modified forms, of the Caribbean and black Latin America, is still something to be wondered at. The specific religious nature of the Atlantic World also generates methodological problems. For a great deal of the African continent in the present (as well as for preColumbian Native Americans in the past), religion is so much enmeshed in everyday life, so much part of a holistic view linking the cosmos to one’s basic daily routine, that studying it as a separate realm could only correspond to an artificial procedure, dictated as it should be by the rational need to classify and distinguish different social practices. In Cuban ritual music of African descent, for example, it would be unsatisfactory to sever the sacred origins from the more or less profane uses that it may be put to; religious ritual and secular spectacle here go hand in hand and cannot be dissociated. Not even the boundaries dividing culture and religion can be unproblematically drawn in relation to Africa and the Americas. For many African and American believers, religion could not be placed under culture, even as a privileged part of it, but would have rather to be conceived over it, as the aim of all culture, the point where all cultural practices should converge. If dead religions may easily be situated within the culture that originated them, living creeds fiercely deny their particularities and refuse to relinquish claims to Truth and universality, especially against other faiths. For many Catholics, Muslims, and Protestants, their religions should not share the same theoretical framework with African traditional religions, the latter being properly “cultural,” which would be but a codeword for “innocuous.” This shows how religions in Africa and the Americas are as vital a theme as they are controversial and conflicting. The three principles for framing culture described above are also fruitful in approaching the transformations, threats, and promises of religions in Africa and the Americas. www.abc-clio.com

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First of all, the principle of mutability also holds here, for when they were transplanted into the new continent, religious rituals had to pass through significant changes to varying degrees. To take an obvious example, when captives died in slave ships or when proper resources were not available in the Americas, which was almost always the case, African burial practices had to relinquish their original grandeur. But beyond particular rites themselves, it is important to observe that larger-scale religious transformations also took place, mainly in three different, if interconnected, ways. New beliefs emerged first by means of syncretism, the combination of apparently irreconcilable elements within the same religious outlook. Brazilian Umbanda and Candomblé, Caribbean Voodoo, Obeah, and Santeria blend Catholic saints with spirits—the orixás and loas—by whom ritual participants may actually be possessed. Another kind of change happened through the adaptation of already-existing creeds to the realities of the Americas, thus creating new hybrid entities. The Nation of Islam, for instance, claims the Muslim faith while its status as a true Islamic religion is refuted by many scholars and theologians. It could thus be interpreted as a working out of partial elements of Islam within a context of U.S. social and racial tension. The same could even be said of Pentecostalism, whose origins may also be traced back, through William Joseph Seymour, to the experience of slavery in the United States. Even though it is now accepted as a legitimate and respectable Protestant religion, Pentecostalism is best understood as a North American creation, and its immense success, which certainly derives from its intensity and caring for individual churchgoers, has its roots in a long tradition of black Protestantism that practiced a more communal and participative kind of worship. This could, again, be viewed as a clear reaction against and as compensation for the oppression brought about by slavery. The third form of change involved established religions as they were transplanted to the Americas. For even Christianity and Islam themselves did not remain the same. As far as Catholicism is concerned, very early on Jesuit converters saw themselves confronted with the task of having to adapt their terminology to the Native American universe. How could one teach the doctrine of the Fall to Indians who simply could not understand the concept of guilt, let alone that of primordial sin? In what is today called Latin America, Catholic indoctrination had thus to be built taking pre-Columbian beliefs and religions as its basis and proceeding to work its way through and out from them. This process of adjustment has not yet stopped, and there is very little reason to believe that it will. Indeed, it is possible to regard, for example, liberation theology and its socially motivated and politically engaged re-reading of the teachings of Jesus as part and parcel of a long Latin American tradition of reappropriation of Catholicism. Nor should it be imagined that changes happened only in the New World, for the African continent, too, has witnessed strong transformations in its religious configuration. Africa has long been associated with religious diversity, for the continent not only played a fundamental role in the history of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism; it was also the birthplace of a great number of native, tribal, animist religions. But what may have once been cohabitation and tolerance became confrontation very early on. Even before the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century, trade routes in North Africa were already bringing Islam to the continent, gradually supplanting traditional beliefs. With increasing www.abc-clio.com

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European presence since the seventeenth century, but most markedly from the nineteenth century on, Christianity too started to occupy an important position in the religious life of the continent. Waves of evangelization also included the reverse movement, when black preachers traveled from the Americas to Africa to profess Protestantism and Catholicism. If religions were (and still are) an all-important aid for the survival of oppressed groups in Africa and the Americas, they were also (and still remain) a means of oppression and control. One way of seeing the history of religions in Africa and the Americas would be to relate it to an overall history of conflicts and animosity, which now would involve competition for the minds of believers. Tending to influence politics and to generate confrontation, religious intolerance is one of the greatest threats facing the Africa and the Americas of today. In the context of the transatlantic world, it is possible to identify at least fours fronts, both past and present, of an undying religious war. The first one of them concerns the attack on pre-Columbian Native American beliefs, one of the first casualties in the colonizing process. These beliefs all but disappeared, even though faint traces of them may still be found scattered in popular superstitions. The second front is that of a good deal of the African continent, where religious tensions, involving mainly Christians and Muslims, but also traditional religions, persist. A full list of such confrontations would not be a short one, and it would have to include the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the genocide in the Darfur region of the Sudan that began in 2003. The third front is that of the Americas themselves, where there seems to be an increasing push toward more unyielding kinds of faith. In the United States, religious war could first of all be verified, albeit not ostensibly, in several acts of conversion. It is hard not to see, for example, Muhammad Ali’s or, more clearly, Malcolm X’s turn to Islam as a political statement, the rejection of Christianity as the religion of the masters and of the status quo as much as the acceptance of Allah. But also from the point of view of dominant Christianity itself, connection to power, including governmental power, has not always been absent. It is not only the case that Protestantism and Catholicism—which of course have their own European history of war—to a greater or lesser extent had the status of “official” religions, but also that for many North Americans, implicitly present in the recent “war on terrorism” is a confrontation with Islam. Finally, in Latin America, religious conflict has been renewed with the decline of Catholicism and Afro–Latin American religions as a consequence of the rise of so-called new evangelical, often Pentecostal, churches. In their worst forms, they may resemble commercial enterprises or self-help industries, sometimes with little connection to matters related to the Beyond such as immortality of the soul or the meaning of Creation. Catholic reaction came under the guise of the Charismatic Movement, which implemented several of the practices carried out by the new evangelical churches. It is not uncommon for the latter, in turn, to revert to rituals left behind by Catholicism, such as collective exorcism and an emphasis on the immediate presence of the devil and evil spirits in the world. And yet, these conflicts demonstrate an openness to unique possibilities. For all the intensification of conflicts and the recrudescence of fanaticism and intolerance, religion in Africa and the Americas contains an unparalleled potential, to be found nowhere else in www.abc-clio.com

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the world, in its capacity to mobilize collective energies that otherwise could never come into existence. If the widespread Latin American and African distrust of politics, the corrosion of personal and communitarian relationships, and the commercialization of most (if not all) spheres of life do not lead in Africa and the Americas to anomie, skepticism, or cynicism, this must be explained to a great extent by the role played by religions there. Reconciliation is an all-important term in this context, because for all the history of suffering and conflict—or perhaps precisely because of it—the fate of Africa and the Americas lies in their togetherness, their future very much depending on whether their forced conjunction may become a peaceful and equal integration. This would be the promise of religion, in fact of all religions, in Africa and the Americas. See also: African Methodist Episcopal Church; Afrofuturism; Atlantic World; Candomblé; Caribbean Artists Movement; Carnival, Latin American; Colored Methodist Episcopal Church; Cuban Music, African Influence in; Cuban Ritual Music, African Influence in; Drama, African American; Film (all entries); Nation of Islam; Négritude; Obeah; Ogun; Orisha; Pentacostalism; Religion (Africa); Transculturation; Voodoo References Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1994. Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. Translated by N. Plaice et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Bosi, Alfredo. Dialética da Colonização. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia Das Letras, 1992. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Inikori, Joseph, and Stanley Engerman, eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. 2nd ed. Oxford: Heinemann, 1989. Palmie, Stephan. Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing, 1998.

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ECONOMICS AND TRADE Christopher Cumo

THE EMERGENCE OF AGRICULTURE AND THE PRE-COLUMBIAN AND AFRICAN CIVILIZATIONS The earliest stone tools in Africa, dating to 2 million years ago, reveal that the ancestors of humans hunted or at least scavenged for food and imply a division of labor between males and females, with males hunting or scavenging game and females gathering plants. During the Old Stone Age, humans in Africa adorned their dead with beads made of seashells and ivory, implying trade in these items. Accompanying this activity was commerce in gold. In the first millennium BCE, humans in Africa began working iron without having, in contrast to the cultures of Europe and Asia, first smelted copper or made bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Excepting Zambia, Africa is deficient in copper, providing little opportunity for the mining and use of this metal. At the close of the Old Stone Age, humans settled the Americas, and around 6000 BCE, well before the Iron Age in Africa, began growing corn in Mexico and the Yucatan and potatoes in the Andes Mountains. Corn had spread north by the first century CE to the Great Lakes, though the potato would not reach this region until the seventeenth century as a product of the Columbian Exchange: the Spanish carried the potato to Europe in the sixteenth century, whence the tuber doubled back across the Atlantic to the Great Lakes a century later. In addition to corn and the potato, Native Americans grew several varieties of bean, squash, pumpkin, tomato, pepper, and tobacco. These crops, especially corn and the potato, made possible the empires of Mesoamerica and South America. The longevity of these empires evidences a regular food surplus, an achievement all the more remarkable given that pre-Columbian people had neither plow nor draught animal. The existence of paved roads in these empires implies commerce. As did the inhabitants of Africa, pre-Columbian people traded gold. It, along with stylistic variations in pottery and elaborate burial, implies a division of wealth, with the affluent able to afford 19 www.abc-clio.com

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greater ornamentation than the poor. The peoples of the Arctic Circle fished and hunted seal. The nomads of Canada hunted moose and caribou. The Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest fished for salmon and traded seashells. The tribes of the Great Plains hunted buffalo, and the woodlands Indians east of the Mississippi River were farmers, hunters, and traders. As in the pre-Columbian empires, agriculture undergirded the economy of ancient Africa. In contrast to the Americas, farming was not an indigenous development in Africa, at least not north of the Sahara Desert. Ancient Egyptians borrowed the crops and implements, notably the plow and sickle, from the Near East around 5000 BCE. Agriculture flourished on the strip of land inundated by the Nile River. Wheat and barley filled the granaries of the pharaohs and later of the Romans. Agriculture spread from Egypt west across North Africa. Whether farming spread south from Egypt or developed independently in sub-Saharan Africa remains open to question. Trade between Egypt and Nubia along the Nile and between Egypt and Ethiopia across the Red Sea leads one to suspect that agriculture migrated south along these routes. Yet the absence of the plow and sickle south of the Sahara confirms the lack of technological diffusion to Nubia and Ethiopia and implies an independent origin of agriculture in these areas. This view gains strength from the different suite of crops grown in sub-Saharan Africa: the yam and oil palm since 3000 BCE; sorghum since 2000 BCE; millet since 1000 BCE; and bananas since the first millennium CE. African farmers also grew rice, though its date of dispersal from Asia remains a matter of conjecture. From an early date North Africa was part of the economy of the Mediterranean world. Alexandria, a city on the western edge of the Nile Delta, was a commercial hub that linked the western Mediterranean to the Near East and India. The merchants of Alexandria traded olive oil from Greece, wine from Italy and Gaul (what is today France), and wheat from Sicily and the Nile Valley. Rivaling these merchants were the Phoenicians in Carthage, which is today part of Tunisia. The Roman conquest of Carthage and Egypt united the Mediterranean in a single commercial zone. The presence of Roman coins throughout North Africa reveals the degree to which the Romans monetized the economy of this region. Conversely, their dearth in sub-Saharan Africa suggests the persistence of trade in kind. With the decline of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, North Africa reverted to trade in kind. The fragmentation of the economy in North Africa paralleled the economic decline that attended the collapse of the Mayan Empire in the ninth century CE. The cause of this collapse remains a matter of controversy, though it is probable that corn yields declined.

CONTACT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC: THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE AND THE SLAVE TRADE Separate for millennia, the economies of Africa and the Americas converged after 1492. The Columbian Exchange brought corn to Africa and rice, via Madagascar, to the New World. Rice fueled the growth of the plantations in the Carolinas and Georgia and stoked the demand for labor. The dearth of money in pre-capitalistic America made it www.abc-clio.com

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difficult to attract labor. The alternative was compulsion through indentured servitude and slavery. Indentured servitude, however, declined in the seventeenth century, leaving slaves to shoulder the plantation economy. Africans were more immune than Native Americans to European diseases and so were suitable as laborers. The European settlers of the Atlantic seaboard sought Africans not only for their labor but also for their knowledge of rice cultivation. Several scholars doubt that Europeans would have succeeded in growing the crop without African expertise. In addition to growing rice, Africans worked the sugar plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean, and Louisiana, the tobacco farms of Virginia and Maryland, and the cotton lands of the Lower South. Historians debate the magnitude of the slave trade. Estimates range from 4 million to 100 million slaves. Historian Philip Curtin has tallied 9.4 million, a number that may be as close to authoritative as one can hope to get. The trade enriched African and European middlemen but otherwise impoverished Africa, draining human capital from the continent. The slave trade began to integrate Africa into the world economy, a process that accelerated during the period of European colonialism. The colonial economy benefited Europe more than Africa. European companies and governments took cash crops and natural resources from Africa, siphoning off the profits rather than reinvesting them in their colonies. The French extracted rubber from Zimbabwe, the British and Italians cocoa from Kenya and Ethiopia respectively, the Portuguese coffee from Angola, and the British oil from Nigeria. Under the tenets of laissez-faire, the governments of Europe paid scant attention to their companies with holdings in Africa, a policy that allowed business to exploit the colonies without fear of condemnation. In the nineteenth century, Belgian rubber companies kidnapped and killed recalcitrant workers in an effort to create a compliant labor force in what became the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In South Africa the discovery of diamonds in 1867 led the British to press men into working the mines for six months at a time. Wages were so low that wives had to send food to their husbands; otherwise the men would have gone hungry. When European governments intervened in the economy, they did so in favor of white settlers. The Land Act of 1913 gave nearly 90 percent of the land in South Africa to whites, an action that intertwined wealth with notions of racial superiority. The Americas, like Africa, were European colonies: Latin America, excluding the Caribbean, was the possession of Spain and Portugal; the Caribbean of Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands; and North America of Britain, France, and Spain. South of the Ohio River the economy resembled that of Africa in its reliance on plantation agriculture and slavery. Cash crops for export predominated over the growing of food for sustenance. North of the Ohio River, however, free labor prevailed over slavery and small farms over plantations. The Columbian Exchange brought wheat to the Americas, where farmers cultivated it in New York and Pennsylvania. The Middle Colonies also abounded in corn for the feeding of livestock. Farmers grew potatoes and vegetables for the cities of the eastern seaboard. Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia were the commercial hubs of North America, linking Britain and the interior of the continent. British North America imported sugar, rum, and molasses from the Caribbean and manufactured goods from Britain and exported meat, grain, tobacco, indigo, and fish to these regions, tallying in www.abc-clio.com

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exports one-sixth of colonial income. British mercantile policy prohibited the colonies from manufacturing textiles and other goods but protected American shipping from foreign competition. Shipbuilding employed from 5 to 10 percent of the colonial workforce, making it the second largest employer after farming, which totaled 90 percent of workers. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese, Spanish, British, and French fished for cod and the Basques hunted whale along the coast of Newfoundland. While drying fish ashore, the French traded knives, axes, trinkets, and fur with Native Americans. By the end of the sixteenth century, French traders had reached the mouth of the Saguenay River. To advance the fur trade the French formed alliances with tribes of Native Americans. By the mid-seventeenth century, France—under the tenets of mercantilism—sought fur, timber, fish, and grain from Canada. The French crown envisioned trade among Canada, the French Caribbean, and France. By the mid-1670s fur traders had reached the eastern rim of Lake Superior. Farmers fed the French and British garrisons in Canada and shipped grain to New England.

NEW NATIONS AND THE SHAPING OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE The colonies of British North America were the first European possessions to gain independence, though autonomy did not lead the United States to repudiate trade with Britain. From 1784 to 1789 trade between the United States and Britain totaled 95 percent of the pre-Revolution mark and by the mid-1790s exceeded it by 30 percent. Commerce in the interior of the continent lagged behind transatlantic trade. The Mississippi River was a conduit north and south, but the Ohio River spanned only a fraction of the breadth of North America. Business needed a route from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River and ultimately to the Pacific Ocean. Between roughly 1790 and 1820 private companies built toll roads, but these were less efficient than water transit. Four horses could transport 4.5 tons only 18 miles in a day by road but 100 tons 24 miles in the same time by water. Inventor Robert Fulton accentuated this advantage in 1807, launching the first steamboat on the Hudson River. To benefit from water transit, New York opened in 1825 the Erie Canal, linking the Hudson River and Lake Erie. So lucrative was trade on the canal that New York had recouped the cost of digging it by 1832. Three additional canals built between 1832 and 1856 linked Lake Erie and the Ohio River, allowing merchants to ship products from New York City to New Orleans by water. Even greater in stimulating trade were the railroads. In 1831 the United States had 13 miles of track; in 1836 more than 1,000 miles; in 1840, 2,818 miles; and in 1849, 9,021 miles. The completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 made it possible to ship goods across the country. The railroad pulled trade and people west, a process Congress spurred in 1862 by passing the Homestead Act. The act stimulated farming on the Great Plains by selling public land to farmers for a small fee. Beyond the corn belt of the Midwest were the cattle ranches of the Southwest and the wheat farms of the Great Plains. Beyond these were the citrus and vegetable growers of California and the Rio Grande. www.abc-clio.com

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As did the British and French in North America, Spain and Portugal applied the tenets of mercantilism in their colonies, seeking a favorable balance of trade to gain gold and silver. Accordingly, Spain and Portugal mined these metals throughout Latin America. Mexico’s yield of gold doubled between roughly 1820 and 1840. Silver production in Peru doubled in the 1830s. Prospectors discovered new veins of silver in Chile and the yield of copper rose from 3.3 million pounds (1.5 million kilograms) in 1820 to 27.1 million pounds (12.3 million kilograms) in 1850. In 1913 Mexican mines produced roughly one-third of the world’s silver. That year tin and silver were the leading exports in Bolivia, silver and copper in Mexico, and gold in Colombia. Chile and Peru exported silver and Brazil gold. Cash crops remained a staple of Latin America. Argentina exported corn, wheat, and meat; Brazil coffee and rubber; the Dominican Republic cocoa and sugar; Ecuador, Haiti, and Venezuela cocoa and coffee; Guatemala coffee and bananas; Panama bananas and coconut; Puerto Rico sugar and coffee; Uruguay wool and meat; Columbia, El Salvador, and Nicaragua coffee; and Paraguay tobacco. In 1913 Argentina totaled $510 million in exports, Brazil $315.7 million, Cuba $164.6 million, Mexico $148 million, and Chile $142.8 million. As in Africa, the concentration of agriculture on cash crops left Latin America short of food for local consumption. Imports made up the difference. By 1913 Latin America imported the largest fraction of its goods from the United States. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Canadian economy centered on shipbuilding and cod fishing along the Atlantic coast and the fur trade north of the Great Lakes. After 1820 Great Britain increased its import of wheat from Canada and the United States to feed its urban population. Spurred by the European market and the clearing of forest, agriculture spread west with settlement, the St. Lawrence canal system, and the railroad. Improvements in technology, farming methods, and varieties of wheat boosted Canadian wheat exports from 2 million bushels in 1896 to more than 150 million bushels in 1921. As had the United States, Canada drew farmers west with cheap land. After 1896 prospectors flocked to the Klondike and Yukon to seek gold. The demand for manufactured goods in the West and a high tariff stimulated the growth of industry in central Canada. Sensitive to opportunity, U.S. investors poured more than $600 million into Canadian mines and factories between 1900 and 1913. As in the United States, workers in Canada sought to bargain collectively with employers. By 1914, 166,000 workers had unionized, 140,000 of them in the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and other international unions.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND NEW CAPITALISM By the nineteenth century the United States was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. Starting with the first textile mills around 1790, factories swept the United States after 1800. The value of manufactured goods tallied $483 million in 1840, $1 billion in 1850, and $2 billion in 1860, a figure nearly equal to the value of the food and fiber produced by U.S. farms. By 1894 U.S. factories were outproducing Britain, France, and Germany combined. In 1901 U.S. Steel held more than $1 billion in capital. A new managerial elite arose to command American industry. Its leaders bent women and children www.abc-clio.com

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to the grind of the factory for subsistence wages. Labor fought back in a series of bloody strikes between 1877 and 1894. The last of them sank in a swamp of travails: in 1893 some 500 banks and 16,000 businesses went bankrupt, plunging the United States into a four-year depression. Henry Ford recast the relationship between labor and the market for wages and prices in a context in which poverty deprived the poor of the ability to buy consumer goods. In 1913 Ford raised wages at Ford Motor Company to five dollars a day and priced cars within the means of consumers. The production of cheap standardized goods at the heart of Fordism defined the U.S. economy into the era of personal computers. Fordism arose at a critical moment. Industry flourished amid protectionism. The open shop prevailed over trade unions, allowing business to dictate wages. Yet agriculture did not share in the prosperity that industry enjoyed. Nations retaliated against the PayneAldrich Tariff Act of 1908 by raising their own tariffs, shutting out American exports. Dependent on exports, American farmers suffered. Farm prices fell between 1919 and 1921, plunging U.S. agriculture into a depression. This depression undermined purchasing power, a cornerstone of Fordism, and the spread of economic woes to banking and business ushered in the Great Depression. Between October 1929 and May 1933 unemployment rose from 500,000 to 15 million, nearly one-third of workers. Between these years, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell nearly 30 percent. Manufacturing plummeted 54 percent, construction 78 percent, and investment 98 percent. Drought on the Great Plains exacerbated the ills of agriculture, turning soil into dust in the mid-1930s. Dust storms in 1935 destroyed wheat farms in Kansas and Nebraska, spurring landless laborers to seek work in California. The efforts of the New Deal to return people to work achieved partial success but only the production of armaments in World War II lifted the U.S. economy from the Great Depression.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND ONWARD: WAR, PROSPERITY, AND POVERTY Wartime prosperity did not end with the return of peace in 1945. The cold war goaded Congress into perpetuating wartime expenditures on the military. The postwar increase in the birthrate fueled the consumption of goods and services. Contractors applied the lessons of Fordism in building cheap, standardized houses in the suburbs. In homage to the automobile, Congress in 1956 began the construction of an interstate highway system, a public works project that rivaled the New Deal in creating jobs. The postwar growth of the economy ended in the 1970s. The southern corn leaf blight, a fungal disease, destroyed 15 percent of the U.S. corn crop in 1970. Some farmers along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers lost their entire crop. In 1973 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries suspended the shipment of oil to the United States to protest American support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Oil prices leapt 350 percent that year. High petroleum prices spiked inflation and eroded purchasing power. Republican legislators responded in the 1980s by cutting taxes on the rich and reducing federal expenditures. Business fled the United States in search of low wages. Nike, for example, closed its factory in Oregon, moving to South Korea and then to Indonesia. Bereft of jobs www.abc-clio.com

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in manufacturing and mining, the Northeast and Great Lakes became pockets of poverty. Attending this decline was the rise of California’s Silicon Valley in the production of semiconductors and personal computers. Telecommunications and biotechnology may revolutionize the twenty-first-century economy, as did the automobile the twentieth century. The first facilities to resemble factories in Latin America were the sugar mills of Brazil and the Caribbean and the meat-processing houses along the Río de la Plata. About 1830, home production of clothing gave way in Mexico to textile mills, which spread thereafter throughout Latin America. The construction of railroads after 1870 improved the transport of goods, and the spread of power plants after 1880 supplied business with electricity. In 1913 factory production totaled $619 million in Argentina, comprising 16.6 percent of its GDP, and $184 million in Chile, comprising 14.5 percent of its GDP. By World War I three-quarters of manufacturing in Latin America was concentrated on the processing of food and the manufacture of textiles. Not all countries shared in this growth. As late as 1925, factory production totaled only $58 million, or 6.7 percent of GDP, in Colombia. World War I increased the demand for oil from Mexico and Venezuela, copper from Peru, tin from Bolivia, and nitrates from Chile. Great Britain imported meat and sugar from Latin America, but the export of coffee and bananas from the region fell amid wartime restrictions on shipping. The Allies barred German goods and investment from Latin America. The dearth of German investment and the postwar indebtedness of Britain brought the United States to the fore. U.S. investment in Latin America, totaling $1.6 billion in 1914, rose to $5.4 billion in 1929. The United States bought 29.7 percent of Latin American exports at the beginning of World War I and 45.4 percent in 1918. Latin America received one-quarter of its imports from the United States in 1913 and 41.8 percent in 1918. Latin America’s dependence on U.S. markets and capital imperiled the region when the U.S. economy contracted in the late 1920s. Between 1928 and 1932 the value of Latin American exports fell 64 percent. During these years the volume of exports plummeted 69 percent in Chile. Between 1929 and 1932 Argentinean exports declined from $1.5 billion to $561 million. The recovery of exports brought Latin America out of the Great Depression. After 1932 the volume of exports increased in Bolivia, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Between 1932 and 1939 the value of Cuban exports doubled. Excluding Mexico and Argentina, the value of Latin American exports rose 53 percent during these years. As had been the case during World War I, World War II stimulated demand for Latin American exports. War’s end left the region in a precarious position. The cold war drew U.S. capital to Europe. Latin America made do with small loans. Unable to attract capital, Latin American industry did not expand to meet domestic and international demand. To fill the gap between demand and supply, Latin America imported goods by expanding the money supply, but this expansion caused inflation. Between 1955 and 1960 prices rose 38 percent per year in Argentina, 28 percent per year in Brazil, 25 percent per year in Uruguay, and 24 percent per year in Chile. Between 1965 and 1970 the annual rate of inflation averaged 48 percent in Brazil, 44 percent in Uruguay, 29 percent in Chile, and 20 percent in Argentina. As in the past, Latin America turned to exports to buoy the economy. After www.abc-clio.com

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World War II cotton cultivation and cattle ranching swept the Pacific littoral. The rise of Communism in Cuba led the United States to turn to the rest of Latin America for sugar. By the late 1970s Guatemala totaled 80 percent of world exports of cardamom. But exports bumped up against ecological constraints. By the 1970s Peru had depleted its fisheries and intensive agriculture had eroded soils in Haiti. The expansion of pasture at the expense of forest diminished rainfall and increased global temperatures. These woes reached a crisis in the 1980s. In 1982 Mexico suspended repayment of its debt, followed over the next two years by nearly every other country in Latin America. The region responded by cutting imports and government spending and increasing exports. Between 1985 and 2000 exports from Latin America more than tripled. During these years exports from Mexico and the Dominican Republic leapt more than seven times and from Chile more than four times. Between 1993 and 2000 inflation in Latin America fell from 876.6 percent to 8.7 percent. Despite these trends, 35 percent of Latin Americans in 2000 lived below the poverty line. The poor comprised three-quarters of the population in Honduras, 65 percent in Nicaragua, 58 percent in Ecuador, 49 percent in Colombia, and 42 percent in Bolivia. The expansion of the early twentieth century gave way to the Great Depression in Canada. Dependent on exports, Canadian farmers and merchants saw their income fall with the price of wheat, fish, and lumber. Between 1929 and 1932 the volume of wheat exports plummeted 75 percent. As it had in the United States, drought bedeviled the Canadian prairie in 1934 and 1937, diminishing wheat yields in these years to one-third of their 1928 level. The contraction of agriculture depressed trade along railroads and the demand for manufactured goods. GDP fell 40 percent between 1929 and 1932. In May 1933 unemployment peaked at 32 percent and hovered above 10 percent until 1939, when the production of armaments for World War II returned people to work. As in the United States, the demand for labor drew women in Canada into factories. In an effort to manage wartime production, the Canadian government limited the right of workers to strike and rationed sugar, tea, coffee, butter, meat, and gasoline. The return of prosperity and the end of rationing boosted the sale of automobiles, televisions, and appliances after 1945. As did Americans, Canadians flocked to suburbs and shopping malls. The postwar growth of consumerism drew people from countryside to city, swelling the ranks of labor. By 1950 one-third of Canadian workers, 1 million men and women, had joined unions. In emulation of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organization in the United States, the Trade and Labour Congress and the Canadian Congress of Labor merged in 1956. The Trans-Canadian Highway linked city and suburb. Construction had begun in 1949, the highway opened in 1962, and the final miles were laid in 1970. Reliant on the automobile, Canadians suffered a quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 and 1974. This increase drove up prices 9 percent in 1973, double the rate of inflation in 1972. To combat inflation, Canada increased interest rates to 20 percent in 1981 to contract the money supply. Unemployment peaked at 13 percent in December 1982, the highest since the Great Depression. To restore prosperity Canada has since the 1980s reoriented trade toward the United States, its largest importer, and away from the European Union. www.abc-clio.com

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As did the United States, Latin America, and Canada, Africa succumbed to the Great Depression. Between 1929 and 1932 the value of African exports nearly halved. As it had in the United States and Canada, drought exacerbated the depression, reducing crop yields in West Africa in 1931. By the late 1930s, however, Africa, like the United States, Canada, and Latin America, had rebounded. As in Latin America, exports catalyzed this recovery. In 1938 African mines produced 97 percent of the world’s diamonds, 95 percent of cobalt, 46 percent of gold, and 40 percent of chrome. World War II stimulated the demand for food and raw materials from Africa, particularly after Japan in 1942 sealed off French Indochina from the Allies. Yet price controls forced African merchants to increase exports without a concomitant rise in profits. The end of price controls in 1948 allowed merchants to realize profits denied them during the war. As had World War II, the Korean War stoked the demand for exports from Africa. Between 1950 and 1957, GDP more than doubled in Zimbabwe and Kenya and increased 84.5 percent in South Africa, 78.7 percent in the Belgian Congo, and 70.2 percent in Uganda. Between 1960 and 1975, however, the growth in the GDP of Africa was less than 5 percent per year and just 2 percent in 1975. The cost of imports into Africa rose from $5 billion in 1965 to $22 billion in 1973. Between 1960 and 1975 agriculture declined from 41.3 percent of GDP to 30.3 percent, mining rose from 4.4 percent to 7.3 percent, manufacturing and the generation of electricity from 10 percent to 12 percent, and construction from 5 percent to 8 percent. As in Latin America, exports have grown in value in several African countries. Between 1976 and 1991 exports in Nigeria increased from 23 percent of GDP to 36 percent, in the Congo from 26 percent to 39 percent, in Mauritania from 31 percent to 42 percent, and in Mauritius from 38 percent to 44 percent. In 1995 Angola sent 64.5 percent of its exports to the United States and Canada, the Congo 36.5 percent, Gabon 31.8 percent, and Benin 22.2 percent. That year exports from Angola totaled $3.9 billion, from Côte d’Ivoire $3 billion, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo $2.5 billion, and from Gabon $2.4 billion. As is true of Latin America, inequality plagues the economy of Africa. Venture capitalists are funding the growth of technology firms in Nigeria, a country in which oil pumps $120 million a day into the economy. Yet Nigeria’s income per person was less than $500 in 2003. Niger, Chad, Mozambique, Eritrea, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea Bissau totaled less than $250 in income per person and Ethiopia and Burundi just $90 per person in 2003. See also: Colonialism; Economic Community of West African States; Globalization; International Monetary Fund; Mercantilism; Slavery (Economics); World Bank; World Trade Organization References Atack, Jeremy, and Peter Passell. A New Economic View of American History: From Colonial Times to 1940. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Bulmer-Thomas, Victor. The Economic History of Latin America since Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cardenas, Enrique, Jose Antonio Ocampo, and Rosemary Thorp, eds. An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Latin America. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2000. Horn, Michiel. The Great Depression of the 1930s in Canada. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Historical Association, 1984. Kayizzi-Mugerwa, Steve, ed. The African Economy: Policy, Institutions, and the Future. London: Routledge, 1999.

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28 INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS McCalla, Douglas. Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784–1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Mshomba, Richard E. Africa in the Global Economy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000. Ouellet, Fernand. Economic and Social History of Quebec, 1760–1850. Toronto: Macmillan, 1980. Rich, Patricia Gray, ed. Latin America: Its Future in the Global Economy. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2002.

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ARTS, LITERATURE, AND SPORT Sarah Boslaugh

African culture has enriched Western culture in many ways, and African influence is particularly evident in countries where persons of African descent are in the majority (e.g., Jamaica) or constitute a sizable minority (e.g., the United States): in those countries persons of African descent combined elements of African and Western culture to create a vibrant African American (or Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, etc.) culture. Cultural sharing works in both directions, however, and Western culture has been an important influence on many aspects of modern African culture. This essay will discuss the mutual influences of African and Western culture in dance, music, literature, film, the visual arts, and sport.

DANCE Dance is an important aspect of many African cultural groups. Not surprisingly, Africans brought their dance traditions with them to the Americas and developed new forms of expression there, combining their traditions with those they encountered in the Americas. A similar process took place when Africans migrated from villages to cities within Africa. One result of this cultural mixture was the creation of national or pan-African dance companies, the first of which was les Ballets Africains. Many popular dance forms common in the Americas can be directly traced to their African roots, including the mambo, samba, rumba, cumbia, and the Brazilian dance– martial art form known as capoeira. Tap dancing, a performance type of dance created in nineteenth-century America, combines African rhythms with Irish and Scottish dance steps. Many of the greatest tap dancers in history have been African Americans, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Fayard and Harold Nicholas, Gregory Hines, and Savion Glover. African Americans working in modern dance have also developed a distinctive style that combines African and Western traditions. Leaders in this regard include Katherine Dunham, who founded the first African American modern dance company, and Alvin Ailey, who studied with Dunham and later founded the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater. 29 www.abc-clio.com

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MUSIC African influence on Western culture may be most obvious in music. It is difficult to imagine what American popular music, or for that matter world popular music, would sound like without the contributions of African Americans. For example, they created jazz, an art form that is recognized and enjoyed all over the world. Jazz is continually evolving and many different types of jazz are currently performed around the globe, from early styles such as Dixieland through swing and bebop to more modern forms such as free jazz and fusion. In fact, jazz has in a sense returned to its roots by crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction. Thanks in large part to radio broadcasts and recordings as well as performances by touring American and European artists, jazz became popular in African cities and distinctive local jazz styles have developed in many different African countries. Among the greatest composers and performers in the history of jazz are Joseph “King” Louis Armstrong (considered by many to be the greatest jazz musician of all time), William “Count” Basie, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday (Eleanora Fagan), Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker. Many other types of popular music were strongly influenced by African traditions, as well. Reggae, which combines elements of many types of music, including jazz, blues, ska, and calypso, was created by Afro-Jamaicans in the 1960s. Soul music, a style of popular music that combines elements of traditional African American gospel music and popular rhythm and blues with the popular song form, was developed in the late 1950s and 1960s in the United States. Hip-hop or rap music, which was developed in the 1970s by African Americans and Latinos in the borough of The Bronx in New York City, has since become popular all over the world. Some trace the spoken or “rapping” technique, an important part of hip-hop performance, back to the griot or itinerant singerpoets of West Africa, as well as to the insertion of spoken sections within songs by African American artists such as James Brown and Isaac Hayes. Even the Caucasiandominated musical genres of bluegrass, old-time, and country music owe their distinctive sounds partly to African influence. The banjo, a central instrument in all three styles of music, is descended from an African instrument first brought to the United States by enslaved Africans. Many popular Latin American types of music also show the influence of African customs. For instance, samba was developed in Rio de Janeiro in the early twentieth century, primarily by Afro-Brazilians from Bahia. Characteristics of samba were later combined with jazz elements and this gave rise to bossa nova, a type of music popular worldwide in the 1960s and featured in the Academy Award–winning movie Orpheu Negro (1959; Black Orpheus). Two world-famous styles of popular music came from the Afro-Trinidadian community: calypso and steel pan. Cuban popular music forms such as the son, the rumba, and the danzon draw on African traditions, as do the more modern hybrids: the mambo and the cha-cha-cha. There has been a revival of interest in Cuban popular music recently due to the success of the 1999 film The Buena Vista Social Club. Some of the greatest performers of Cuban popular music have been Afro-Cubans, including Machito (Frank Grillo), Ibrahim Ferrer, and Celia Cruz. www.abc-clio.com

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LITERATURE The influence of European culture on contemporary African writers is most obvious in their use of European languages such as English and French and in their use of Western forms such as the novel. The works of the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, are an outstanding example of how artistic results may be achieved through the combination of traditional African and modern Western culture. Other English-speaking Africans who have achieved recognition in contemporary literature include Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Ben Okri (Nigeria), Anthony Appiah (Ghana), and Bessie Head (South Africa-Botswana). Outstanding African writers in French include the philosopher Frantz Fanon (Martinique-Algeria) and the statesman and poet Leopold Senghor (Senegal). African Americans played only a small role in American literature until after the Civil War, primarily because most had neither the education nor the freedom to enable them to write. One exception was Phillis Wheatley, the first African American to receive recognition as an author. Another was Frederick Douglass. Interestingly, both Wheatley and Douglass had to defend their works against charges of inauthenticity, that is, the claim that they had been written by someone else, since some of their contemporaries believed African Americans were incapable of writing fine literature. After the Civil War, the debates about the place and future of African Americans were often carried out in the writings of Booker T. Washington (e.g., Up from Slavery, 1901) and W. E. B. Du Bois (e.g., The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). The first time African American writers as a group became central to American literature was during what is now called the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Another name for the Harlem Renaissance was the New Negro Movement, after the term the “New Negro,” coined in 1925 by Alain LeRoy Locke. These terms conveyed the belief that African Americans could now cast off their heritage of servitude and define for themselves what it meant to be African American. Both labels are apt, as the Harlem Renaissance saw a veritable explosion of creative activity from African Americans in many fields, including art, literature, and philosophy. One reason the Harlem Renaissance was possible was the fact that many African Americans migrated from the rural South to northern cities, including New York City, during World War I, the 1920s, and the 1930s. The increased numbers of African Americans living in small geographic areas naturally fueled a sense of community. Furthermore, in northern cities these internal migrants experienced freedoms and opportunities that had not been available to them in the South. These two factors encouraged African Americans to seek to redefine themselves socially and politically. African American writers are now firmly established as a vital part of the American literary canon. Ralph Ellison’s fame rests primarily on his novel Invisible Man (1953), which won the National Book Award for fiction. In it, he uses the metaphor of invisibility to express his disconnection from the largely Caucasian world around him. Although he wrote many books, Richard Wright is best known for his novel Native Son (1940) and the autobiographical volume, Black Boy (1945). Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize (in 1950, for poetry) and also published novels and www.abc-clio.com

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essays as well as encouraging the younger generation of African American poets. Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, which takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award as the best play of 1959. Alex Haley’s novel, Roots: Saga of an American Family (1976), won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and was adapted into a television mini-series that was the highest-rated program of its time. Maya Angelou, perhaps best-known for reading a poem at the 1993 inauguration ceremony of President Bill Clinton, wrote the best-selling autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) as well as numerous volumes of poetry. Other contemporary African American writers include the poets Audre Lorde and Nikki Giovanni; the poet and playwright Amira Baraka (Leroi Jones); the novelists Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman; and the playwright Ntozake Shange. African Americans have also achieved success in genre fiction, including Samuel R. Delany in science fiction and Walter Mosley in detective novels. The most distinguished African American playwright is probably August Wilson (Frederick August Kittell), whose greatest works form a series of ten plays chronicling African American life in the twentieth century. Wilson won Pulitzer Prizes in 1987 for Fences and in 1990 for The Piano Lesson. George C. Wolfe, a noted Broadway director, achieved great success with his play The Colored Museum (1986). The best-known contemporary Afro-Caribbean writer is probably the poet Derek Walcott, born in St. Lucia and resident in Trinidad; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. The poet Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados) was in the forefront of those emphasizing the importance of African influence in Caribbean culture; he has published over twenty-five books of poetry as well as historical and critical works. Other important contemporary Afro-Caribbean writers include the poets Wilson Harris (Guyana) and Linton Kwesi Johnson (Jamaica) and the novelists Merle Hodge (Trinidad), Michelle Cliff (Jamaica), and Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua).

FILM Opportunities for persons of African descent in film have been limited until the last decades of the twentieth century due to a combination of deliberate exclusion and lack of access to education and funding. The greatest number of opportunities were available for performers, both as actors and actresses (although in a limited range of roles) and as singers and dancers. One exception was the “race movies” made in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, primarily for African American audiences. These films not only featured African American actors and actresses in leading roles, but were often written and produced by African Americans. Three of the most influential directors and producers in this genre are Omar Micheaux and George and Noble Johnson. The first African American to direct a Hollywood film was Gordon Parks, with The Learning Tree in 1969; other African American directors of this generation include Melvin van Peebles and Ossie Davis. Today a number of African Americans are working as film directors, both in Hollywood and independently; they include Spike Lee, John Singleton, and Julie Dash. Notable African Canadian directors include Clement Virgo and Stephen Williams. Several outstanding directors of African descent have come from the French-speaking Caribbean. Rassoul Labuchin’s Anita (1980), the first film made in the Haitian Creole www.abc-clio.com

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language, tells the story of a young girl working as a domestic servant in Port-au-Prince. Martinique-born Euzhan Palcy achieved international renown with her first feature film, Rue Cases Nègres (Sugar Cane Alley) in 1983 and has also directed A Dry White Season (1989) and Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History (1994). Christian Lara, born in Guadeloupe and working primarily in France, has directed a number of French-language films concerning Caribbean subjects, the best-known of which is Sucre Amer (1998). Raoul Peck’s feature, L’Homme sur les quais (1993), set in Haiti in the 1960s, was the first Haitian film released in U.S. theaters. In Colombia, José Agustín Ferreyra was an exception to the usual rule that film direction was a role reserved for Caucasians. Ferreyra, who was often referred to by the nickname “El Negro” because of his African heritage, directed many films in the first half of the twentieth century. Many Brazilian films have focused on the life of Afro-Brazilians, including the Academy Award–winning Ofeu Negro (1959), by the French director Marcel Camus; Rio Zona Norte (1957), by Nelson Pereira dos Santos; and Cidade de Deus (2002), by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. However, as in the United States, few AfroBrazilians had the opportunity to direct films until the late twentieth century. The current generation of Afro-Brazilian directors includes Waldyr Onofre, Antonio Pitanga, and Silvana Afram. Since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, focus in Cuban film has shifted from the primarily Caucasian landowning class to the history and current reality of ordinary Cuban citizens. A number of films have looked at the role of race in Cuban society, past and present, including La Última cena (1976), by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Cecilia (1981), by Humberto Solás.

VISUAL ARTS Relatively few African American artists worked in the mainstream of the visual arts until the twentieth century. An early exception was Henry Osawa Tanner, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal minister who spent much of his adult life in Paris. Although most of his paintings are of religious subjects, he is best-known for his sensitive portraits of African Americans, including The Banjo Lesson (1893). The Harlem Renaissance also included a number of visual artists, such as Lois Mailou Jones, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Palmer Hayden. The works of Bearden and Lawrence in particular have become part of the canon of twentieth-century American art. The photographers James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks (who was also a novelist and filmmaker) also achieved success in the mainstream art world. Younger African Americans who were or are successful in the visual arts include Jean-Michael Basquiat, Carrie Mae Weems, Faith Ringgold, and Martin Puryear.

WESTERN SPORTS Western sports were introduced to Africa primarily by Europeans. Sometimes sports were taught directly as part of a colonizing or missionary endeavor and at other times Africans simply observed and imitated European games. For instance, soccer became popular in South Africa after Africans observed the game as played by British soldiers serving in the Boer War. Few Africans were successful in sports at the world-class level until the 1960s; www.abc-clio.com

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exceptions included the boxers Louis Faal of Senegal, Dick Tiger and Hogan Bassey of Nigeria, and Roy Ankrah of Ghana. Participation in international sports became an expression of national identity for many newly independent African countries in the 1960s, and many countries participate in international sporting events such as the Olympics and the Football (Soccer) World Cup. This national and pan-African pride is also celebrated at the Pan-African or All-African Games, first held in 1965. Given the opportunity to train and compete at the world-class level, African athletes have excelled at many sports. Runners from East Africa, particularly Kenya and Ethiopia, currently dominate middle- and long-distance races all over the world. Among the first to achieve success at the world level were Abebe Bikila, who won the Olympic marathon in 1960 and 1964, and Kipchoge (Kip) Keino, who won the 1,500 meters at the 1968 Olympics and the steeplechase at the 1972 Olympics. Africans also star in football (called soccer in the United States): many play on European teams, and the national teams of Nigeria and Cameroon in particular have distinguished themselves in World Cup competition. In basketball, the Nigerian Hakeem Olaujuwon was the first African to play at a world-class level, starring first for the University of Houston and then for the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association (NBA). A number of African players have since played in the NBA, including Manute Bol of Sudan, Michael Olowokandi of Nigeria, and Dikembe Mutombo of Congo. In addition, many Africans also play professional basketball in Europe, and the African continent has been represented at the world championships and Olympic Games by several teams, including Angola, Senegal, and Nigeria. African Americans have suffered discrimination in sports throughout most of American history. Legal segregation in public accommodations, including schools and recreational facilities, meant that the African American community had to develop its own support networks and institutions. For instance, the first two great African American tennis players, Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe, both received critical assistance early in their careers from Dr. Walter Johnson, a Virginia physician and tennis player. Gibson also developed her game at Florida A & M College, a traditionally black school, and in competitions of the American Tennis Association, founded in 1916 to promote tennis among African Americans. In 1950 Althea Gibson became the first African American woman to compete in the U.S. national tennis championships, and she was the first to win a Grand Slam title, winning singles titles at the French Open (1956), Wimbledon (1957, 1958), and the U.S. Open (1957, 1958). In 1963 Arthur Ashe was the first African American to play on the U.S. Davis Cup team, and he was the first African American man to win singles titles at the U.S. Open (1968) and Wimbledon (1975). The most remarkable example of segregated sports in the United States may be the simultaneous existence of the all-black Negro Baseball Leagues and the all-white American and National Leagues (also called the “Major Leagues”). The Negro Leagues achieved their greatest success from the 1920s through the 1940s, when their all-star teams regularly beat white all-star teams. Outstanding players from this era include Josh Gibson of the Homestead Grays, Satchel Paige of the Kansas City Monarchs, and Cool Papa Bell of the Pittsburgh Crawfords. Some Negro League teams continued to exist after Major League baseball www.abc-clio.com

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began to integrate in 1946, after Jackie Robinson was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League. However, the best African American players chose to play in the Major Leagues when possible, and the Negro Leagues ceased to exist after 1960. In the integrated era (since 1946), many of the best players in Major League baseball have been African American, including Willie Mays, Reggie Jackson, Bob Gibson, and Roberto Clemente. Many professional boxing champions over the years have been of African descent, including Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammad Ali in the United States and Sergio Eligio Sardinas Montalvo of Cuba, better known as “Kid Chocolate.” Cuban boxers have only competed as amateurs since 1962, but they dominate Olympic competition; among their greatest champions are the Afro-Cubans Teofilo Stevenson and Felix Savon. Football (soccer) is the most popular sport in many parts of the world, and many of the best players from the Western Hemisphere have been of African descent. These include arguably the greatest player of all time, Edson Arantes Do Nascimento of Brazil, better known as Pelé. Current outstanding players of African descent include Ronaldo (Ronaldo Luiz Nazario da Lima) of Brazil and Freddie Adu (born in Ghana, currently residing in the United States), who at the age of fourteen became the highest-paid soccer player in the United States. The relationship of Africa and the Americas in the arts and athletics has been mutually beneficial in many ways. Western culture would look very different today were it not for the contributions of Africans living in the Americas. For instance, it is difficult to imagine what contemporary popular music would sound like if all African influences were removed from it, or what modern art and dance would look like without the influence of African folkloric traditions. African culture has also been enriched by Western influence; jazz, for instance, a type of music created in the Americas by persons of African descent, has re-crossed the Atlantic and become a vital part of modern African cultural life. This cultural exchange continues today in the vibrant artistic creations of persons of African descent living on both sides of the Atlantic. See also: Brathwaite, Kamau; Brazilian Culture; Brooks, Gwendolyn; Calypso; Clemente Walker, Roberto; Cliff, Michelle; Cuban Music, African Influence in; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Ellison, Ralph Waldo; Fanon, Frantz; Fauset, Jessie; Film (Caribbean); Film (Latin America); Film (North America); Film (South America); Garvey, Marcus; Guinea Dance; Haley, Alex; Hansberry, Lorraine; Head, Bessie; Hip-Hop; Hurston, Zora Neale; Johnson, Linton Kwesi; Kincaid, Jamaica; Locke, Alain LeRoy; Lorde, Audre; Marley, Robert Nesta; Mays, Willie Howard; Morrison, Toni; Music (African); Negro Leagues; Nigeria, Drama in; Reggae; Robinson, Jack Roosevelt; Shange, Ntozake; Soyinka, Wole; Toomer, Jean; Walcott, Derek; Washington, Booker T.; Wideman, John Edgar; Wright, Richard References Alexander, George. Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk about the Magic of Cinema. New York: Broadway Books, 2003. Ashe, Arthur. A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete. New York: Amistad, 1993. Conyers, James L., Jr., ed. African American Jazz and Rap: Social and Philosophical Expressions of Black Expressive Behavior. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. Ervin, Hazel Arnett. The Handbook of African American Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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36 INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS Lewis, Samella S. African American Art and Artists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Long, Richard A. The Black Tradition in American Dance. London: Prion, 1995. Reid, Mark. Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Ross, Charles K., ed. Race and Sport: The Struggle for Equality on and off the Field. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Smithe, Jonathan P., ed. African Literature: Overview and Bibliography. Hauppague, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2002. Watson, Steven. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African American Culture, 1920–1930. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. Welsh-Asante, Kariamu. African Dance: An Artistic, Historical, and Philosophical Inquiry. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996.

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as in the New York City revolt of 1712. While the direct result of this particular uprising was a new set of laws to restrain more tightly the movements of black people, such events also became opportunities for American Quakers to advocate more openly for the general and gradual manumission of the colonial slave population. The issue of abolitionism did not come to the forefront more broadly in colonial America until the dawn of the American Revolution of 1775. Both free and enslaved blacks found themselves in a complicated position when the British offered emancipation for slaves who joined Loyalist forces. A significant number fought on the British side during the Revolution, seeking refuge in Nova Scotia, Canada, and elsewhere after the British defeat. In the United States, abolitionism was somewhat successful during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, especially in the northern states. Some Americans saw the absurdity of fighting for freedom while continuing to deny others the same freedom for which the war was being fought. As a result, there was a gradual abolition of slavery in the North. The southern United States did not follow suit; since large numbers of slaves resided in the southern states, slaveholders feared reprisals. Following the news of Toussaint

Abolitionism refers to the political and social means by which different groups in slaveholding nations, including enslaved and formerly enslaved peoples themselves, tried to end chattel slavery. An expanded definition of abolitionism would include both formal political processes and the efforts by slaves to free themselves through revolt, escape, and the creation of communities outside the control of slaveholders, such as the Maroon societies of the Caribbean and Latin America. The demise of slavery in Europe, the United States, and Latin America was the direct result of multifaceted abolitionist efforts. The first white group to publicly prohibit slavery in its ranks in colonial America was the Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, beginning in 1755. Refusing to subscribe to the artificial hierarchy of the races, the Quakers viewed everyone as equal in God’s eyes. American Quakers began their mission by first discontinuing the practice of slave trading and ousting from their religious community those who would not desist from the practice. Abolitionist sentiment grew not only because of religious belief, but also because through the course of colonial American history, slaves sought to revolt and escape, 39 www.abc-clio.com

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Louverture’s successful slave revolt in 1791, which led to the establishment of the Republic of Haiti, southern whites actually tightened their states’ slave laws. Southern states also remained economically dependent on plantation slavery. Consequently, southern states became determined to hold on to that institution. The first European nation to abolish the slave trade, prohibiting the traffic of new slaves from Africa to the Americas but not emancipating slaves or their descendants, was Britain. Working in conjunction with their American counterparts, the British Quakers began the first European abolitionist activities by presenting a petition against slavery to the British Parliament in 1783. In 1787 the London Committee to Abolish Slavery was established through the collaborative efforts of the Quakers and evangelical Christians. The British Quakers, through the Committee to Abolish Slavery, then assisted in the creation of other abolitionist organizations that included parishioners of Baptist and Methodist congregations along with members of marginalized groups such as women and industrial workers. Britain passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. The Emancipation Act would be passed in 1833, freeing slaves over the course of five years; the measure included a period called “apprenticeship” and provided compensation for slave owners. All slaves in the British Empire were free by 1838, including slaves in the colonies of Jamaica, Barbados, Sierra Leone, Cape Town, and the Bahamas. British abolition and emancipation would be a model for abolition in other European nations. Between 1847 and 1848 the Swedish and Danish governments worked to bring about emancipation to www.abc-clio.com

their perspective colonies of the West Indies. In 1848, following political turmoil at home and a slave revolt on Martinique, France emancipated slaves within the French Empire, including the colonies in Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Senegal. In 1863 the Dutch emancipated the remaining slaves in their Caribbean colonies. In 1873 Puerto Rico was in the midst of abolishing slavery. By 1886, with Puerto Rican slavery nearing its end, Cuba followed the Puerto Rican paradigm and moved toward abolition. However, as slavery was abolished in Europe’s Western Hemisphere possessions, the United States steeped itself even more in the practice, and consequently the divide between northern and southern states hardened. Revolts and religious reforms reignited Northern calls for the abolition of Southern slavery while the success of southern cotton plantations further convinced southerners of the necessity of slavery. For Northerners, continued violence was a reason for abolition, while Southerners saw it as a reason to tighten their control over slaves. The American Anti-Slavery Society was a key northern abolitionist organization. This group included William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the weekly publication The Liberator (1831), and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote a serially published novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In addition to well-intentioned whites, voices of freed and escaped slaves such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth made strong abolitionist arguments. These black voices described the horrors of slavery in the first person and reached audiences in a different way than either the rhetoric of Garrison or the extremely successful fiction of Stowe.

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Stowe’s novel further fueled concern about slavery and abolition at a pivotal time. America was expanding and the expansion of slavery within the growing country was a major issue. Some Northerners saw slavery as a sin that needed to be eradicated from all parts of the country, so the idea of slave expansion was completely unacceptable. Opposing this viewpoint were those who saw a failure to spread slavery as meaning a loss of ground to Northern abolitionists. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had kept the United States balanced between free and slave states by prohibiting slavery above the 36th parallel. However, with the passing of the KansasNebraska Act of 1854, in which both states were allowed to vote on whether or not to allow slavery, the Missouri Compromise was dissolved. The changing balance of power between pro- and antislavery forces would thus play a major role in the American Civil War that began in 1861. In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in Confederate-controlled areas. In December 1865, after the defeat of the Confederacy earlier that year, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, freeing all slaves. During the nineteenth century, slavery existed in parts of Latin America, especially former Spanish colonies. The issue of abolition did not gain the attention of the world as it did in other places with greater numbers of slaves, such as the United States. Because of the smaller number of slaves and the marginal financial opportunities they offered their owners, abolishing slavery in places like Mexico and Venezuela was not difficult. From the 1820s through the 1860s, Latin American countries all but abolished slavery as a whole. Peru www.abc-clio.com

emancipated its 45,000 slaves in 1821, Mexico emancipated its 3,000 slaves in 1822, and Chile emancipated its 4,000 slaves in 1823. The Central American Federation, composed of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, emancipated its collective lot of 3,000 slaves in 1824, Bolivia emancipated its 1,500 slaves in 1846, Colombia emancipated its 20,000 in 1851, Ecuador emancipated its last 2,500 slaves in 1852, Argentina passed a law making all members of its society equal in 1853, and Uruguay emancipated its slave population in the same year. In contrast to the United States, where slavery was a major part of the economy, slave labor in Latin America was largely used by a small elite. While such a class was rich, it was generally not so large as to monopolize the moral debate concerning slavery. In some specific cases, the general wellbeing of the country required or profited from the abolition of slavery, as was the case with Uruguay. In an attempt to secure their own liberty from Brazil, Uruguay’s rebel government officials freed the slave population so that the slaves could join their army. The economic and political reality in Latin America was reinforced by the fact that slaves there were more likely to escape, maintain their freedom through Maroon communities, and actively revolt. Brazil was the last stronghold of statesanctioned slavery in the West. It ended there in 1888 with slaves refusing to continue to work under existing harsh conditions of involuntary servitude and government soldiers refusing to force compliance. Ironically, the abolition of Western slavery ended in a way similar to how slave abolition began—with slaves trying to annihilate the systematic hell that unjustly bound

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them. Brazilian abolition took so long to occur in large part because the great numbers of slaves had been made part of the fabric of the country for over three centuries, from the time of Portuguese colonization through independence. Slaves occupied a very important role in the society and were essential to the economy. Like the United States, which had ended slavery twentythree years earlier, Brazil profited greatly from slavery. Unlike from the United States, however, Brazilian society was not so morally divided about the issue of slavery that it was prepared to enter into a civil war. As the black population grew, including a large number of free persons, political thinking changed. Additionally, the political leadership began to consider the slavery issue in terms of its effects on Brazil’s national labor market, its ability to continue functioning within the international market, and the safety of citizens. The culmination of all of these factors led to Brazil’s final abolition of slavery. Abolition in Africa took place in the context of the changing structure of African slavery as a consequence of the European slave trade and European colonialism in the late nineteenth century. Slaveholding was extensive in Africa. There were about 2 million slaves, according to some estimates, in northern Nigeria when the British began to establish colonial rule there at the end of the nineteenth century. However, an important distinction often needs to be made between chattel slavery in the Americas, in which enslaved people were considered simply a particularly valuable commodity, and African systems of slavery. Although chattel slavery existed, many African systems of slavery, prior to the growth of transatlantic slavery, resembled ancient Greek or Roman slavery in www.abc-clio.com

that the enslaved person was not eternally relegated to the lowest rung of a caste system from which no upward mobility was possible. However, the growth of transatlantic slavery led to the dramatic destruction of much of Africa’s human capital through increased warfare, kidnappings, and enslavement. Kidnappings of Africans for the trade became so rampant that, just as there were concentrated abolitionist efforts to end slavery in the West, there were concerted efforts to end slave trading in Africa. As the demand for slaves grew, so did African resistance. Groups fought off slavers when they could and found other means of resistance as well. For example, a number of tribes in central Africa used the region’s complex terrain defensively, changing their hunting and cultivation practices so as to better hide their presence. From about 1830 until the early twentieth century, European countries tried to bring an end to slavery in Africa. The abolition of slavery there was closely tied to colonialism. The governments of colonial powers, which had themselves outlawed slavery at home and within their own empires, sought to abolish the institution in Africa. While part of the interest that these governments had in abolishing slavery in Africa was humanitarian, there were also other, less benign motives. These included using abolitionism as a justification for colonial domination to the public at home and developing a labor force abroad. In French colonies in the early nineteenth century, slaves were emancipated only after serving fourteen years as indentured laborers under the control of French colonial administrations. In British colonies, emancipation was also gradual. In the case of northern Nigeria for example, laws were

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put into place that sought to slowly minimize slavery. For example, in 1901 the children of slaves were legally born free. Unlike in Europe or the Americas, the abolition of slavery in the colonies tended to have a patchwork quality. The pace and extent of abolition and emancipation in colonial areas depended greatly on the extent to which the colonial administration depended on the goodwill of local rulers who might hold slaves, on the balance of economic advantages and disadvantages, and on the desire to maintain a stable labor pool. As in the United States, abolition and emancipation under colonial rule often meant not a transition to economic freedom but a shift to sharecropping or other forms of labor with minimal social mobility. Overall, while abolitionism did not completely remove slavery from the face of the planet—especially as slavery existed in parts of Africa into the early 1900s—it did help to end the human travesty in large part of the Western Hemisphere. And even though forms of labor exploitation existed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the attitude of tolerance and general acceptance toward such practices changed significantly in large part because of abolitionism. Members of the abolitionist movements took the position that human rights superceded the right of individuals to make profits at the expense of their fellow humans. That position has since become a norm for many people within the Western Hemisphere. Ordner Taylor See also: Abolitionism, British; American Revolution; Civil War, American; Colonialism; Douglass, Frederick; Emancipation Proclamation; Human Rights; Nova Scotia, African American Diaspora in; Quakers; Slave Narratives;

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Slave Revolts/Maronnage; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Truth, Sojourner; Tubman, Harriet; World Anti-Slavery Conventions (1840, 1843) References Baronov, David. The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Broadhead, John Romeyn. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New Cork; Procured in Holland, England, and France. Vol. 5. Edited by E. B. O’Callaghan. New York: AMS Press, 1969. Davidson, Basil. The African Slave Trade. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1980. Harrold, Stanley. The Abolitionist of the South, 1831–1861. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995. Klein, Martin A. Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Manning, Patrick. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Rassner, Ronald M. “Palmares and the Freed Slave in Afro-Brazilian Literature.” In Voices from Under: Black Narrative in Latin American and the Caribbean, edited by William Luis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. Rout, Leslie B. The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

ABOLITIONISM, BRITISH The role of the United Kingdom in the abolition of both the slave trade and slavery during the nineteenth century was extensive. From the late eighteenth century, Britain progressively turned against slave trading and then against the very practice of slavery itself. A change in opinion by the British people transformed Britain from being the biggest Atlantic slave trader into actively pursuing a multifaceted antislavery policing operation within the Atlantic

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Exeter Hall in London, England, filled with a large crowd for the Anti-Slavery Society meeting in 1841. (Library of Congress)

Basin. This involved a plethora of instruments, including international anti-slave trading treaties, diplomatic pressure, leading by example, and military intervention. By the late nineteenth century, both the slave trade and the practice of slavery had not only been suppressed in the Atlantic but also banned in all advanced countries. By 1807 the British had already exported approximately 3,120,000 people into bondage. Merchants from the wealthy ports of Liverpool and Bristol operated an extensive chain of slave installations along Africa’s Atlantic coast, where goods were taken and exchanged for slaves, which were then shipped across the notorious Middle Passage to the Americas. The trade was extremely lucrative; for some traders, profits could reach in excess of 100 percent. One of the principal uses for slaves was in the www.abc-clio.com

labor-intensive sugar trade—in the Caribbean and in Louisiana in southern North America—that enabled Britain to dominate the sugar trade. By 1805 the nation was accounting for approximately 55 percent of world sugar production, a figure that was still rising. The economic incentives for the continuance of slavery were enormous, but these were further reinforced by various social incentives. As slave trading could generate rapid wealth, it was also a path to respectability in the class-ridden society of the late eighteenth century. However, hostility toward slavery had been growing in Britain within certain humanitarian and religious circles since the mid-eighteenth century. These groups believed the trade corrupted all aspects of social and economic life within the British

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Empire and beyond. By the 1770s the antislavery movement had gained momentum and was further reinforced by the decision of Lord Mansfield in the Somerset case of 1772, which decreed that any slave who set foot within the United Kingdom was immediately a free citizen. Real progress commenced, however, when two leading antislavery campaigners, Zachary Macaulay and William Wilberforce, started to mobilize grassroots movements to end the trade in slaves. Along with other abolitionists, such as Granville Sharpe, they came to be known as the Clapham Sect and operated with evangelical fervor. Pressured by their work, the Houses of Parliament passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. From this moment, slave trading was illegal throughout the British Empire. Nevertheless, the abolitionists were still not content. By 1814, 806 antislavery petitions, signed by 750,000 people, were sent to Parliament. This next thrust formed part of the antislavery movement, and the AntiSlavery Society was founded in 1823 to campaign for the outlawing of slavery itself. In 1833, ten years later, this was finally achieved with the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act, although a period of apprenticeship was introduced for slaves between 1834 and 1838. Neither the slave trade nor slavery would be eliminated by two mere acts passed by the British government. Those engaged in the trade would need to be actively pursued. As Adam Hochschild has pointed out, “the Atlantic slave trade depended on the fact that most of the societies of Africa—chiefdoms, kingdoms large and small, even groups of nomads—had their own systems of slavery” (p. 16). Further, many European nations and Middle Eastern merchants were engaged in the www.abc-clio.com

trade. It was truly systemic, and most of those societies showed few signs of abolishing either the slave trade or the practice of slavery. The abolitionists believed that slavery had to be proactively stopped and wanted to use all the available instruments of the British state to achieve their goal. As Lord Castlereagh, the then foreign secretary, wrote of the abolitionist movement in 1814: “The whole nation is bent upon this project. I believe that there is hardly a village which has not met and petitioned upon it. Both houses of parliament are pledged to press it and ministers must make it the basis of their policy” ( Johnson, p. 328). The British had been in pursuit of slave traders since the 1807 Act. In order to stamp out the trade, the Royal Navy’s power was used in an attempt to sweep the African and American seas of slave ships. This resulted in the dispatch of the British West Africa Squadron, a pioneer of gunboat diplomacy, to arrest recalcitrant traders engaging in the slave trade from ports within British territory. This was how the operation started, but the British found it increasingly difficult. At first they used their dominance—especially after the defeat of France in 1815—to entice and pressure other European nations into signing treaties that enabled the mutual searching of suspected slave ships in international waters. Such treaties were not very successful, however, as many nations turned a blind eye to the trade in practice. Some even attempted to cash in on the trade that Britain sought to end. British sugar production had fallen by 25 percent in the 35 years since 1807 and would account for only 15 percent of the world total by 1850 (a drop of 40 percent since 1807), whereas sugar production increased in rival

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(slave-based) economies by 210 percent. There was now an economic as well as a moral stimulus for the enforcement of the ban. Britain could not allow its economic competitors to benefit from a trade it had itself abandoned. The British, therefore, became considerably more aggressive. The Houses of Parliament authorized the unilateral searching of intransigent nations’ ships, with or without their consent. It was decreed that slave traders were to be treated like pirates, meaning that they could face the death penalty. The slave traders were also to be rooted out at the source. Slave installations in Africa were bombarded and burned and local chiefs were forced into signing treaties that demanded that they prevent, or arrest, traders operating within their kingdoms. In 1850 the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, went further still and sent Her Majesty’s gunboats into an undeclared war against Brazil, which eventually forced the Brazilian government into banning the trade altogether. Lord Palmerston then turned his attention toward the similar trade operating between Africa and the Middle East. In all, the British intercepted 1,635 slave ships, liberated over 150,000 slaves at sea, and had reduced the trade by approximately 80 percent by the middle of the nineteenth century. The suppressing of the slave trade has been estimated as costing the British almost 2 percent of their economic output over sixty years; furthermore, at the height of the operation, about onethird of the Royal Navy’s military assets were involved. With the Union’s victory in the American Civil War and unrelenting British pressure elsewhere, the slave trade between Africa and the Americas would eventually cease as a sizable organized practice, which would lead to considerable www.abc-clio.com

economic restructuring on either side of the Atlantic. Further, the Royal Navy’s mapping and exploration of the African coast during the antislavery operations helped to pave the way for the opening of Africa to European penetration during the New Imperialism in the latter nineteenth century. James Rogers See also: Abolitionism; Apprenticeship (British Empire); Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; British Empire; Slavery (History); Wilberforce, William; World Anti-Slavery Conventions (1840, 1843) References Eltis, David. Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery. London: Macmillan, 2005. Hyam, Ronald. Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1993. Johnson, Paul. The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830. London: Phoenix Giant, 1991. Kaufmann, Chaim, and Robert Pape. “Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade.” International Organization 53, no. 4 (1999): 631–668. Morris, Jan. Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.

ACHEBE, CHINUA (1930–) Chinua Achebe is the most widely read, translated, and taught modern African writer. Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, has become a classic. The tragedy of Okonkwo, who abhors the corruptive influence of Western civilization in his Umuofia community and dies fighting against the alien, is a historical

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fictionalization of African society during the European colonial invasion of the nineteenth century. Achebe was born on November 16, 1930, at Ikenga, Ogidi, in Igboland, southeastern Nigeria. He hails from a family of Christian converts, and his father, Isaac Okafor Achebe, was an evangelist. Things Fall Apart is an epochal allegory on the passing of traditional glory and the beginning of modern disenchantment. The heroic and suicidal father, Okonkwo, belongs to an old order and his children, represented in the experiences of the despised and apostate first son, Nwoye, and the beloved and demoniac first daughter, Ezinma, belong to the new dispensation. Achebe studied at Government College, Umuahia, and he was a pioneer student at the premier London University College, Ibadan, Nigeria, where he matriculated in medicine and graduated in classics. He taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and at several American universities, including Bard College in Annandale-onHudson, New York, where he still teaches. His studies in European imperial literature were the immediate catalyst for Achebe’s vocation as a writer. Achebe feels that the British colonial district officer and writer, Joyce Cary, portrays his African characters in the novel, Mister Johnson, as stupid and naïve. Achebe’s widely anthologized essay, “An Image of Africa,” is canonical in the postcolonial and race discourse of Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness (1902). Achebe argues that Conrad misrepresents his African characters as nameless types, “dumb brutes,” and “prehistoric” savages. The continuing animalization of the African image in the writing of such an Anglophile as J. M. Coetzee demonstrates the corrosive influence of Conrad and Cary www.abc-clio.com

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and tends to justify the caustic criticism of Achebe. As Achebe says in his essay, “The Novelist as Teacher” (1965), it is against the demeaning background of colonialist literature that he takes up the novel genre to present a vision of African history and humanity that challenges and defies European depictions of precolonial history as simply a long stretch of simple savagery. This defiant persona of the colonized African, the Shakespearean “Caliban,” or the psychotic subject as a speaking subject “talking back” to the master, is a signifying selfidentification and liberation from a debasing objectification. The foregoing is Achebe’s creative discovery as the father of African literature. It has also been the springboard of his influence over succeeding generations of African writers from the mid-twentieth century to the twenty-first century. Beginning from his novels Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), through his Biafran War poetry and his collected essays to his short fiction and children’s writing, Chinua Achebe remains the most widely read, translated, studied, sought after, and honored African writer worldwide because of the global accessibility of his discourse on the preservation of universal human integrity. Obi Iwuanyanwu See also: Literature, African; Nigeria References Achebe, Chinua. “The Novelist as Teacher.” In Morning Yet on Creation Day. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1975. Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” In Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Anchor Books, 1989.

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48 AFRICA, NORTH Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Booker, M. Keith, ed. The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Iwuanyanwu, Obi. “Achebe’s Poetic Drive.” Sentinel Poetry Quarterly 5 (September 2005): 23–48.

AFRICA, NORTH The physical boundaries of the region recognized as North Africa have varied tremendously throughout history. Some consider North Africa to comprise only the former French colonies of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, also known as Le Maghreb. However, the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), founded in 1989, includes Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, although disputes over the former Spanish territory of Western Sahara have sometimes stood in the way of AMU unity. At present, North Africa is generally understood to be all the northern part of the African continent: the area situated between the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea, and extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east. Because of its historical relation to the Greek and Roman empires, North Africa is generally seen by scholars to be more closely related to Europe than to subSaharan Africa. This perception, however, has been sustained by climatic, racial, and religious arguments that are ultimately artificial. The two regions have in fact a long history of contacts as well as deep-rooted religious, cultural, and political ties. The oldest link between North and sub-Saharan Africa, however, is economic, and it dates back to the ninth century BCE, when trans-Saharan trade networks began flourishing as a result of the markets created on www.abc-clio.com

the Mediterranean coast by the Carthaginian Empire. From an Arab perspective, North Africa is known as al-Maghrib (The West), since it was the site of the massive westward expansion of the Islamic Empire. This expansion started in the seventh century, when General Uqbah ibn Nafi’s Arab army invaded the region, and culminated in the annexation of southern Spain by General Tariq ibn Ziyad in 711. Arab expansion in North Africa set a precedent for later European endeavors in the Americas, emblematized in Columbus’s voyage in 1492. This was the same year that the city of Granada fell to the Christian Reconquista, which marked the end of the Islamic states in Spain. Today, North Africa is almost entirely Sunni Muslim, with the exception of a few minorities such as Coptic Christians in Egypt and Sephardic Jews in Morocco and Tunisia. Morocco in particular maintained close ties with its former Jewish citizens living in Israel. In the 1970s, King Hassan II of Morocco (1929–1999) paved the way for peace negotiations in the Middle East and the signing of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in September 1978. The indigenous inhabitants of North Africa, the Imazighen or Amazigh, better known by their Arabic name as Berbers, have almost uniformly converted to Islam. Although their language subsists in its various dialects, they often equally claim an Arabic identity and are sometimes called Arabized Berbers by anthropologists. In spite of the similar economic and political circumstances of Latin America and North Africa, both legacies of European colonialism, North Africa’s American contacts have been mostly limited to ties

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with the United States. This is especially true for Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, which constitute the westernmost edge of the Arab world and are therefore geographically closer. Thus, North Africa eventually became a crucial figure in American conceptions of “the Arabs.” Morocco is the North African country with the longest history of political links to the United States. In fact, the Sultanate of Morocco in 1777 was one of the first states to seek diplomatic relations with the newly independent United States. Contacts between the two countries grew significantly after World War II, and especially after the 1942 military landing of mostly American Allied troops near the cities of Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. In January 1943, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt met with the sultan of Morocco, Mohammed V (1909–1961), during the Casablanca Conference and encouraged him to seek independence from French colonial rule. After World War II, Morocco occupied a major place in the American imagination and became a focus of literature, art, and media. The writings of the American author Paul Bowles (1910–1999), who settled in the city of Tangiers in the late 1940s, drew the American public’s attention to the country. Later on, Morocco became a favorite destination for American tourists—especially hippies in the late 1960s—and grew increasingly important in relation to the American movie industry. Indeed, Morocco moved from providing the setting of movies made in Hollywood, such as Casablanca (1942), to being the shooting location for numerous films such as Orson Welles’s Othello (1949). In later Hollywood productions, Morocco’s landscapes stood in place of a wide gamut of geographical locations, ranging from www.abc-clio.com

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the Arabian Peninsula (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962) to Somalia (Black Hawk Down, 2001). During the cold war, Morocco generally sided with the United States, while neighboring states usually adopted neutral positions. Tunisia, for instance, observed a policy of neutrality because it depended on foreign aid for its development and maintained good relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union in order to reduce its reliance on either one. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, cultural links between the United States and Morocco were reinforced in the field of education. The Moroccan American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange, established in 1982, administers a wide range of research grants and facilitates academic and cultural exchanges between American and Moroccan scholars. In 1995 the first private English language university in North Africa was inaugurated in the town of Ifrane, with contributions from Saudi Arabia and the United States. Most of North Africa’s foreign trade links are with Europe. However, attempts to expand commerce and economic exchanges with the United States have moved transatlantic connections forward. Tunisia’s economic relations with the United States have advanced in spite of disagreements over the Gulf War in the early 1990s, and trade accords between the two countries have been negotiated since Morocco’s signing of a free trade agreement with the United States in 2004. After Mauritania’s independence from France in 1960, the SOMIMA mining company began exploiting copper deposits in the Akjoujt region, partly thanks to U.S. investments, but the mine was closed in 1978. In 2001 Mauritania took further steps toward developing its

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mineral resources by allowing a North American mining company to prospect for precious metals in the Akchar region. With the growing interest in Islam and the Arab world that has emerged since the 1970s, and especially since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Arab side of North African identity has been paramount, and today, more often than not, the region is considered part of the Middle East rather than Africa. For instance, alZammouri—enslaved by Spaniards in 1511, named after his native Berber town of Azemmour on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, and brought to what is now Florida in 1528—is now celebrated as the earliest Arab immigrant to the New World in a permanent exhibit in the ArabAmerican National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. That the full complexities of a Berber-Arab identity could thus be elided is a testament to the American interest in North Africa mainly as a portal into the Arab world. Consequently, although Sudan is usually considered to be in East Africa, it has sometimes been included in North Africa because the northern part of the country is largely dominated by Arabic speaking Muslims who identify themselves as Arabs. Tensions between northern and southern Sudan have resulted in armed confrontations throughout the 1980s and 1990s and erupted in a violent conflict in the Darfur region when an Arab militia was created in response to attacks on government installations. Hostilities reached such proportions that in 2005 the situation in Darfur was described as genocide against the “nonArab” population, and it remains a major problem in Sudan. Various countries, including the United States, have supported a www.abc-clio.com

plan to send UN peacekeepers to Darfur and have put pressure on the Sudanese government to bring an end to the fighting. Ziad Bentahar See also: Algeria; Libya; Mauritania; Morocco; Sudan (Darfur Region); Tunisia References Edwards, Brian. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Gelb, Norman. Desperate Venture: The Story of Operation Torch, the Allied Invasion of North Africa. New York: William Morrow, 1989. Morse, Kitty. “Esteban of Azemmour and his New World Adventures.” Saudi Aramco World 35, no. 2 (March–April): 2–9. Prunier, Gérard. Darfur: Ambiguous Genocide. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Taha, Abdulwahid Dhanun. The Muslim Conquest and Settlement of North Africa and Spain. London: Routledge, 1989.

AFRICA, PRECOLONIAL The term “precolonial Africa” can refer to any period of African history prior to the conquest and occupation of the continent by Europe. It is often used also to refer specifically to the century prior to direct European colonization of Africa, from approximately 1780 to 1884, the year when the Berlin Conference laid down the guiding principles for European powers to carve up Africa among themselves. It is hard to generalize about Africa’s development during this period, as the continent exhibited a wide variety of regional variation in terms of political, economic, social, and cultural change generated both by external and internal forces, such as Western military technology, economic pressures of the shift from slaving to “legitimate trade” and the impact of the Industrial Revolution, European exploration, and missionary

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activity associated with Christianity. All of these activities would free Europe from the fringes of the continent, establishing “informal empires” that would subsequently be transformed into formal ones at the end of the century. In addition to a changing relationship with Europe and North America, precolonial Africa also experienced internal forces that rocked the continent, including the rise of jihadist movements in West Africa, the emergence of new commercial empires in East Africa, tentative steps toward modernization in North Africa, and the explosion of new military powers in South Africa. In North Africa, the precolonial century saw the decline of the Ottoman Empire’s control and the increase of European powers’ influence, indirectly via the gun trade and directly via intervention and occupation. North Africa had begun to be incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 but had not experienced many benefits of such an association. Repeated bouts of plague and drought resulted in drastic demographic decline, economic stagnation, and political instability. By the nineteenth century, there was little loyalty toward the Ottomans and local leaders began to exert their independence from Istanbul. In Egypt the Mamluk Beys outmaneuvered the Ottoman sultan, and in 1760 Ali Bey set Egypt on a new path of autonomy. When the French invaded in 1798 to undermine British influence in the region, Egyptian nationalism flared and new military and administrative opportunities opened up to young, ambitious men. In 1805 Muhammad Ali turned on his Ottoman counterparts, seized control of Egypt, declared himself “pasha,” and began the expansion of Egypt’s control in the region. More importantly, Ali began the www.abc-clio.com

modernization of Egypt. His activities soon threatened British interests in Asia. As such, the British undermined his efforts and stalled his progress. Ali’s success in Egypt was also linked to expansionist policies on slaving that negatively impacted the peoples of Nilotic Sudan. His influence, at its peak, reached into modern-day Ethiopia and northern Uganda, to the corner of Zaire, and into Darfur. The stateless peoples of the Upper Nile, predominantly the Dinka, experienced the brunt of the trade and remember it as a time of insecurity and devastation, a time when “the earth was spoilt.” It is also the time when the foundations for the Sudanese conflicts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century were laid between the Arab and African populations of the Sudan. Under Muhammad Ali’s successors, Egypt opened itself to foreign investors and began to incur growing debts to European bankers. Modernization was clearly desirable, but it was expensive, and by the 1870s Egypt was unable to repay or meet interest payments on its loans. As a result, Britain and France took control of Egyptian finances, setting up an “informal empire” in which Egypt might claim formal sovereignty but had to act under the direction of European powers even though technically it was still an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. Informal empire gave way to formal when, in 1880, Britain took control of the Egyptian government and by extension gained the Sudanic territories. But in 1881 a local rebellion flared in Sudan under the leadership of Muhammad ‘Ahmad ibn ‘Abdallah, who declared himself as Mahdi. The Mahdi seized Khartoum and established control throughout northern Sudan. This independent caliphate was allowed to exist

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until 1898, when the British committed themselves to full colonization of the region. While North Africa renegotiated its relationship with old and new empires and made tentative steps toward modernization, a religious revival movement whose roots came from the north swept across West Africa and established a series of new and powerful Islamic empires. Over many years and miles, Islam was introduced slowly into West Africa via the transSaharan trade routes. Muslim merchants traveled the routes bringing the faith with them, versions of Islam that were often not orthodox Sunni. Over time Islamic religious brotherhoods became important in the routes’ entrepôts, and the Qadiriyya emerged as the most influential. West African rulers often adopted Islam for its secular economic and political benefits, and while some became devout Muslims, many did not, and even fewer attempted to enforce Islamic law or practice on their populations. As a result, Islam became more of a class religion, and while elements crept into traditional African religious practices, the majority of West Africans neither converted to nor practiced devout Islam. Muslim clerics were frustrated with the state of affairs but could do little. From the seventeenth century on, however, some clerics began to confront the situation aggressively through the use of jihad, not only against non-Muslims but also—and primarily—against rulers who were not devout or who tolerated non-Islamic practices within their kingdoms. The main participants in the Islamic reform movements were the Fulbe from Futa Toro in the north of the savannah near the Senegal River. Due to their location, the Fulbe had been among the earliest www.abc-clio.com

groups in West Africa to convert to Islam, and they were also among the first to wage jihad with the result of establishing small imamates in the seventeenth century. In 1725 Alfa Ibrahim Bin Nuhu established Futa Jalon; in 1769 Suleiman Bal established Futa Toro, and subsequently a third imamate was established between Futa Jalon and Futa Toro. These early Islamic states were but the forerunners of an even more extensive jihadist movement of the precolonial era: the most influential, the Sokoto Caliphate, founded by Usman dan Fodio in 1804, had by the 1830s incorporated all of Hausaland in what is today northern Nigeria and northern Cameroon. Usman dan Fodio, a Fulbe scholar of the Qadiriyya brotherhood, capitalized on the rivalry between the Hausa states and internal discontent among the populations to conquer non-Fulbe states. The Hausa rulers could not match the organization of dan Fodio’s followers, let alone their zealous motivation. Fulbe clerics became the new ruling class in Hausaland, and Usman dan Fodio’s success inspired other Islamic reformers in the region, including Sheikh Ahmadu Lobbo of Masina, who had been part of Usman dan Fodio’s movement in Hausaland. Within the area where Fulbe herdsman made up the majority of the population, Ahmadu Lobbo in 1818 led a movement for clerical control over the Fulbe, a kind of internal jihad. His troops conquered Jenne, Timbuktu, and Macina, and he established a second new caliphate at Hamdullahi. Unlike that of Usman dan Fodio, his caliphate experienced tensions with the old ruling classes of the conquered cities and came into conflict with another caliphate, that of Sheikh Umar Tal. Unlike Usman dan Fodio and Ahmadu Lobbo, Umar Tal

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was a member of a new Islamic brotherhood founded in North Africa called Tijanyya. After making the pilgrimage to Mecca, he took the title, al-Hajj Umar and founded a base in Futa Jalon where he recruited followers and imported guns from coastal European contacts. Al-Hajj Umar conquered the non-Islamic Bambara states as well as Islamic states including Hamdullahi in 1862, and he established the largest Islamic empire in West Africa, the Caliphate of Futa Jalon. The legacy of these three Islamic states in the region is important even today. Once established, they brought order, reformed administration, and an expansion of trade to the region. The new reformers overthrew old systems of rule and created a new ruling class. The jihadists strengthened the faith of believers and caused extensive conversions of non-Muslims to Islam. However, non-Muslims also felt the brunt of the negative impacts of the empires, including forced conversions, loss of status, and increased slaving via the trans-Saharan trade routes. As power shifted from old empires to new ones, Islamic reformers were not the only ones to seek out new opportunities. In the upper Niger region, Samori Ture organized a powerful army that held off the French for fifty years. A controversial character, Ture has been remembered as an empire builder, a brilliant military strategist, a nationalist, and an anticolonialist as well as an opportunist and a tyrant. While he was establishing a new empire, the oncepowerful Oyo Empire finally disintegrated as Fulani jihadists from the north penetrated its territory and internal administrative crisis rocked its foundations. As a result, groups once under Oyo’s control began jockeying for supremacy. A series of wars broke out between the principal www.abc-clio.com

Yoruba states of Ijaye, Ibadan, Egba, and Ijebu as they all sought supremacy in the face of Oyo’s decline. These conflicts disrupted trade between 1840 and 1893 to such an extent that the British intervened on the side of Ibadan. As a result of Oyo’s decline and the conflicts between Yoruba states, the kingdom of Dahomey began making incursions into Yorubaland. Initially, the incursions were motivated by Dahomey’s extensive slaving practices, which had depopulated their traditional slave-raiding grounds, but when the British abolished the slave trade, the incursions were motivated by a desperate desire for productive land to grow the new crops the Europeans desired. Dahomey’s economy would never recover from the shift from slaving to legitimate trade, and ultimately the kingdom fell to the Egba. Despite the decline of many traditional African kingdoms, West Africa was not dominated solely by new Islamic powers. In what is today Ghana, the Asante emerged as a powerful empire among the Akan principalities, with a strong, centralized state and diversified economy. In addition to gold wealth, the Asante established a well-equipped army and soon came into conflict with their coastal neighbors, the Fante. Although the suppression of the slave trade temporarily impacted the Asante economically, they quickly retooled their economic activities and continued their expansionist drive in the region. Conflict with the coastal kingdoms and their rising strength also brought the Asante into conflict with the British. Although both groups were interested in the benefits of trade, they spent the majority of the precolonial century engaged in a long series of wars, ending with British annexation of the Asante Empire in 1901.

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In West Africa, religious purification and political decay allowed for the development of new empires. In East Africa, political boundaries were also modified, but primarily due to shifting commercial activities in the region. Coastal trading networks were increasingly controlled by Oman, causing new currents of trade to push into the interior as far as Lake Victoria. Demands for ivory and slaves created a system of trading networks that involved the Nyamwezi of central Tanzania and the Swahili and Afro-Arabs from the coastal ports. The British, as well as the sultans of Oman, benefited from Oman’s centralization of power on the Arabian coast. As a result of the growing interior trade, the sultan of Oman moved his capital from Arabia to Zanzibar to dominate better the coastal ports from Mombasa to Kilwa. The island of Zanzibar was transformed into a commercially based kingdom, aided by the British. Its major economic activities were centered around newly established, lucrative clove plantations on the island and continued trade in ivory and slaves from the mainland. These products ensured a steady supply of guns from the British, which was then used to protect Zanzibar’s control of trade routes and to foment conflict on the mainland to ensure a steady supply of slaves when necessary. Zanzibar’s commercial enterprises flourished and dominated East Africa until the 1860s, when the British Royal Navy finally neared its goal of effectively interdicting the slave trade and Britian’s pressures against slavery in Africa continued. Sultan Bargash faced a difficult position in 1873 as the trading posts were dependent on slaving, but the British threatened to end their support if he did not agree to end the trade. He accepted an antislavery treaty www.abc-clio.com

to ensure continued British protection of the clove plantations and further British military support that increased his control over the coastal region, despite the discontent of the mainland slavers. What the Zanzibar example illustrates is the continuing incorporation of Africa into a global economic network that was increasingly dominated and dictated by Europeans. It also indicates the benefits of cooperating with Europeans to gain access to military technology. The trade relations between African and European states were dominated by the gun trade, and those African rulers who were able to access that technology could easily dominate their neighbors and enemies. As a result, new interior states sprang up as guns made their way into the continent. Military weaponry may have been used by Africans to protect trade and commercial interests in East Africa, but in South Africa, Africans used it for conquest and expansion in conjunction with new African military tactics, resulting in one of the most profound migrations of people the continent had ever witnessed. Indeed, most scholars examine precolonial South Africa through the lens of two great migration experiences: the Mfecane and the Great Trek. Both were seminal events in the history of the region. The Mfecane is a Nguni word used to describe the profound disruptions caused by the rise of the Zulu under the leadership of Shaka. By the mid-eighteenth century, population pressures and traditional cattleraiding practices were creating land tensions among population groups. Three leaders emerged at this time: Sobhuza of the Ngwane, Zwide of the Ndwandwe, and Dingiswayo of Mthethwa. These men developed a new method of military organization

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that integrated local age/grade sets into army regiments, armed them with European weapons, and used them as infantry against their enemies. They all clashed with each other but were not able to dominate the region due to the emergence of a young Zulu named Shaka. Shaka created a highly trained infantry unit and introduced a short stabbing spear as well as the famous “cow’s horns” fighting formation. In 1818 Shaka emerged as the undisputed master of the region. He established his empire via military conquest, expanded his forces, and traded guns with the English. Shaka’s swift rise to power disrupted the region through forced migrations of people who, as they moved, came into conflict with other groups over resources. The success of the Zulu gave rise to smaller new states that adopted Zulu military tactics for their own gain and security. While much of South Africa was wracked by the Mfecane, Africans were not the only ones having to migrate to protect their way of life in the precolonial period. Between 1835 and 1841 between 6,000 and 10,000 Afrikaner men, women, and children trekked northward from the Cape Colony to the Natal and Transvaal. The “voortrekkers” were the descendants of Dutch settlers who had come to the Cape Colony after Holland took over Portuguese interests on the Cape of Good Hope and established a way station in 1652. The Dutch initially were not interested in colonizing the area and actually attempted to prevent contact with the native populations of Khosian and Bantu speakers. But the way station was quickly transformed into a full-scale settlement, and Dutch settlers soon arrived, bringing with them strong agricultural traditions and strict Calvinist Christianity. Known as Boers, the settlers www.abc-clio.com

also quickly established a society with rigid racial prejudices. As the colony went from Dutch to British rule, it was inevitable that the attitudes of the Boers would come into conflict with those of the British, especially after Britain abolished slavery. In response to British authority, the Boers set out on their Great Trek north to establish new colonies far from British rule. The Mfecane had depopulated northward territory and the Boers relocated their families. But clashes with the British could not be avoided, especially after discoveries of gold and diamonds. In addition, tensions between the Boers and African populations increased, and the British could not ignore the Boers’ independent existence as Britain annexed an increasing amount of territory in South Africa. The rest of the precolonial era in South Africa focused predominantly around the expansion of British control of both the African and European population in the region through the Zulu Wars and the Anglo-Boer Wars of 1880–1881 and 1899–1902, respectively, as well as the activities of Cecil Rhodes and the conquest of central South Africa. The South African precolonial experience illustrates a number of changes in the relationship between Africa and Europe, many of which can be seen throughout the continent during this era. It is clear that the abolition of the slave trade and movement to legitimate trade created tensions and caused economic difficulties for many African kingdoms. From the north to the south and the east to the west, this transition was not easy for many African states. Many had participated in the trade and now had to find a replacement commodity, and a great number were confused over the new policy against slaving. Africans showed great resourcefulness and adaptability, so

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that by 1880 the mainstays of Africa’s external trade economy were ivory, gum, cloves, beeswax, honey, wild coffee, peanuts, cotton, rubber, and palm oil. Europe’s Industrial Revolution had created almost an inexhaustible demand for fats and oils. Slave trading posts were converted to outlets for the new trade, and additional commercial enclaves were established. Many of the new products were plantation based and, due to transportation costs and logistics, were concentrated on the coasts. As the slave trade contracted to localized regional markets, new economic opportunities emerged for some Africans able to engage in cash crop agriculture. The early terms of trade benefited Africans as the demand for their products was high and the prices for European imports low. But this would not continue, and by the end of the precolonial era, the benefits had shifted drastically in favor of European interests. The search for new resources in the continent also spurred European exploration. Steamships navigated Africa’s rivers and medical advances against malaria and yellow fever brought down the last barriers to European penetration of interior Africa. But pursuit of economic gain was not the only motivating factor in Europe’s domination of precolonial Africa. Scientific advance and inquiry were also prime motivators in the movement inland. In 1788 the African Association of England formed to send explorers to collect scientific information about Africa, and in 1821 the Geographic Society of France followed suit. Through the expeditions of men such as Mungo Park, Dr. David Livingstone, Heinrich Barth, Sir Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, and Antoine d’Abbadie, Europe “discovered” Africa. This so-called discovery was spurred and www.abc-clio.com

directed by a complex and often problematic mixture of inquiry, acquisition, and transformation represented by exploration, economic development, and missionary activity. Part of the changing dynamic between Africa and Europe during the precolonial age was the introduction of Christianity. In 1800 Christianity was confined to only the coastal regions of Africa, but by 1880 there were a great number of missionary societies active deeper and deeper within Africa. Nineteenth-century Europe underwent a kind of Christian revivalism represented by new humanitarian concern and missionary zeal. This resulted in a great deal of Christian influence on the designs for informal empire that the European powers had in Africa. As a result of missionary activities, African societies were divided into further factions: a small Christian, European-educated African elite and a larger group of traditional and illiterate Africans. There is clear evidence of African openness to new technologies and interest in modernization. The developments in precolonial Africa indicate African peoples’ ability to adapt to profound economic, political, and social changes. There was also no indication that Africans thought of themselves as inferior to Europeans, as evidenced in the diplomatic correspondence from African rulers to European heads of state or in the Ethiopian victory over the Italians. But what a majority of African rulers did not realize was that they were living in a precolonial age. The Europe that clung to the coasts of the continent had undergone a massive transformation via the Industrial Revolution and was no longer content to pursue free trade and informal empire. With that economic transformation emerged a new technology gap

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between Africans and Europeans in the form of new weaponry. While African rulers had armed themselves with European weaponry of the previous age, European powers now had breech-loading rifles. And so within two decades, all of Africa except Liberia and Ethiopia fell to European occupation. By the onset of the twentieth century, the incredibly diverse and complex variety of independent African states and peoples were lumped into forty artificially created colonies. The speed and suddenness of the transition between the precolonial and colonial age in Africa was shocking to Africans, and the subsequent impact destroyed the tentative steps Africa was taking toward independent modernization during the precolonial era, leaving a legacy that the continent is still struggling to overcome. Heather Theissen-Reily References Afigbo, Adiele, et al. The Making of Modern Africa. Vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century. London: Longman, 1993. Ajayi, A. UNESCO General History of Africa. Vol. 6, The Nineteenth Century until the 1880s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Bennet, Norman. Arab versus European: Diplomacy and War in Nineteenth Century East Central Africa. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986. Crais, Clifton. White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-industrial South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hamilton, Carolyn. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998. Hilliard, C. B., ed. Intellectual Traditions of Pre-Colonial Africa. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998. Martin, Bradford G, Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth Century Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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McCaskie, T. C. State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Smith, Robert. Warfare and Diplomacy in Pre-colonial West Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

AFRICA,WEST West Africa has been an historical focal point for the African continent’s economic and political development. The region has been pivotal to the transatlantic slave trade, European colonial expansion, and U.S. interests in Africa during and after the cold war. Across its history, West Africa experienced long periods of migration and as a result contains a plethora of cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. Rich in mineral resources, West Africa has long drawn in outside interests, first via the early Muslim-controlled trans-Saharan trade routes and then via Europe’s coastal trading stations for the transatlantic slave trade. Early economic development in the region resulted in the development of entrepôts (ports of trade) in lucrative and expansive trade routes that created, in turn, powerful precolonial African states; Islamic empires; European colonies; and, finally, independent nation states. The migration of peoples and the expansion of trade routes also encouraged the expansion of Islam and Christianity into the area, adding to an already complex mix of animist African religions. Today, the region contains the modern states of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. The boundaries of these nations are the legacy of the colonial era

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and, consequently, tend to cut across ethnic, cultural, and religious lines. Indeed, all of West Africa’s modern states, except Liberia, were created by European colonialism. Geographically, West Africa refers to the area that stretches from the Nile Valley and Sudan westward to the Atlantic Ocean. It is bordered to the north by the Sahara Desert and extends southward through the savannah belt and the forest regions to the coast. Consequently, West Africa is an area of vast economic variance with climatic zones whose characteristics go from the extremes of desert to tropical rain forest. Four main vegetation belts stretch across the region: the Sahara in the north; the Sahel, a semi-arid region south of the Sahara; the savannah; and the southern coastal region. The savannah belt has long been the site of agricultural activities, including the production of groundnuts, sorghum, and millet. Agricultural activities in areas of cleared forest include the production of cocoa, yams, coffee, and cassava. In the Sahel the population engages in herding and related activities. West Africa also contains some of the continent’s greatest rivers: the Gambia, Niger, Senegal, and Volta. These rivers and their tributaries provide vital trade routes both internally and to and from the Atlantic Ocean. Prior to European expansion, West Africa saw constant transregional migration as populations traveled through the Sahara and Sahel and into the forest regions. The earliest settlers in the region appeared around 12,000 BCE. Subsequently, substantial migrations of agriculturalists and pastoralists would take place until around 2000 BCE. With the onset of the Iron Age in 400 BCE, the region witnessed the establishment of more settled and sophisticated civilizations, and evidence shows www.abc-clio.com

extensive sedentary farming and herding practices by the fifth century CE. The region’s largest ethnic groups, the Yoruba, Ibo, Nupe, Fon, and Asante, developed powerful kingdoms through trade and by harnessing the resources of the savannah and the forest. From 500 CE to 1600 CE the states of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay dominated the region, benefiting from the lucrative camel caravans that crossed the Sahara Desert. The region and its emerging kingdoms were first integrated into a larger economy via a series of lucrative trans-Saharan trade routes that extended down from the North African coast. Between 200 and 700 BCE, a network of caravan routes using camels connected West Africa to the larger Arab world. This trade system transformed the region economically, culturally, and politically. Demand for gold led to an increase in mining in what are now Ghana, Senegal, and Nigeria. This gold had global importance; prior to the discovery of the Americas, Europeans received the majority of their gold supplies from West Africa via these trade routes, and West African gold motivated Europeans to make direct contact with the African kingdoms, bypassing the Muslim Afro-Berber traders who controlled the Saharan routes. Additionally, Africans traded ivory, gum, kola nuts, and slaves for Mediterranean and Eastern goods such as silk, cotton, beads, mirrors, dates, and salt. From 500 to 1600 CE, Ghana, Mali, and Songhay emerged as dominant kingdoms with large urban centers on the economic basis of these caravan routes. Alongside the trade in gold, West Africa also had an extensive and growing slave trade. The slave trade along transSaharan routes dates to approximately the ninth century and served primarily the

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Mediterranean. Arab peoples justified enslaving Africans on religious grounds and used them for military service, administration, domestic service, and concubinage. Extensive trade facilitated the urbanization of the region; cities such as Jenne, Gao, Timbuktu, and Kumbi all became both trading centers and centers of culture and learning. This development was linked to the introduction of Islam into the region. By the tenth century, Muslim Berbers controlled the trade routes and the routes became conduits for not only goods and economic activities but also for the expansion of Islam. The mid-eleventh century incursions of the Almoravids into the region also facilitated the expansion of Islam as Muslim scholars traveled the routes. The cities of Gao and Timbuktu become important centers of trade and Islamic study. By the eleventh century many rulers in the southern Sahara and the Sahel had accepted Islam. Conversion brought legal, political, administrative, cultural, and economic benefits to elites, and Islam spread to the ruling classes and mercantile elite. African elites did not force the conversion of their populations and Islam did not disrupt indigenous African shamanist and animist beliefs. Still, as Islam spread into the region, it united some ethnic groups and laid the foundations for the development of Islamic states such as Kanem and the small Hausa states at the southern ends of the caravan routes such as Kano and Katsina. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the focus of trade was shifting from the Sahara to the Atlantic as Europeans arrived on the coast of West Africa, seeking direct contact with the Africans who controlled the sources of gold and other goods. The Portuguese were the first to arrive due to the invention of the caraval, a ship that www.abc-clio.com

could sail into the wind and whose hull construction could overcome the strong oceanic currents. Hugging the African coastline, the Portuguese arrived on the Guinea coast in 1445 and established Elmina, a fortress on the coast, in 1482. While the Portuguese expeditions were sent by Prince Henry the Navigator, whose interest in Africa included scientific, political, and religious concerns, economic motives became paramount. The Portuguese brought the first African slaves to Lisbon in 1441. While Prince Henry the Navigator hoped to convert them to Christianity and return them to Africa as missionaries, the result was the start of the transatlantic slave trade. The trade expanded substantially when the Spanish conquest and occupation of the Caribbean and the Americas led to a precipitous decline of the indigenous population as a consequence of disesase and abuse. Acute labor shortages threatened the expansion of the plantation system in the Spanish colonies. By 1521 both the Portuguese and Spanish were taking Africans captives directly from the western and central coasts of Africa, as well as relying on African middlemen for slaves. As the European colonial presence in the Americas grew, so did the demand for labor, especially after the introduction of sugar cane. Soon, Spain and England were both importing slaves into their American colonies from Africa. The Dutch, French, Swedish, Danes, and Germans were also active along the West African coast. Competition between European powers was fierce. Areas of the coast quickly were named by Europeans based on the products they found there: the Grain Coast, Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, and Slave Coast. It was the Slave Coast that would experience the most intensive

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European involvement in West Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. Added to the older trans-Saharan trade in slaves, the transatlantic slave trade expanded the scale of African slavery. The two slave-trading systems were conducted simultaneously for almost four centuries. While the transatlantic slave trade was far more extensive, both systems removed millions of people from the continent and resulted in a large global economic network. The sheer size and geographical reach of the transatlantic slave trade led to profits that dwarfed those of the trans-Saharan trade. The transatlantic slave trade would become the centerpiece of European–West African relations for centuries. The Dutch, using their strong naval power, wrested control of the Gold Coast of West Africa from the Portuguese. Under the Dutch, the slave trade grew rapidly. After 1650 the Dutch, French, and English also developed plantations in the Caribbean and North America. After 1700 the British took control of the slave trade from the Dutch and the slave trade reached its peak in exports, replacing gold as the main export out of West Africa and blending the Gold Coast into the Slave Coast. By the eighteenth century, the enslavement of Africans for the transatlantic trade was also carried out by African coastal kings and the elders of West and Central African societies. Very few Europeans marched inland to capture slaves. However, when African rulers seemed recalcitrant to expand their slaving activities outside of traditional practices, Europeans were quick to foster conflict among African societies to increase the number of slaves taken as prisoners of war. www.abc-clio.com

They did so by trading guns for slaves and creating alliances with one group against another. The impact of the slave trade on West African governments, economies, and societies was varied. Wealth and power in West Africa moved away from the Sudan and Sahel toward the coast, causing the once lucrative and expansive trans-Saharan routes to decline drastically after 1700. Some groups were able to expand as a result of participating in the trade and acquiring European firearms, which gave them a technological advantage over their neighbors. By 1730, 180,000 guns had been sent to West Africa. New coastal populations of urban entrepreneurs, artisans, and traders, often the mixed-race offspring of European traders and African women—for example, the Wolof Signares of Goree and SaintLouis—spurred the economic reorientation of West Africa from the north to the south. But many societies suffered greatly from the increase in warfare. Some African rulers, such as King Agaja of Dahomey in 1724 and those of Futa Toro in 1789, tried to stop the trade but were unable to gain widespread support. Groups without central governments became easy prey for the trade, and African industry stalled as the most productive adults were seized and manufactured goods poured in from Europe, undermining local African industries. African societies were devastated culturally, economically, and politically by the prolonged crisis of losing their most productive members. By the time of the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, much damage had already been done across the centuries.European and American activities in West Africa were not limited to trade but also included promoting Christianity. While guns tended to interest African

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rulers more than the Bible, Christian missionaries set out to establish a presence in West Africa and experienced varied levels of success, especially after the 1827 establishment of Fourah Bay College in the British repatriation colony of Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone was founded by Granville Sharp in 1787 as a settlement for London’s black poor, black American Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, and rebel Jamaican former slaves, known as Maroons, as well as those Africans recovered from slaving ships at sea. The colony had a difficult beginning and experienced conflicts with the local Temne and Mende peoples. Nonetheless, it ultimately became a base for the British missionary activities. Following the Sierra Leone example, Captain Paul Cuffe, a successful African American and Quaker shipowner in the United States, attempted to gain American support for a repatriation colony in Africa. On December 21, 1816, prominent Americans, including James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster, became members in the newly formed American Colonization Society (ACS). In 1819 the ACS received $100,000 from Congress, and two years later it established a settlement on the west coast of Africa. As in Sierra Leone, the early settlers faced disease and hostile natives while also lacking sovereignty, as the colony was managed by the ACS. Despite these hurdles, between 1824 and 1864, 19,000 African American repatriates settled in Liberia, in addition to 5,000 recaptured Africans from slave ships. Although the British and the French had become the dominant European powers in West Africa by the nineteenth century, European hegemony in West Africa was challenged by an Islamic revivalist www.abc-clio.com

movement that swept across the Sahel. In the nineteenth century, Islamic religious brotherhoods were no longer willing to coexist with traditional African practices, and a series of Fulani-led jihads swept across Western Sudan seeking to purify the faith in the region. These jihadist movements led to the establishment of powerful Islamic states in the Sahel, including Uthman dan Fodio’s Fulani Empire in the first decade of the nineteenth century, which defeated the Hausa states, followed in 1818 by Seku Amadu’s Massina Empire, which defeated the Bamber, and, in the 1860s, by El Hadj Umar Tall’s Tokolar Empire, which came to control most of Mali. These empires controlled the Sahel region until the late nineteenth century, when European powers extended their control from the coast inland. The British and French quickly consolidated their control over West Africa under the principles of the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–1885. Britain established indirect rule over the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria, and France established direct rule over Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Niger (French West Africa). Germany claimed Togoland but quickly lost it after World War I, and the territory was turned over to Britain and France by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The only area in West Africa not claimed and colonized by Europeans at this time was the nation of Liberia, because of its ties to the United States. The Great Depression of the 1930s, frustrations with colonial rule and racism, and the presence of an increasing number of educated Africans returning from abroad resulted in the rise of militant demands against the colonial system. While early nationalist movements pressed for a more

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representative system, younger Africans called for the full dismantling of colonial rule. During and after World War II, Britain and France responded to reformist demands. In 1946 France liberalized its colonial governments and Britain introduced new colonial constitutions that allowed the election of more Africans to colonial governments. But these mild reforms were not sufficient. Between 1944 and 1948 the first mass-based political parties began to emerge in West Africa, the first in the continent. The National Council of Nigeria, the Convention People’s Party in Gold Coast, and the Rassemblement Democratique Africaine in French West Africa all committed themselves to winning full independence. The most influential of all emerged in Ghana under Kwame N’krumah, who became the major influence in independence movements within West Africa. In 1957 Ghana became the first subSaharan colony to achieve independence; subsequently, Britain dismantled its colonial control in the region. France followed suit and, by 1960, all major French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa were on their way to independence. N’krumah and the independence movements of West Africa were influential in promoting Pan-Africanism and connecting West African intellectual and political leaders into a global network of black intellectuals that included Aime Cesaire, W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, all of whom advocated a common destiny for all black African peoples around the world and an emphasis on African cultural community and spirituality against European and U.S. materialism. By 1974 all West African colonies had gained their independence. Independence www.abc-clio.com

led to a mix of one-party rule and democracies. Much of the region’s postindependence era has been characterized by great potential but also great failings. Independent West Africa has suffered from high levels of political corruption and instability. Early movements toward democracy fell to the imposition of oppressive one-party states, military dictatorships, and autocratic rulers. The cold war divided the region between U.S. and Soviet spheres of influence, resulting in the empowerment of West African militaries and their generals while economic development languished. During and after the cold war, conflicts over economic resources, complicated by ethnic tensions, have fueled brutal civil wars. Petroleum and regional competition caused the bloody Biafran secessionist movement and civil war between 1967 and 1970. Conflicts also broke out in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire, with resources such as diamonds fueling the conflicts. Ghana and Burkina Faso experienced military coups and the region’s conflicts have created immense refugee and humanitarian crises. Political and economic development has been complicated by increasing environmental challenges and crises. The region experienced devastating droughts in 1968–1974, 1977–1978, and 1983–1985 and the desert edge of the area is expanding. The resulting aridity and soil desiccation leads to the further removal of forests as farmers attempt to survive. Lake Chad, which lost 90 percent of its area between 1960 and 1983, illustrates the severity of the problem of desertification; whole countries such as Niger and Mali risk turning into deserts. As a result of the political, economic, and environmental problems facing the

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region, there have been serious attempts at interstate cooperation. However, competition over economic resources, including diamonds and oil, continues to fuel conflicts, and the legacy of colonialism continues to keep trade and economic development oriented to the southern coast and overseas rather than among West African countries themselves. In an effort to address such concerns, a concentrated effort was made in 1975, when the Treaty of Lagos established the Economic Organization of West African States (ECOWAS). This organization included all West African nations and has sought to promote trade, cooperation, and self-reliance among its members. In the last decades of the twentieth century, it also became a vehicle for resolving regional conflicts collectively. Responding to the threat to regional security posed by civil war in Liberia in the 1990s, which included conflict with neighboring Sierra Leone, ECOWAS intervened militarily with ECOMOG, the ECOWAS Monitoring Group, a multinational armed force. ECOMOG has intervened in the internal conflicts of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau with some limited success in ending the region’s brutal conflicts. However, ECOMOG troops are generally ill-equipped and poorly trained and have been implicated in human rights abuses. Still, the attempt to find regional solutions may aid West Africa’s stability. As the twenty-first century opens, positive signs of political change are visible. Sierra Leone and Liberia have ended their conflicts and their governments are focused on rebuilding and reconciliation; former Liberian president Charles Taylor, whose soldiers committed shocking and systematic atrocities, was arrested as a war criminal and faces charges in the International www.abc-clio.com

Criminal Court. Throughout the region there are other examples of a peaceful transition to genuine multiparty constitutional systems of government, as in Senegal. West Africa’s global cultural influence is considerable. The region has produced some of the continent’s most influential writers, such as Nigerian authors Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, and Buchi Emecheta and Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana. Musicians from the region have popularized their traditional musical forms of expression, such as Palm Wine music from Sierra Leone; M’balax, most associated with Youssou N’Dour; Makossa by Manu Dibango; and Juju by Iko Darro and King Sunny Ade. Other West African musicians have fused traditional music with black American forms to create new forms of expression; the best known, Afrobeat, was popularized by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti of Nigeria. While West Africa was first integrated into the Atlantic World via a brutal traffic in humanity, today the region’s connections across the Atlantic come primarily through immigration of choice. With the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1865 in the United States, African immigration boomed and the U.S. census of 2000 indicated that over one-third of all immigrants from Africa to the United States come from West Africa. The region’s wealth of natural resources also ensures continued integration in the Atlantic World and the international global economy. Heather Theissen-Reily References Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor, 1994. Boahen, Adu. Topics in West African History. New York: Longman, 1986. Collins, Robert. Western African History. New York: Marcus Wiener Publishing, 1990.

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64 AFRICAN INSTITUTION,THE Crowder, Michael. West Africa. New York: Longman, 1977. Davidson, Basil. West Africa before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850. New York: Longman, 1998. Gomez, Michael, and Martin Klein. Reversing Sail: A History of the Africa Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Soyinka, Wole. You Must Set Forth at Dawn. New York: Random House, 2006. Webster, J. B., and Adu Boahen. West Africa since 1800. New York: Longman, 1980.

AFRICAN INSTITUTION,THE The African Institution was an earlynineteenth-century British abolitionist group that was formed after Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Out of the environment following abolition came a new antislavery group, the African Institution. Virtually all of the top abolitionists of the day were involved, including Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Clarkson. The group planned to promote Africa’s well-being—by, among other things, spreading practical information throughout the continent—and circulate useful information about Africa throughout Britain. Later, the group also pushed for emancipation and lobbied for more direct action in order to stop Africa’s slave trade. The group also supported British pressure for other European countries to end their trading and maintained close correspondence with North American abolitionists. Limited financial resources hampered the effectiveness of the African Institution in pursuing these programs, but the group did manage to keep African and antislavery issues at the heart of Britain’s foreign policy. This was relatively easy, given the close personal connections that top group members www.abc-clio.com

enjoyed with many prominent British politicians. These connections, however, did not guarantee the African Institution complete success in pursuing its goals. The efforts of the group in developing Africa are most clearly seen in Sierra Leone, a colony that seemed an ideal testing ground for projects. The close attention that the organization gave Sierra Leone ensured that the colony stayed on the minds of relevant segments of the British government. The group recommended that slaves freed from captured slave ships be settled in Sierra Leone. While how much credit the group deserves for Sierra Leone’s increasing success and stability is debatable, it certainly did all it could toward building up the colony. The organization also advocated on Paul Cuffe’s behalf as he attempted to bring American free blacks to the colony, though Cuffe, an American free black Quaker, only managed to bring several dozen colonists to Sierra Leone before his death in 1817. The involvement with Cuffe and Sierra Leone demonstrated clearly the group’s transatlantic focus. The group’s activities would change and expand with the times. Members supported the creation of slave registries in all of the West Indian possessions; the registries were expected to improve slave conditions and also inhibit illegal slave importation. The group also collected information on the East African and Indian Ocean slave trades and corresponded with Henri Christophe, Haiti’s first and only black king. Foreign slave trading also became a more and more important issue for the African Institution. The group kept British diplomats well supplied with antislavery literature at the congresses of Vienna, Aix-laChapelle, and Verona, while also working

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AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH

to keep the British delegations on track in terms of raising slave-trade issues with other nations’ delegations. Other European powers did, in fact, either modify or abandon their slave trades during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a partial success for which the African Institution can take some credit. The African Institution was an organization whose primary goals were only partially fulfilled, however. Though the group’s agenda did become part of national planning and international concern because of its connections with the British government, these contacts did not ensure the pursuit of all of its plans. Nonetheless, the African Institution was the primary national British antislavery organization between 1807 and 1823, when it was largely replaced by the new Antislavery Society. The African Institution came to an effective end in 1827. Wayne Ackerson See also: Abolitionism, British; Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Sierra Leone; Wilberforce, William References Ackerson, Wayne. The African Institution (1807–1827) and the Antislavery Movement in Great Britain. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2005. Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church is a Christian evangelical church founded to embrace a congregation with an African heritage and to spread Christian gospel to African Americans and people of www.abc-clio.com

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African descent around the globe. It established missions to Liberia and Sierra Leone. The AME Church followed the Christian tradition of evangelizing and spreading the gospel. The AME Church was formed as a protest against the treatment of African Americans by the white members of the St. George Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. In November 1787, Bishop Richard Allen led a group of African Americans out of the predominately white church after they were pulled off of their knees while praying during the church service. Although African Americans were always expected to stand when seating was limited, there were even fewer places available than usual during that November worship service, since the church was constructing a larger gallery. Therefore, the seats previously designated for blacks were needed for white members. Being pulled off their knees during prayer catalyzed the formation of the independent African Methodist Episcopal Church. Officially established in 1816, the “African” in the title connected the new denomination with an African heritage. Although it separated from the Methodist Episcopal Church, the AME Church and its leaders maintained the strong Methodist commitment to John Wesley’s philosophy, including evangelizing the world. However, the AME Church felt a special commitment to spreading the Christian gospel to African Americans and people of African descent around the globe. Early in its history, the AME Church sent missionaries such as David Smith and William Paul Quinn to perform missionary work in the West and South. In Canada, the AME Church worked among escaped slaves, founding the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Missions to the

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Portrait of Richard Allen with other African Methodist Episcopal bishops. Founded in 1787 by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, the African Methodist Episcopal Church is the oldest black religious denomination in the United States. The church was formed as newly imposed segregated practices forced blacks to sit in the balcony, away from the white congregation. (Library of Congress)

South after the Civil War are credited with transforming the AME Church from a small northern community to a national church and the largest black Methodist denomination. The year 1816 also marked the formation of the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded by Robert Finley, a white Presbyterian from New Jersey. Finley, who opposed the harsh treatment of slaves, argued for a government-funded colony on the west coast of Africa for the freed blacks of America. Finley felt that blacks, once out of slavery, could prosper, and he hoped the creation of such a colony would lead to the abolition of slavery. He also hoped the colony would bring the gospel to Africa and remove an unacculturated group from America. www.abc-clio.com

There were varying views of the ACS within the AME Church. In 1820 Bishop Daniel Coker of the AME Church established the first ACS colony in Liberia. However, Richard Allen and many of his supporters distrusted the ACS and began seeing Africa as a reminder of a perceived black inferiority and a lack of readiness to become full American citizens. Although the AME Church retained the title “African,” the word was removed from thousands of black schools, churches, and benevolent societies across America. While the 1830s saw a marked decline in emigration and association with Africa in the AME Church, the church remained committed to evangelical work at home and abroad.

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Foreign missions began early in the church’s history. In 1820 an AME missionary, Daniel Coker, began evangelizing Africans in Liberia and Sierra Leone. In the 1830s the AME Church sent Scipio Beanes and Richard Robinson to establish AME churches in Port au Prince, Haiti. Led by Bishop Henry McNeal Turner in the 1880s and 1890s, the church renewed its interest in international missionary work. In 1896 the AME Church accepted the Ethiopian Independent Church of South Africa into the denomination. The South African church would become the largest of the AME Church’s foreign branches. The first permanent AME mission in Africa began in Liberia in 1878, led by Samuel Flegler. Flegler, as well as his successors—Clement Irons, S. J. Campbell, and, in the 1890s, William H. Heard—all made fleeting efforts to evangelize Africans. In 1915 the total AME membership in Liberia was 436. The AME Church had slightly better success in Sierra Leone. From its inception, the Freetown congregation successfully attracted emigrants from Canada who had fled to Sierra Leone during the American Revolution. In 1885 the Freetown membership was in sharp decline, however, so the leadership requested an official affiliation with the AME Church to boost its sagging numbers. The AME Church sent J. R. Frederick to establish the congregation. Along with Edward Blyden, Frederick instituted a Dress Reform Society that encouraged the acceptance of traditional African clothing and language, which was a departure from previous missionary philosophies in the church, which had emphasized the importance of embracing Western dress and culture. In 1888 another AME missionary, Sarah Gorham, opened a small mission 75 miles inland at www.abc-clio.com

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Magbele. By 1891 the Sierra Leone Church had over 500 members. Lack of funding remained a recurring issue. Gorham’s mission closed in 1894 and in 1897, Frederick’s congregation withdrew its affiliation with the AME Church. Women played a large role in the AME Church’s missionary efforts. From the inception of the Women’s Mite Missionary Society in 1874, led by Mary A. Campbell, its first president, the organization raised money for local societies and missionary work in Haiti, Santo Domingo, and West Africa. Sara J. Duncan served as the general superintendent of the AME Church’s Woman’s Home and Foreign Missionary Society. However, women faced obstacles to their full participation in the missionary process and some, such as Amanda Smith, found the limitations placed upon female missionaries in the AME Church too restrictive. In April 1865, Smith joined the Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia. In November 1870, at the Fleet Street AME Church in Brooklyn, New York, Smith felt the Holy Spirit was calling her to preach. Smith gained renown speaking before white and black audiences at “holiness” revivals. Because the AME Church would not sponsor female missionaries traveling abroad unless their husbands accompanied them, some women in the AME Church worked with white denominations that had fewer prohibitions against female missionaries. In 1878, in conjunction with the white Methodist Episcopal Church, Smith engaged in missionary efforts across the globe and eventually traveled to London, India, and Africa. In 1890 she returned to the United States and became involved with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Chicago. Although many of the fledgling communities

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founded by male and female missionaries in the church struggled for their existence throughout the nineteenth century, the commitment of the AME Church to foreign missions rarely wavered. Julius Bailey See also: Christianity (African American); Liberia; Sierra Leone References Angell, Stephen W. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African-American Religion in the South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Campbell, James T. Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Dodson, Jualynne E. Engendering Church: Women, Power, and the AME Church. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.

AFRICAN SQUADRONS African Squadrons were naval patrols mainly organized by the British whose main duty was to intercept slaver ships. Although the English had been the major slave traders in the eighteenth century, the British Parliament passed a bill in 1807 by virtue of which the slave trade was considered illegal. This bill had been finally adopted thanks to Thomas Clarkson’s and William Wilberforce’s efforts and the support of the British prime minister, Lord Grenville. In the United States the issue of slavery had already been present at the framing of the Constitution in 1787, but the only measure concerning slavery taken at the time was a section of the document barring Congress from abolishing the African slave trade for a twenty-year period. At the end of those twenty years, Congress passed the Slave Importation Act (1807) www.abc-clio.com

that on the one hand censored the international exportation of slaves but on the other did not affect the U.S. internal or coastal slave trade. The centrality of cotton production in the southern states and the huge demand for Cuban sugar and coffee were partly responsible for the measures adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1807. The British organized squadrons—for example, the British West Africa Squadron— to implement the law and to ensure that there were not any British ships trading in slaves along the African coast. Soon these squadrons demanded the right to board and inspect ships of neutral and enemy lands such as the United States and France. The United States did not want the British to investigate their ships. The Royal Navy practice of impressment, by which it seized U.S. vessels indiscriminately, caused tensions between the two nations. Ships of other slaver nations, such as Portugal and Spain, began throwing the human cargo overboard when chased by the Royal Navy in order to avoid capture, both to lighten the weight of their ships, as well as to disguise their purpose. In 1819 the American Congress passed the Slave Trade Act, by which President James Monroe allowed warships to play an active role in detecting and suppressing the trade in human beings. The Slave Trade Act also created Liberia as a West African country in which newly freed slaves could resettle. Monroe required U.S. ships to detect and take into custody any ship with the American flag that was involved in the slave trade. The first five U.S. navy vessels sent to Africa to fulfill their squadron duty were the Cyane, Hornet, John Adams, Alligator, and Shark. The conditions under which the squadrons had to work were terrible in

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terms of temperature and sanitary conditions. Surgeons in the ships could only treat the symptoms of many mosquito-induced fevers and illnesses. The two-year period assigned to an African Squadron was a painful test for any member of the crew. The American African Squadron was far less successful than the British squadrons. During the nineteenth century about 7,750 slaving voyages were attempted, but only 21 percent of the ships were captured by the African Squadrons. In the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, approximately 200,000 Africans were shipped, of which 10 percent were rescued by these naval patrols. Laura Gimeno-Pahissa See also: Abolitionism, British; Slavery (History) References Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery. New York: Verso, 1997. Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery. New York: Penguin, 1993. Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

AFRICAN UNION On May 25, 1963, thirty African heads of state assembled in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and signed a charter for the Organization of African Unity (OAU) before a 500person delegation of ministers, nationalist party leaders, a United Nations (UN) representative, and the Chilean ambassador from the Organization of American States (OAS). The OAU established four organs www.abc-clio.com

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in a descending order of hierarchy: the Heads of State and Government; the Council of Ministers; the General Secretariat; and the Commission of Mediation, Conciliation, and Arbitration. In 2002 the OAU was reconfigured as the African Union. The Pan-African philosophy of the OAU was rooted in a transnational movement of black leaders from the Americas, Europe, and Africa that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. W. E. B. Du Bois, known as the Father of Pan-Africanism, attended the founding Pan-African Congress of 1900 and later presided over the historic Fifth PanAfrican Congress of 1945 convened in London, where future OAU leaders Kwame N’krumah and Jomo Kenyatta were present. Du Bois bequeathed the leadership of the Pan-African Congress to N’krumah, who then spearheaded the formation of the West African National Secretariat in 1946, the Union of African Socialist Republics in 1946, and the Committee of Independent African States in 1958. These unions, along with the UN declaration of the Year of Africa in 1960 and a series of closed and open deliberations amongst the Monrovia and Casablanca blocs, were instrumental in forming the OAU. Domestic and international affairs in the United States also affected the political evolution of the OAU. The OAU’s denunciation of brutality against civil rights protesters in the Jim Crow South caused great alarm in the U.S. State Department and compromised the OAU’s official policy of neutrality during the cold war. But some OAU member states facilitated U.S. cold war initiatives by condemning Soviet aggression in Africa, accepting U.S. aid for development, and lauding the efforts of the

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United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan addresses the African Union Summit in Banjul, Gambia on July 1, 2006. (UN Photo by Mark Garten)

federal government in thwarting the violent backlash of racist segregationists. Malcolm X returned from a 1964 meeting of the OAU inspired by its call to African unity yet questioning the merit of independent states that accepted U.S. foreign aid. Upon its founding, the OAU immediately confronted the tensions wrought by language barriers, the geographical divides inherited from the colonial era, and the official policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of member states. Starting in the mid-1970s, the OAU attempted to mitigate the economic devastation of famine and debt repayment through initiatives like the Lagos Plan, and its first troop dispatch went to Chad to settle a military conflict in 1981. In the early 1990s the OAU began deliberations on the HIV/AIDS pandemic occurring throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In 2002 the African Union replaced the www.abc-clio.com

OAU to form a counterweight to the European Union and economic globalization. It had the mission of creating one African currency, one defense system, and an AU head of state. The January 2006 summit of the fifty-three member states of the AU met in Khartoum, Sudan, to discuss the recent dispatch of AU troops to Sudan, HIV/AIDS, and the conflicts in northern Uganda, the Congo, and Algeria. Margaret M. Stevens

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See also: Economic Community of West African States; N’krumah, Kwame; Pan-African Congress; Pan-Africanism. References Brown, Michael B. Africa’s Choices: After Thirty Years of the World Bank. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. “The Addis Ababa Charter: A Commentary.” International Conciliation, no. 546 (January 1964): 25–32.

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AFROCENTRISM Murray, Rachel. Human Rights in Africa: From the OAU to the African Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. N’krumah, Kwame. Africa Must Unite. New York: Praeger, 1963. Salim, Salim Ahmed. The OAU at 30: Reflections on the Past and Prospects for the Future. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: OAU Information Service, 1993. Wallerstein, Immanuel. Africa, the Politics of Unity: An Analysis of a Contemporary Social Movement. New York: Random House, 1967.

AFROCENTRISM Afrocentrism is an African American ideological and educational movement supporting and promulgating pride in peoples of African descent by locating the origins of black civilization in Egypt. A major facet of Black Nationalist historiography, Afrocentrism asserts the significant contributions of black peoples to human history and culture. A challenge to Western cultural paternalism, Afrocentrism posits not only that black culture provides a credible alternative to European culture, but also that European culture is in some ways itself derivative of black culture. Proponents of Afrocentrism would accept and even embrace that idea that it provides a radical historical, cultural, and political perspective, but they would reject the charge of critics that it depends too much on pseudo-historical claims and speculation. Afrocentrism has its basis in the widely accepted theory that humankind developed on the fringes of the forests and plains of East Africa and from there spread to all corners of the world. The centerpiece of Afrocentrism is the claim that the Pharaonic civilization of the Nile Valley was in many of its essential aspects an African, rather than a Mediterranean or a Middle Eastern, civilization. Since the www.abc-clio.com

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Pharaonic civilization had great influence throughout the Mediterranean world, the subsequent ascendancy of Greek civilization—and through it, Roman and Western civilization—can therefore be seen as also owing a significant debt to cultural sources in black Africa. Critics have argued that Afrocentrists have grossly overstated the general influence of the Nubian kingdoms on Pharaonic civilization and the impact of their relatively brief hegemony over the lower Nile Valley near the end of the Pharaonic epoch. Afrocentrism began in the United States as an educational movement intended to address deficiencies in the education of African American students. Central to addressing other deficiencies was the perception that the denigration of black culture left African American students with a diminished sense of self-esteem and that the obvious way to raise the self-confidence of African American students was, therefore, to celebrate the past achievements and the future possibilities of black culture. Critics have argued that Afrocentrism serves only to further isolate African Americans from the mainstream, Eurocentric culture. But proponents have countered that the teaching of an Afrocentric curriculum would also serve to broaden the perspectives of students with European ancestries and would enhance their ability, as well as that of African Americans, to function meaningfully within an increasingly multicultural world. The most prominent proponent of Afrocentrism has been Molefi Kete Asante, whose The Afrocentric Idea (1987) remains the seminal text in the movement’s history. He has subsequently authored the influential collection of essays, Malcolm X as Cultural Hero and Other Afrocentric Essays (1993). Another notable Afrocentrist has been the

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historian Yosef ben-Jochannan, whose books have included Black Man of the Nile (1970) and Africa: Mother of “Western Civilization” (1971). Martin Kich See also: Black Athena; Literature, African American; Négritude; Race, History of References Asante, Molefi K. Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. Asante, Molefi Kete, and Ama Mazama, eds. Egypt vs. Greece and the American Academy: The Debate over the Birth of Civilization. Chicago: African American Images, 2002. Conyers, James L., ed. Afrocentric Traditions. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2005. Dompere, K. K. Africentricity and African Nationalism: Philosophy and Ideology for Africa’s Complete Emancipation. Langley Park, MD: I.A.A.S., 1992. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gray, Cecil Conteen. Afrocentric Thought and Praxis: An Intellectual History. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001. Henderson, Errol Anthony. Afrocentrism and World Politics: Towards a New Paradigm. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995. Keto, C. Tsehloane. The Africa-Centered Perspective of History: An Introduction. Laurel Springs, NJ: K. A. Publishers, 1991. Keto, C. Tsehloane. Vision and Time: Historical Perspective of an Africa-Centered Paradigm. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001. Mazama, Ama. The Afrocentric Paradigm. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. Ziegler, Dhyana, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Afrocentricity: In Praise and in Criticism. Nashville, TN: James C. Winston, 1995.

AFROFUTURISM Afrofuturism is an African American literary and artistic movement addressing the transatlantic issues of displacement, home, and belonging. In speculative fiction, some www.abc-clio.com

of the major recurring themes have included alien intrusion and subjugation, forced displacement, and the quest to return to the native land and to regain a lost sense of cultural location. All of these themes would have a very natural appeal to African American writers and readers, and yet until the last few decades of the twentieth century, there was little African American visibility in the genres of science fiction and science fantasy. At the literary forefront of the Afrofuturist movement has been the Jamaican-Canadian novelist Nalo Hopkinson. She is best known for her novels Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and Midnight Robber (2000), in which she focuses on Afro-Caribbean women dealing with the dislocation that they experience in other settings. Beyond their inventive narratives and compelling themes, the novels are notable for their use of Afro-Caribbean dialect. Hopkinson’s African American forerunners in the genre have included, most prominently, the American novelists Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler, both of whom have won major awards. Delany has earned a reputation as a novelist interested in intellectual movements and cultural theories. In almost all of his novels, he has treated the intersections of language, myth, and artistic expression. His most acclaimed novels have included Babel–17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967). Butler is best known for her fivevolume Patternists series (1976–1984), which focuses on a group of telepaths who are obsessed with creating a race of superhumans. More recently, she has written the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989), which treats a postapocalyptic world in which aliens conduct genetic experiments with human beings. Afrofuturism is

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not just a literary movement. It has drawn adherents from across the whole spectrum of the arts. Some of the more prominent of these artists have included George Clinton, Kodwo Eshun, McLean Greaves, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Keith Piper, Sun Ra, and Fatimah Tuggar. Martin Kich See also: Literature, African American References “Afrofuturism.” Social Text 71, no. 2 (Summer 2002). Nelson, Alondra, ed. Afrofuturism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Rollins, Lisa M. “Models of Black Resistance: Negritude, New Negroism, and Afrofuturism.” MA thesis, Claremont Graduate University, 2000.

AGRICULTURE Historically, agriculture arose independently in Africa and the Americas, but is followed, from the fifteenth century to the present, by extensive exchanges of crops and farming practices. Evidence from paleobotany points to the Americas rather than Africa as the earlier region of plant domestication, a surprise given that humans colonized the Americas only around 10,000 BCE, making them the last of the habitable continents to be settled. Despite this late date of settlement, the transition to agriculture was rapid. The oldest corncobs establish that humans first grew corn as early as 6000 BCE in southern Mexico and the Yucatan. At the same time, the people of the Andes Mountains began to grow the potato. These two crops made possible the empires of Mesoamerica and South America. The longevity of these empires evidences a regular food surplus, an achievement all the more remarkable given that pre-Columbian people had neither www.abc-clio.com

plow nor draught animal. The collapse of the Mayan civilization may signal a decrease in corn yield in the ninth century CE, a decline one hypothesis attributes to the spread of an insect-borne corn virus. This hypothesis implies a genetically uniform corn crop, though it need not imply monoculture. Pre-Columbian agriculture was diverse enough to include several varieties of bean, squash, pumpkin, tomato, pepper, and tobacco in addition to corn and potato. The 4,000 years between the settlement of the Americas and the rise of agriculture contrast with the more than 100,000 years that separate these events in Africa. Anatomically, modern humans originated in Africa 130,000 years ago, and they must have gathered plants for food from the outset. Despite the long association between people and plants, humans in Africa did not make the transition to agriculture on their own. Rather, the inhabitants of the Nile River Valley borrowed crops and implements, notably the plow and sickle, from the Near East around 5000 BCE. The Nile Valley is well suited to the requirements of agriculture; the annual innundation of the Nile deposits enough silt to free farmers from the need to fertilize their soil. Barley and wheat had the same importance in Egypt as corn and potato had in the Americas. The small farmer, averse to risk, must have prized barley for its drought tolerance, an attribute the firstcentury CE Roman writer Columella noted in his On Agriculture. Along with barley, farmers grew emmer and einkorn wheat for porridge, bread, and beer. By the Roman period, Egypt was the granary of the Mediterranean Basin. In addition to barley and wheat, Egyptian farmers grew peas, lentils, chickpeas, and several

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types of vegetable. Egypt was the model for agriculture throughout North Africa. Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa cultivated a different group of crops. The cultivation of both the yam and oil palm dates to 3000 BCE, sorghum to 2000 BCE, millet to 1000 BCE, and bananas to the first millennium CE. Having been separate for millennia, the agricultural systems of Africa and the Americas moved toward one another after 1492, though convergence has been incomplete. The voyages of Christopher Columbus awakened Europeans to the possibility of transferring crops in both directions across the Atlantic Ocean. Europeans dictated the terms of this exchange, and they concentrated on the cultigens of Eurasia and the Americas rather than on those of Africa. Even had they adopted an “Africa first” strategy, they would have bumped up against biological and ecological constraints. Soils are thin in many regions of Africa and vulnerable to erosion. The clearance of forests exacerbates the problem of erosion. Soils in equatorial Africa tend to be acidic, requiring the application of calcium carbonate before they can be farmed. The tropical climate of equatorial Africa has hindered the transplanting of crops from temperate regions, in part because the diseases of tropical Africa have been a barrier to the introduction of crops. The potato is adapted to cool weather and spread rapidly to northern Europe after 1500 but not to tropical Africa, where fungal diseases afflict the crop. Tobacco, indigenous to Virginia, grows poorly in the thin soils of Africa, in part because it rapidly depletes the soil of nutrients. Corn, on the other hand, is native to the warm climate of Mesoamerica and, more than any other crop, has transformed www.abc-clio.com

African agriculture. Europeans introduced corn into Africa around 1500, planting it wherever they established colonies. So successful has corn been that it dethroned sorghum and millet as the leading crop in several regions of Africa. Between 1976 and 1980 corn tallied 37 percent by weight of all crops harvested in eastern and southern Africa, whereas sorghum and millet combined for only 14 percent. The percentages are similar in sub-Saharan Africa. Only in West Africa has corn not displaced sorghum and millet. From the perspective of biology and ecology, the transfer of crops from Africa to the Americas should have been straightforward. Sorghum, for example, is well suited for cultivation throughout the midwestern United States. As late as 1970 farmers in western Ohio grew it on a few thousand acres, but by 1980 soybeans, a crop that swept the Midwest after World War II, had replaced sorghum. As with soybeans, corn has excluded African crops from the Americas. Corn was the primary cultigen when Europeans began to settle the Americas in the sixteenth century. Rather than reconfigure agriculture, Europeans deepened their dependence on corn, forging the Midwest into a monolith of corn and hogs. The result is a stable system of production that farmers could change only at prohibitive cost. More than any other African crop, rice transformed American agriculture. Native to East Asia, rice came to colonial America from Ghana in 1672. During the 1680s Europeans planted a hardy variety of rice from Madagascar along the Carolina coast, whose marshland and climate are ideal for rice cultivation. The farmers of Carolina exported 1.5 million pounds of rice in 1710, 18 million in 1730, and 76 million in 1770.

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Rice was a plantation crop. If the interchange of crops between Africa and the Americas was incomplete, the rise of the plantation nonetheless marked a stark convergence of the agricultural systems of these regions in the form of African labor and the crops of Africa, the Americas, and Eurasia. Sugar fueled the growth of the first plantations. In 1493 Columbus brought sugar, a crop native to northern India, to the Caribbean. The Portuguese, who had established sugar plantations as early as 1441 in the Old World, carved out in 1538 the New World’s first sugar plantation in Brazil. The British followed suit in Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands in the seventeenth century, as did the French in Louisiana after 1700. Production grew in Jamaica from 500 tons in 1669 to 7,100 tons in 1691 and in the Leeward Islands from 1,505 tons in 1678 to 8,015 tons in 1699. Britain’s sugar islands more than tripled production between 1663 and 1698. North of the sugar plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean, and Louisiana and the rice plantations of Carolina were the tobacco lands of Virginia and Maryland. In 1612 John Rolfe transplanted a variety of tobacco from Trinidad to Virginia. In 1627 Virginia exported 500,000 pounds of tobacco, in 1635 it exported 1 million pounds, and in 1660, 15 million. Cotton was the last crop to sink roots in the plantations of America. The cotton lands stretched from Georgia to Texas. Two types of cotton vied for the market. Long staple cotton grew along the Carolina and Georgia coast but yields declined inland, where short staple cultivars prevailed. The cotton gin eased the separation of seeds from the fiber, thereby removing the bottleneck in production. The southern United States produced 3,000 bales of cotton in 1790, www.abc-clio.com

178,000 in 1810, 732,000 in 1830, and 4.5 million in 1860. By 1850 this region produced two-thirds of the world’s cotton. Plantations, whether they grew sugar, rice, tobacco, or cotton, devoured African slaves. Between 1526 and 1810, 10 million slaves crossed the Atlantic. During these years the plantations of Brazil absorbed 3.6 million slaves, the Caribbean 3.3 million, Spanish Florida 1.5 million, and British North America and the United States 400,000. Among the Caribbean Islands, the Leeward Islands imported 2,000 slaves between 1640 and 1650, 10,100 between 1651 and 1675, and 32,000 between 1676 and 1700. Intent on controlling slaves through drudgery, the British planters in the Caribbean forced slaves to toil without benefit of the plow. Plantation agriculture substituted labor for technology, the reverse of the trend toward mechanization on farms that employed free labor. Technology occupied a prominent place in the agriculture of the United States from its early days. Among his accomplishments, Thomas Jefferson designed a plow, and from the eighteenth century the agricultural societies offered prizes for the development of farm implements. The horsedrawn reaper of 1833 and the steel plow of 1837 launched a series of innovations that have culminated in the modern planter and combine. Science was the other side of the coin. Proponents of agricultural innovation championed the application of science to farming. George Washington advocated federal support for agricultural science, and in 1862 Congress created the U.S. Department of Agriculture and gave states land to establish agricultural and mechanical colleges. The agricultural experiment stations were the research arm of these colleges, and in the early twentieth century, they began

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breeding high-yielding crops. Hybrid corn swept the midwestern United States in the 1930s and 1940s and Mexico, South America, and Africa after 1950. Highyielding varieties of potato in the United States and the South American highlands and wheat in North Africa supplanted traditional cultivars after 1940. Fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and irrigation doubled yields. These new cultivars were genetically uniform. Although they were resistant to a range of pathogens, the evolution of new strains of pathogen left farmers vulnerable to losses. The spread of corn viruses through the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in 1945 and between 1962 and 1964, the Southern Corn Leaf Blight throughout the United States in 1970 and 1971, and the Late Blight of Potato in Ecuador and Peru since 1997 have diminished yields between 15 and 90 percent. The formative years during which science and technology came to shape agriculture coincided with the period of European colonialism in Africa. As had been the case in the Caribbean and British North America, plantations monopolized wealth. Large farmers grew cash crops for export at the expense of food for local consumption. By 1900 the French had established rubber plantations on 9 million acres in Zimbabwe. In Angola coffee production increased from 4,000 tons in 1920 to 118,000 tons in 1961. Coffee plantations expanded from 297,000 acres to 1.2 million acres between 1948 and 1961. By 1974 Angola was the world’s third-leading coffee grower. Colonial Nigeria exported cocoa, palm oil, and groundnuts. The Shire Highlands of Malawi produced cotton, coffee, and tobacco. Planters required peasants to work their estates as many as six months a year in lieu of rent, a policy that www.abc-clio.com

undermined subsistence farming. Uganda, Tanzania, Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Nigeria produced cotton; Senegal groundnuts; Zaire palm oil; and Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, and Ethiopia cocoa. In Gambia planters converted land from rice, a staple of the peasant, to groundnuts for export. In Guinea rubber and groundnuts displaced rice. Postcolonial Africa has tried with varying success to feed its burgeoning population by growing food for domestic consumption rather than cash crops for export. In 1968 Nigeria launched a program to increase land under irrigation from 32,000 acres to 677,000 acres in ten years. Much of the $2.7 million Nigeria earmarked for the program lined the pockets of contractors rather than benefiting farmers, while the country’s population grew faster than food supply. In 1970 Nigeria imported just 1.6 percent of its food, but by 1979 that figure had jumped to 21 percent. Between 1977 and 1981 grain imports rose from 1.4 million tons to 1.3 billion. Other countries fared better. Starting in 1932 farmers in Senegal supplanted groundnuts with millet, manioc, and taro for domestic consumption. In Kenya beans and bananas have diversified an agriculture that once concentrated on coffee and cocoa. Between 1966 and 1970 sub-Saharan Africa exported on average 1.3 million tons of grain per year. In 1981 Zimbabwe exported 1 million tons of its record 215 million tons of corn. At issue is whether farmers in Latin America and Africa can replicate the model of intensive agriculture. The proponents of this model assert that only the growing of high-yielding crops can avert famine in Africa and other populous regions. Opponents point to the ecological and

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human costs of intensive agriculture. Monoculture robs the land of its native foliage, hastens erosion, and depletes nutrients. The use of agrochemicals pollutes groundwater and endangers wildlife. Mechanization displaces labor, pushing the rural poor into overcrowded cities. Intensive agriculture squeezes the small farmer between low commodity prices and the high cost of agrochemicals. Small farmers launched the Neolithic Revolution in the villages of Peru and Egypt. Whether they can survive in an era of highly capitalized agriculture and global markets is an open question. Christopher Cumo See also: Agriculture, Sustainable; Development, International; Green Revolution; Rice in the African Diaspora References Cohen, Ronald, ed. Satisfying Africa’s Food Needs: Food Production and Commercialization in African Agriculture. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1988. Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1623–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Harrison, Paul. The Greening of Africa: Breaking through in the Battle for Land and Food. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. McCann, James. “Maize and Grace: History, Corn, and Africa’s New Landscape, 1500–1999.” http://www.ruafrica. rutgers.edu/events/media/ maize_and_grace_jamesmccann[1].pdf.

AGRICULTURE, SUSTAINABLE In 1987 the UN’s Brundtland Commission defined “sustainable development” as meeting people’s needs today without compromising www.abc-clio.com

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the ability of generations in the future to meet their own needs; in turn, sustainable agriculture generally refers to an agriculture that is economically viable, socially equitable, and environmentally sound, not only at the present, but also for the future. This paradigm, initially rooted in the environmental and organic food movements of the United States and Europe, has become increasingly visible in the arena of agricultural development, with particular implications for Africa and the Americas. In developing countries, sustainable agriculture stands as an alternative to extractive colonial and postcolonial plantations of export crops planted in monoculture, and it has been largely embraced as an alternative to the Green Revolution’s “silver bullet” package of hybrid varieties and agrochemical inputs, which has largely failed to deliver its promised results to smallholder farmers. Indeed, small farmers who adopted the new Green Revolution technologies found that yields of new hybrid crop varieties often fared more poorly on their marginal land than their own traditional varieties. Similarly, mechanization and monocropping as prescribed by extensionists contributed to increased rates of soil degradation on hillside farms, as well as to increases in pest and disease infestation and concomitant pesticide use. Unlike the input-intensive approach of the Green Revolution, sustainable agriculture is knowledge-intensive, founded on agroecological principles. Sustainable agriculture’s agroecological approach is not a one-size-fits-all technical solution—there is no panacea recipe of broad-spectrum pesticides, precise fertilizer dosages, or silver bullet genetically modified seed purporting to solve world hunger. Rather, agroecology uses knowledge of ecological processes to

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work within the framework of a particular existing natural system in order to enhance beneficial biological relationships. Instead of a package of inputs, sustainable agriculture relies on a set of guiding principles that can be adapted in unique fashions to a particular agroecosystem. First, dependence on external inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides should be minimized in conjunction with the improvement of on-farm nutrient cycling. This includes the cycling of crop residues back into the soil, as well as integration of livestock into the farming system and extensive applications of organic matter such as manure, compost, or mulch. By “closing the system,” nutrient losses and the unnecessary importation of off-farm inputs can be reduced. Where conventional chemical agriculture focuses on “feeding the plant” with measured doses of synthetic mineral fertilizer, sustainable agriculture emphasizes instead “feeding the soil” with organic matter in order to compensate for topsoil lost to erosion from tillage, wind, and rain and to revitalize soil microbial populations. Soil microbes metabolize organic matter, releasing nutrients in the mineral form available for uptake by plants. In addition to serving as a nutrient-rich feedstock for microbes, soil organic matter absorbs moisture, vital in the sandy, arid soils of the Sahel and parts of the Americas. Additionally, it acts as glue holding together soil particles, slowing erosion. The second principle of sustainable agriculture is the enhancement of functional biodiversity. This is accomplished in a number of ways. By maintaining habitats for beneficial insects that parasitize pest species, a farmer can reduce dependence on pesticides. Application of organic matter fosters soil microbial diversity, helping to www.abc-clio.com

stem soil-borne pests and pathogens as well as improving nutrient cycling. Increased spatial and temporal crop diversity helps to buffer the farming system from environmental or market shock. Unlike in a monoculture system, when a falling price or crop failure spells economic disaster or food insecurity for a farmer, a diverse cropping system spreads out environmental or market risks across several crops. If a crop’s price falls or if the crop fails due to pest or disease pressure, a farmer relies on his other crops. Similarly, polycultures also serve as barriers to the rapid spread of host-specific pests and diseases. A pest specific to a particular crop can quickly destroy a monoculture, whereas in a polyculture or intercropped system, the pest’s trajectory is broken by the presence of other plant species. Third, the enhancement of beneficial interactions or “mutualisms” between agroecosystem components is fundamental. For example, the inclusion of nitrogenfixing leguminous plant species into a cropping system improves soil fertility, just as the presence of beneficial insect populations can reduce pest pressure and thereby improve crop performance. Finally, the integration of existing farmer knowledge (of soils, insects, crops, and so on) as the basis of enhanced management techniques promotes sustainability of practice. Unlike conventional industrial agricultural production, sustainable agriculture is sitespecific and rooted in a farmer’s knowledge of his fields and farm. Sustainable agriculture is imbedded largely at the field and farm levels and is adapted to the heterogeneity of specific local agroecosystems and farming practices. Indeed, many sustainable agriculture approaches are built on foundations of local knowledge. For

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example, Haitian farmers have developed a range of techniques to address the constraints they face, such as erosion, pests, and volatile markets. Rock walls and residue embankments slow erosion. They rely on polycultures of maize, sorghum, taro, yams, malanga, pigeon pea, and cowpea, and numerous multipurpose trees to enhance soil fertility and control pests. Similarly, in many parts of Africa, farmers have developed strategies to rehabilitate degraded soil by stopping erosion with rock bunds that trap nutrient-rich sediment. Velvetbean, a nitrogen-fixing cover crop, is widely used in coastal West Africa and East Africa as fertilizer, erosion control, and animal fodder. Throughout the world, development projects employing sustainable farming techniques have boasted significant crop yield increases. Sustainable agriculture, however, addresses more than simply ecological sustainability and productivity. In addition to being environmentally sound, it must also both be economically viable for the long term and socially equitable. For example, while industrial-scale U.S. conventional and organic agriculture are economically viable, they are both still monoculture systems that rely heavily on off-farm inputs (either synthetic or organic) and exploit cheap Latin American migrant labor. A more sustainable system would remain profitable, provide workers with decent working conditions and a living wage, and be more biologically diverse with fewer offfarm inputs. While total sustainability may seem an impossible goal, an asymptote that can never quite be reached, the paradigm of sustainable agriculture serves as a framework to help improve the long-term stewardship of the land for current and future www.abc-clio.com

generations. Helping to buffer farmers from the risk of crop failure due to globalwarming-induced climatic variability, sustainable agriculture is of particular interest to farmers in the drought- and hurricaneprone zones of Africa and the Americas. Additionally, sustainable farming practices can help protect developing country farmers from the economic variability associated with increasingly globalized markets, guaranteeing a modicum of income and food security. Nathan C. McClintock See also: Agriculture; Biotechnology; Globalization; Green Revolution References Altieri, Miguel. Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Nicholls, C. I., and M. A. Altieri. “Conventional Agricultural Development Models and the Persistence of the Pesticide Treadmill in Latin America.” International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology 4 (1997): 93–111. Pretty, Jules N. Regenerating Agriculture: Politics and Practice for Sustainability and SelfReliance. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 1995. Reij, Chris, and Ann Waters-Bayer. Farmer Innovation in Africa—A Source of Inspiration for Agricultural Development. London: Earthscan Publications, 2001.

AIDOO, AMA ATA (1942–) Ama Ata Aidoo is a prominent Ghanaian woman novelist and dramatist, writing in English and addressing women’s issues in Africa and in Europe. Relentlessly confronting patriarchal attitudes in culture and society, Aidoo has probed into the intricate relationship between the neocolonial mentality and African women’s condition in her composite literary production and through her political activism.

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Born in the Central Region of Ghana, she studied at Cape Coast and at the University of Ghana, where she produced The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), thereby entering the male-dominated African literary scene. The play centers on Ato’s return to Ghana with his African American wife, Eulalie, and dramatizes the latter’s conflict with her inlaws, highlighting burning issues like the cultural gap between Africans from different continents, the duty of motherhood, and African involvement in the slave trade. The theme of slavery recurs in her next play, Anowa (1970). In the late nineteenth century, the eponymous protagonist defies societal pressure and marries the man she loves, but his trading in humans will lead her to another rebellion, this time against her husband, and to a tragic conclusion. Stylistically, both plays recover traditional literary genres, such as the folktale. Her fiction is similarly molded. No Sweetness Here (1970) is composed of eleven stories where storytelling, plurality of voices, and direct speech recreate in Ghanaian English the communal atmosphere of oral literature. Worth mentioning is “For Whom Things Did Not Change,” where the old servant, Zirigu, cannot distinguish his former colonial master from his present Ghanaian ones. In her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy (1977), narrated alternately through prose and poetry, the Ghanaian protagonist Sissie travels to Germany and London on a scholarship, experiences the contradictions of European society, stigmatizes the neocolonial alienation of Africans who choose to live there, and finally returns home. Between the late 1960s and the 1980s, she taught and lectured in Ghanaian, Tanzanian, Kenyan, and U.S. universities, besides actively engaging in politics as director of institutions such as the Ghana www.abc-clio.com

Broadcasting Corporation and the Arts Council in Ghana. Beginning in 1982 she served as Ghana’s secretary for education for eighteen months. She later moved to Zimbabwe, where she published her poetry in Someone Talking to Sometime (1985), a collection of colloquial pieces dominated by a pensive mood, with a section on her experiences in New Orleans. The early 1990s saw another collection of poems on African and gender matters, An Angry Letter in January (1992) and the novel Changes (1991), winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, which follows the vicissitudes of the divorced working woman Esi and her controversial choice to marry for love a man who already has one wife. Using polygamy as a possible alternative for an educated woman in today’s Accra, and alternating (as in Killjoy) prose with poetry and scriptlike dialogues as a way to revitalize the continuum of traditional verbal discourses, Changes confirmed Aidoo’s penchant for experimentation and her restlessness with imposed forms and ideas. The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1997) followed in its wake, reaffirming her belief in the emancipation of African women as a necessary step toward national advancement— also a guiding principle in her essays and in her involvement with women’s associations and NGOs. She has also published two books for children, The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories (1989) and Birds and Other Poems (1989). Pietro Deandrea

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See also: Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, African; Ghana; Literature African References Aidoo, Ama Ata. The Dilemma of a Ghost. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1965. Aidoo, Ama Ata. Changes—A Love Story. New York: CUNY, Feminist Press, 1991.

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AKAN 81 Azodo, Ada Uzoamaka, and Gay Wilentz, eds. Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999. Odamtten, Vincent O. The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading against Neocolonialism. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994.

AKAN Akan is a Ghanaian linguistic and cultural group whose folk culture, especially proverbs and textile art, define them as a people. The Akan are one of the bestknown cultural groups in Africa. Four million strong, they are the largest cultural grouping of Ghana, representing approximately half of the country’s population. The Akan Abusua (family), or clans, include the Ahanta, Akuapem, Akwamu, Akyem (Abuakwa, Bosome, Kotoku), Asante, Bono, Fante, Kwahu, Nzema, Sefwi, and Wassa. The Asante and Fante are the two largest of these subgroups. While the political, social, religious, and customary practices of the Akan are very similar, each clan shares a common cultural heritage and language, which—added to their historical tradition of group identity and political autonomy—contributed to the formation of individual nation-states during the precolonial period. Linguistically, the collective term “Akan” refers to a group of languages belonging to the Kwa subfamily of the Niger-Kordofanian language family spoken in both Ghana (south of the Volta River) and Côte d’Ivoire. What distinguishes one group from another are their linguistic variants (dialects), which include Akuapem, Asante, and Fante; the former two are referred to as Twi. Akan is the first language of approximately 44 percent of Ghana’s population, with Asante Twi being the most widely www.abc-clio.com

spoken of the variants. Making use of figurative speech, the Akan are probably best known for their proverbial wisdom. Proverbs, popular maxims used to express practical truths gained through experience and observation, are expressed by the Akan not only in words but also through music, particularly traditional drumming, and dance, as well as through textile art, specifically adinkra and kente cloths. Proverbs constitute an important characteristic of the Akan languages and are used to imbue communication with life. It is through proverbs that we gain a better understanding of the Akan outlook on existence, both physical and spiritual. What distinguishes the Akan from many of the other cultural groupings in Ghana is that they are a matrilineal people, tracing their lineage and inheritance through the mother’s bloodline. Most importantly, although Christianity and Islam attempted to colonize their spirituality, they have not departed from their ancestral and spiritual culture, which defines them as Akan. Religion, understood in a broad sense, is the foundation upon which Akan society and culture is built. Cosmologically, the Akan universe is essentially spiritual. In addition to their belief in a Supreme Being (Nyame), Mother Earth (Asase Yaa), and a host of intermediaries (Abosom), the Akan believe in the omnipresence of the ancestors (Nsamanfo), made evident by daily acts such as the pouring of libation and the throwing on the ground of the first morsel of food, as well as by periodic ancestral ceremonies. Akan culture is ancestral in that the Akan believe that the Nsamanfo, although they no longer occupy physical space on earth, maintain important roles in each person’s life. The most important of their roles is that of direct messenger to Nyame, as opposed to the Abosom, who

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are messengers from Nyame. It is believed that the Nsamanfo are spiritual beings with the power to bring good fortune to the living, specifically members of their lineage, or if dissatisfied, to show their displeasure by causing ill fortune, sickness, and so on. They may manifest themselves in human form, in dreams, or through trance, and their spiritual presence may be invoked to assist the living. Prayers, offerings, and sacrifices are most often offered to them to seek their blessings and to avoid any misfortune. Spirituality, therefore, permeates all aspects of Akan society, and most activities are informed by its ancestral cosmology and culture. Yaba Amgborale Blay See also: Ancestor Worship; Ghana; Religion (Africa) References Buah, F. K. A History of Ghana. London: Macmillan Education, 1980. Opoku, K. A. West African Traditional Religion. London: FEP International Private, 1978.

AKRAM,WALI (1904–1994) Wali Akram was the founder of the First Cleveland Mosque and author of the Moslem Ten-Year Plan. Akram was born Walter R. Gregg in Bryan, Burleson County, Texas. He studied electrical engineering at Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College before working a series of odd jobs. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri, during the early 1920s where he met Sheik Ahmad Din, a local leader of the nonconformist Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam. Akram converted to Islam, took on his Muslim name, and a year later married his wife, Kareema. After studying Islam for several years, he became a missionary in the Midwest and eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. There he helped to www.abc-clio.com

establish an Ahmadiyya mosque, but within a few years the African American congregation became distrustful of the motives and activities of the movement’s Indian missionaries. Akram and most of the congregation rejected their Ahmadiyya connections and beliefs and turned toward orthodox practices of Islam. In 1937 the First Cleveland Mosque was established, becoming the only orthodox mosque in America to be run entirely by indigenous Muslim converts. At about the same time, Akram developed the Moslem Ten-Year Plan, a proposal to address the economic and educational needs of African American Muslims in the midst of the Great Depression. Akram later toured the nation in an effort to unite all American Muslims and in 1943 was elected president of the United Islamic Society of America. In 1957 he became one of the first African Americans to officially make the pilgrimage to Mecca and was thereafter known as Al-Hajj Wali Akram. He spent the remainder of his career advocating the Ten-Year Plan and leading his mosque as imam until he retired in the early 1980s. Brent Singleton See also: Islam, African American References Dannin, Robert. Black Pilgrimage to Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lo, Mbaye. Muslims in America: Race, Politics, and Community Building. Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 2004.

ALGERIA Algeria’s territory, the second largest of any African nation, consists mostly of a desertic region in the south that is separated from the coastal plains of the Mediterranean shore by the Atlas Mountains. A significant amount of Algeria’s foreign exchange

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consists of the export of petroleum and natural gas products to the United States. Algeria was under the domination of a weakening Turkish Ottoman Empire when France invaded it in 1830 in response to a diplomatic dispute dating back three years earlier. France’s main purpose at the time was to impose a naval blockade to solve the problem of Turkish-sanctioned piracy in the Mediterranean. As early as 1847, the French incorporated the territory of Algeria into France proper. Consequently, France was more attached to Algeria than to its other colonies, which made the war of decolonization that led to Algeria’s independence in 1962 particularly violent. To obtain independence, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) employed diplomatic activity abroad—particularly in Egypt and at the United Nations—as well as guerilla warfare and urban terrorism that the French army countered with the use of torture. Algeria’s struggle for independence set an example for other decolonizing African nations in the 1960s. From the African American perspective, Algeria was a model of resistance against racism. The writings on the Algerian Revolution by the West Indian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon were an inspiration for the foundation of the Black Panther Party by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966. Malcolm X had a close relationship with Ahmed Ben Bella, the first president of independent Algeria. Additionally, Malcolm’s meeting with Taher Kaid, the Algerian ambassador to Ghana, in May 1964 had a particularly great influence on him. Furthermore, Malcolm and the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara were expected to strengthen the links between North Africa and the Americas by appearing as keynote speakers at an international www.abc-clio.com

conference in Algeria in February 1966. However, the venture was undone by Malcolm’s assassination and by Ben Bella’s imprisonment after a coup led by Colonel Houari Boumedienne on June 19, 1965. Later on, in January 1981, Algeria played a major role in mediating the release of U.S. hostages held in Iran. However, Islamism became an increasingly important part of Algerian politics. After the army canceled the January 1992 second round of elections for the National People’s Assembly following the victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in the first round in December 1991, violence by Islamist groups escalated into a yetunresolved civil war. After September 11, 2001, the U.S. government studied terrorist and counterterrorist tactics in French Algeria. In 2003 Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, The Battle of Algiers (1966), which documents three years of the Algerian war for independence, was screened at the Pentagon as a case study to better understand the problems faced by the United States in Iraq. Ziad Bentahar See also: Colonialism; Decolonization, African; French Empire; Malcolm X; Terrorism References Ageron, Charles-Robert. Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1991. Isham, Christopher, Richard Clarke, and Michael Sheehan. “The Battle of Algiers: A Case Study.” Disc 3. The Battle of Algiers, DVD. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. The Criterion Collection, 2004.

‘ALI PASHA, MUHAMMAD (1769–1849) Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha (Mehmet Ali) was the viceroy of Ottoman Egypt, conqueror of Sudan, and founder of Egypt’s Muhammad

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‘Ali dynasty, its last dynasty. He was also an important reformer in Egypt. Born in Kavala, a fishing village on the Macedonia coast, he was probably of Albanian ethnic origin. After Muhammad ‘Ali’s father, Ibrahim Agha, died, he was reared by the governor of Kavala. He married one of the daughters of the governor. She eventually became the mother of five of his ninety-five children. While in Kavala he became involved in the Greek tobacco trade. His experiences with tobacco may have contributed to his commercial interests later in life. In 1798 Muhammad ‘Ali went with an Ottoman expedition to drive the French out of Egypt. As a young officer he fought in battles against the French and British. The French withdrawal from Egypt in 1801 created a power vacuum. Muhammad ‘Ali gained control of Egypt and in 1805 was appointed as the Ottoman sultan’s wali (viceroy) in Egypt, with the rank of pasha (“ruler”). The French invasion initiated great changes in the traditional social structure of Egypt, changes that Muhammad ‘Ali found useful to perpetuate. Between 1805 and 1812 he abolished the Mamluk Beys and their obsolete military class. Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha’s reforms ushered in the modern Egyptian army. He worked to reorganize Egypt after the nizam jaded (new order) instituted by Sultan Selim III (1789–1807). He promoted new industry and improved the agricultural system, the irrigation system, and the administrative system in order to strengthen his position within Egypt. In 1818 Muhammad ‘Ali destroyed the Wahabbi movement in Arabia. In 1821 he conquered Sudan. He also fought against the Greeks in their war of independence, but his fleet was destroyed at the www.abc-clio.com

Battle of Navarino on October 20, 1827. ‘Ali Pasha fought two wars against Sultan Mahmud II (1831–1833 and 1838–1841). He defeated an Ottoman army at the Battle of Nezib (June 24, 1839). However, Britain and other Europeans stopped his expansion and prevented him from making Egypt independent. In 1841 Muhammad ‘Ali’s family became an Egyptian dynasty, lasting until King Farouk was dethroned and exiled in July 1952. Muhammad ‘Ali died on August 2, 1849 at Alexandria. Andrew J. Waskey See also: Africa, Precolonial; Egypt References Dodwell, Henry. The Founder of Modern Egypt: A Study of Muhammad ‘Ali. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931. Fahmy, Khaled. All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

ALI, MUHAMMAD (1942–) Muhammad Ali was the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion who now travels the world promoting peace and humanitarian causes. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, he won the heavyweight title in 1964, defeating Sonny Liston is what was at the time thought to be one of the greatest upsets in the history of the sport. Immediately following this victory, he revealed publicly that he was a disciple of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, a Black Nationalist religious organization that promoted racial separatism and stood in contrast to the leading integrationist figures of the Civil Rights Movement like Martin Luther King Jr. Shortly afterwards, he changed his name from

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Muhammad Ali (right) and Howard Cosell (left) on “Speaking of Everything with Howard Cosell” on WABC radio in 1965. (Library of Congress)

Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, a symbolic rejection of his ties to the slaveholders after which his family had been named. Three months after he won the championship, Ali left the United States to embark on a month-long tour of Africa, visiting Ghana, where he met with President Kwame N’krumah, Nigeria, and Egypt, where he spoke with President Gamel Abdul Nasser. The trip furthered Ali’s belief that he was a world champion whose duty was to represent people all over the globe, not just in the United States. Ali’s most formidable articulation of himself as a worldwide figure occurred during 1966 and 1967, when he resisted being drafted into military service during to the Vietnam War. Ali believed that American www.abc-clio.com

intervention in Vietnam was driven by the same forces that had denied blacks firstclass citizenship in the United States. He believed that the war was a racist one, a cog in the apparatus that white people around the world had used to conquer and disfranchise nonwhites. His draft resistance and outspoken defiance of the United States government came with a heavy price, as Ali was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to five years in prison, stripped of his championship, and exiled from boxing for threeand-a-half years. During this period, although he remained out of prison while appealing his case, Ali was unable to box or to leave the country. Nevertheless, he became a hero to millions around the globe who understood that his sacrifice paralleled

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their own freedom struggles against oppression. His conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1971, paving the way for the resumption of his boxing career. For the next several years, Ali pursued the championship, eventually earning a match against titleholder George Foreman. The fight was the first world heavyweight championship match held in Africa, and it took place in Kinshasa, Zaire. It was held there because President Mobutu Sese Seko paid $10 million for the right to host the bout, believing that it would bring his country the kind of publicity that would add up to increased tourism and industry for his poverty-stricken nation. The bout also had great symbolic value because it marked the return of the Black Nationalist Ali to Africa, thus materializing his assertions that blacks around the globe were unified in struggle. Although Foreman was heavily favored to retain the crown, Ali scored a stunning knockout in the eighth round, cementing his status not only as an all-time great fighter but as a hero to poor people worldwide. Michael Ezra See also: Civil Rights Movement References Ali, Muhammad, with Richard Durham. The Greatest: My Own Story. New York: Random House, 1975. Hauser, Thomas. Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. New York: Touchstone, 1991. Remnick, David. King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. New York: Random House, 1998.

ALI, NOBLE DREW (1886–1929) Noble Drew Ali was the founder of the Moorish Science Temple Islamic movement and the author of The Holy Koran of www.abc-clio.com

the Moorish Science Temple of America (1927). Originally named Timothy Drew, he was born in North Carolina in 1886. Ali was self-taught, receiving no formal education. Little is known about his early life except that he worked as a railway expressman in New Jersey. As an adult he visited the Middle East and became a Muslim. On his return to New Jersey in 1913, he launched an Islamic movement called the Moorish Science Temple. It attracted many blacks, as Ali taught his members that if they were of Asiatic or Moroccan origin, that they were superior to the white man and that they must have their own identity. To further this, he issued identification cards and wrote instructional pamphlets for his followers. In addition, in 1927 he authored his own Holy Koran, which contained forty-eight chapters wherein he illustrated his philosophy. He considered himself a new prophet to black Americans. Ali encouraged his followers to establish businesses to achieve economic independence, to take care of their health, to be industrious, and to invest in the education of their children. He believed that a begging people would never attain success or enjoy a prosperous life. Ali did not advocate the separation of blacks from whites or the emigration of blacks to Africa, as was preached by his predecessor, Marcus Garvey. For Ali, America was the homeland for blacks because they were Americans. He warned his followers against violence. Because of his approach, the American government did not perceive Ali and his movement to be a threat to the government. The Moorish Science Temple nonetheless expanded and new temples in Philadelphia, New Jersey, Chicago, and Detroit were built. Even though Ali claimed his was an Islamic

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movement, most perceived it as a nationalist movement with little connection to Islam. Differing from mainstream Muslims, the members of the Moorish Science Temple did not observe the five daily and Friday prayers, nor did they fast in the month of Ramadan. In addition, Ali’s followers called him the Prophet rather than the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad bin Abdullah of Mecca. They also believed that Noble Drew Ali’s Koran was the Book of Guidance, rather than the Arabic Qur’an. In fact, much of Ali’s teachings were actually in contradiction to mainstream Islamic guidelines. Ali was a suspect in the assassination of his rival, Shaikh Claude Green; he himself died a violent death in July 1929 as a result of a beating he received from Green’s followers. With Ali’s death, prominent members of the Moorish Science Temple fought for leadership positions, killed one another, and ultimately brought on the collapse of the movement. Today, only a few claim to be members of the Moorish Temple, mostly in New York. Yushau Sodiq See also: Garvey, Marcus; Islam, African American References McCloud, Aminah B. African American Islam. New York: Routledge, 1995. Rashad, Adib. Islam, Black Nationalism, and Slavery: A Detailed History. Beltville, MD: Writers Inc., 1995. Turner, Richard Brent. Islam in the African American Experience. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997.

AMERICA, CENTRAL Extensive links between Africa and Central America have existed since the first Spanish colonies, and large numbers of people with African ancestry live in the Central www.abc-clio.com

American countries of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Most live on the Caribbean coastline of these countries. El Salvador, without an eastern coastline, has the smallest number of people of African descent. The early Spanish voyages brought slaves to the Caribbean and, soon after, to Central America. There were African slaves on the first Spanish expedition to Guatemala, led by Pedro de Alvarado, in 1524. Alvarado, the governor of Guatemala from 1527 until 1531, was one of the most bloodthirsty of the conquistadors and fought fierce battles resulting in the Spanish conquest of all modern-day Guatemala and much of modern-day El Salvador. Most of the early slaves were used in construction work and in the search for gold. While dying after his horse fell on him during an expedition against the Indians in 1541, he left orders for all his slaves to be freed. The first documented reference to African slaves being brought for sale in Central America was the arrival of a Spanish ship from Santo Domingo that arrived at San Pedro (Honduras) on January 5, 1543. There is also a report of a ship bringing slaves to Central America two years earlier. Most of these early slaves seem to have been first taken to the West Indies to work on plantations, where they were assigned to do the hard manual labor required. As the Spanish population increased in Central America, some of the slaves were transferred to the region. One reason was the death, mainly from disease, of many Indians, whom the Spanish had initially relied on as manual laborers. In 1548 all Indian slaves were officially freed (although many became bonded

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laborers), at which time it was estimated that each Spanish household in San Salvador had about twelve slaves. By 1550 a sufficient number of slaves resided in San Salvador to make some worry that there were too many, and there were also increasing numbers of black freedpersons in the region. Many of the latter worked as day laborers on farms under dreadful conditions, while others worked in domestic service, often alongside slaves. Both they and slaves were involved in the cultivation of indigo and sugar, mining for silver, dock and road construction, and shipbuilding. In isolated parts of the countryside, especially on estancias where cattle were bred, the differences in condition between slaves and freedpersons were sometimes minor, with freedpersons working as bonded laborers. In 1570 an account of the Kingdom of Guatemala noted that there were 10,000 blacks and mulattos (descendants of blacks and Europeans) living in it, with African slaves costing 200 pesos, as against an Indian male slave, who would cost only 15 pesos. There are some descriptions of the Africans in Central America during the seventeenth century. Slaves in San Salvador were selling from between 150 and 500 pesos for males and 250 to 500 pesos for females. In some areas slaves dominated the population. In 1610 there were 3,500 African slaves in Panama City alone, with the city having a population of 1,007 whites, 146 mulattos, and 148 free blacks. By contrast, the small town of Cartago, in the central part of Costa Rica, remained largely white, with only 41 blacks out of a total population of 578. Overall, in the Kingdom of Guatemala there were an estimated 20,000 blacks and 10,000 mulattos in the 1650s. By this time the population was being divided, racially, into sixteen www.abc-clio.com

categories. Apart from Europeans, blacks, mulattos, and Indians, the term mestizo was being used to define those who were mainly of European or Indian descent, but possibly with some African antecedents; zambos and coyotes referred to descendants of Indians and Africans. During this period, the number of new slaves being brought to the region from Africa declined considerably and many urban slaves were transferred to work on sugar plantations and estancias. The Spanish sought to reduce their reliance on slaves, with many blacks being freed or leaving their owners. The arrival of the English, however, in what was later to become British Honduras (and then Belize), resulted in many Jamaican slaves being brought to the Central American mainland. Some Dutch plantations in Costa Rica also used slaves. By the eighteenth century most of the slaves in Central America were owned by religious orders, particularly the Dominicans and Jesuits, who operated some of the wealthiest sugar plantations and indigo mills. An account of one sugar plantation and mill near Amatitlán, owned by the Dominicans, noted that there were 900 slaves employed there, and a much smaller number of free blacks who had been exempted from military service and the corvée (compulsory labor for public works projects such as road construction). In 1770, three years after the king of Spain had ordered the suppression of the Jesuit order, many slaves that had been owned by the order remained in San Salvador. A 1781 census of the Salvadorean estates noted some 600 blacks working there. During the second part of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the Spanish saw an opportunity to eject the British from their bases along the eastern, Caribbean

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coast region of Nicaragua, but they failed to do so. The British left of their own accord in 1782 but continued to use slaves in British Honduras until slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833. In 1775 slave owners petitioned the colonial authorities to exact harsher penalties on people who harbored escaped slaves, but to no avail. However, measures were adopted to reduce nighttime gatherings of slaves. During this period—the last decades of the eighteenth century—the Spanish were facing many problems regarding the administration of slaves. As slaves could invoke royal amparo (protection) for particular grievances, the treatment of them improved considerably. In fact, there are records to show that royal funds were spent in connection with the feeding, doctoring, christening, marriage, and burial of slaves in Central America owned by the king. During the 1790s the Código negro español provided for religious instruction to slaves and also stipulated that slaves working in domestic service should be given an allowance of two pesos a year. It was even possible for a slave of one owner to marry a slave who had a different owner, and once married, the code said, “they should not live apart.” However, despite the legal code, only royal and ecclesiastical slaves were ever guaranteed this condition. Around this time the garifuna—blacks of African descent who traced their origins to slave plantations on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent—appeared in Central America. Most of them were moved, en masse, in 1797–1798, by the planters on St. Vincent in response to a sustained pattern of resistance and rebellion. Many were landed at Roatán in the Bay Islands of Honduras and others were moved to British Honduras, where slavery continued www.abc-clio.com

for many years. These new migrants in Honduras were often known as the Caribs, although writers of the period refer to them as Trujillanos (because many blacks lived in the port of Trujillo) and Vincentinos, as well as Morenos. Most made their living from the sea, by fishing, with the vast majority of them residing within less than a mile of the Honduran coast. Some still worked on indigo plantations, but many were involved in the cutting of mahogany. The black populations in the interior had largely assimilated with the Indian population, so few retained a black identity there. Slave populations continued to decline through the nineteenth century. From 1810 onward there was unrest among many of the elite families of Spanish Central America as nationalist sentiment rose. By 1810, indigo had also replaced cacao as the major export crop, leading to a decline in the demand for slaves. Cacao had needed a labor force all year around, as had sugar. For indigo, however, a large pool of labor was needed for only two months of the year. Therefore, gradually over time, many indigo plantations came to prefer hiring seasonal labor rather than “looking after” slaves for the whole year. Furthermore, indigo did not require much machinery. On September 15, 1821, the first step toward independence in Central America occurred when Mexico ceded from Spain. In that year a census was held throughout Central America and in one village, Pueblo de los Esclavos (town of slaves), close to the Honduras-Guatemala border, no individual slave owner was mentioned, although 395 men and 376 women, ranging in age from five months to 100 years old, were living in a village that appears to have been established by the colonial authorities. This

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peculiar demography suggests the complex situation of slavery and freed slaves in Central America. On June 29, 1823, the Central American Federation—consisting of modern-day Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua (Panama was a part of Colombia until it gained independence in 1903)—detached itself from Mexico. One of the early actions of the new Central American Federation was to abolish African slavery. This became Article 13 of the Federation’s 1824 Constitution, with slaves being declared free on April 17, 1824. Abolition was confirmed by the federation’s National Constituent Assembly. Each of the Federation’s constituent states ratified the law, led by Costa Rica on May 24, 1824. Part of the reason for abolition was that by this time there were relatively few slaves in Central America, with many farmers more reliant on Indian labor. Sources indicate that there were only 50–200 slaves in Costa Rica and 800 in Guatemala. During the 1830s many more Africans migrated to Honduras from Grand Cayman, further augmenting the African population of the Bay Islands of Honduras, which became a largely English-speaking Protestant enclave in the country. Some British administrators felt that, as a result, the Bay Islands should become British and, in fact, it was not until 1860 that Britain recognized Honduran sovereignty over them. Although the Liberals, who dominated the Central American Federation, had freed the slaves, many Africans were concerned about the Liberals’ goal of reducing the power of the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, Africans briefly closed the ports of Omoa and Trujillo in a campaign of civil unrest. www.abc-clio.com

Although the former Spanish colonies of Central America had outlawed slavery, it existed in British Honduras, which was under Spanish rule, where slaves were still an important factor in the economy of the settlements. In 1814 the restored Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, had agreed to allow British settlements in British Honduras. Two years later, some Britons tried to carve out territory along the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. This latter operation was abandoned. However, many more slaves were brought to British Honduras to make the plantations more viable; in particular, a large number were brought from Barbados. However, this led to trouble in British Honduras, as slaves began protesting against their condition. Gradually, although the number of blacks grew, that of slaves fell. As the total population rose from 2,824 in 1816 to 4,107 in 1826, that of slaves declined from 2,742 to 2,468 during the same period. Part of this resulted from the escape of some slaves from British Honduras to neighboring Guatemala, where slavery had been abolished. The British demanded the return of the slaves. This led to massive internal debate in Guatemala, with Guatemalan politicians being eager to avoid offending Britain but unwilling to hand back the slaves. During the 1850s American adventurer William Walker led a small band of Americans into Central America. His aim was to provoke U.S. military intervention that, Walker hoped, would result in U.S. annexation of the region. Walker hoped for support from the English-speaking people in Honduras but those of African descent were worried that Walker was a supporter of slavery. Walker made himself president of Nicaragua on July 12, 1856, and some 2,500 American adventurers and mercenaries, along with a

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number of southern plantation owners, arrived soon afterward. In the year in which he was president of the country, Walker declared English to be the official language of Nicaragua and also legalized slavery. Walker had initially been against slavery but now seems to have felt that its reintroduction would help gain some support for his cause from slave states in the United States. The use of the English language and the legalization of slavery were both very unpopular with Liberals in the country, who had originally offered him some support. They also feared that the United States might annex Nicaragua, a move which Walker might well have hoped for. The Liberals turned against him, and when Walker tried to invade neighboring countries, his forces were driven back. He himself was forced to flee. In 1860 he returned but was captured and handed over to the president of Honduras, who had him executed. As with the much earlier creation of Liberia in 1847, there were also plans to establish black colonies in Central America. The main reason given to U.S. president Abraham Lincoln—during whose presidency this idea was resurrected—for such colonies was that they could check the British and the Mexicans who might otherwise consider taking over the region for themselves. At that time the French were heavily involved in Mexico with Emperor Maximilian, and Elisha O. Crosby, U.S. minister to Guatemala, claimed that the idea of a colony of “free blacks” would achieve “two good things”—remove large numbers of blacks from the United States and block a possible Mexican expansion. The humanitarian aspect of such a colony does not seem to have been a major consideration. U.S. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair suggested in June 1861 www.abc-clio.com

that many black colonists might be moved to some parts of Mexico, but Guatemala seems to have been the favored location. The Central American countries were rather cautious about these plans, varying from polite interest to opposition. Victoriano Castellanos, the acting president of Honduras, thought it might be a good way of working unused land, especially on the Caribbean coastline. In early 1862 President José María Montealegre of Costa Rica asked his legislative assembly, on hearing of the idea, to investigate whether lands could be set aside for the project. His foreign minister was less convinced and wanted further discussions. By contrast, Nicaragua was hostile, especially when John P. Heiss, a Southern U.S. businessman who had settled in the country, wrote a letter, published in the government-sponsored newspaper, which suggested that these freed slaves might control the local economy with the help and extraterritorial protection of the United States. He never raised any racial objections, however, and it is possible that after Walker’s failed bid to take over the country six years earlier and his unpopular plans to reintroduce slavery, Heiss knew that complaints along these lines might fall on deaf ears. Very soon Nicaragua managed to persuade El Salvador and Costa Rica to join them in rejecting the scheme. On October 7, 1862, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward asked Abraham Lincoln to suspend all plans for moving blacks to Central America, and Lincoln agreed. By the 1860s people of African descent in Central America were living mostly along the Caribbean coastline. They were needed to work on banana plantations, and American and British firms welcomed the fact those who were from the British West

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Indies were English-speaking and also mainly Protestant. Initially, many came from Jamaica, which had been undergoing an economic depression since the 1860s, and later many came from the Windward Islands; St. Kitts (in the Leeward Islands); and many other places, including British Guiana and British Honduras. To keep wages low, the companies tended to bring in more immigrants than were actually needed. As the men were brought over on contracts, the British colonial government did not feel any obligation to intervene. However, protests by locals led the Honduras government to start placing restrictions on immigration in 1903. Seven years later, in June 1910, police connected with the Vaccaro brothers’ fruit company were involved in the shooting deaths of three black West Indian employees, creating an international incident. The British government complained and eventually, through the arbitration of King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the matter was adjudicated in favor of the British. Tensions remained, and in 1929 the government of Honduras finally banned immigration from the West Indies. Many of the families remained in Honduras and Costa Rica—indeed, one of the highest concentrations of African Costa Ricans is in the city of Limón, on the Caribbean coast, where they work for the United Fruit Company. Many West Indians of African ancestry moved to Panama to help with the construction of the Panama Canal. Most faced considerable discrimination and worked in terrible conditions during the canal’s construction. There were also many black residents and employees of the Canal Zone who, although technically Panamanian citizens, came from the West Indies, were English-speaking, and Protestant. When www.abc-clio.com

the United States ended its control of the canal, many chose to leave Panama, but a large number remained. Although many of the people of African descent in the former Spanish colonies in Central America had long since lost their connections with Africa, many of the British administrators in British Honduras had served in Africa. Robert W. Harley, the lieutenant governor from 1882 until 1884, had been administrator in the Gold Coast, in modern-day Ghana. Of the governors, Cornelius Moloney had been administrator in Gambia and governor of Lagos (Nigeria) before becoming governor of British Honduras in 1891–1897; Ernest Sweet-Escott had been administrator of the Seychelles before being transferred to British Honduras in 1904; his successor, Eric John Eagles Swayne, had been governor of British Somaliland. Harold Baxter Kittermaster, who was governor from 1932 to 1934, had been governor of British Somaliland, later becoming governor of Nyasaland; his successor, Alan Cuthbert Maxwell Burns, who was governor from 1934 to 1940, went on to be governor of the Gold Coast and then of Nigeria. John Hawkesworth, the first post–World War II governor of British Honduras, had been chief commissioner of Ashanti; his successor, Patrick M. Renison, went on to be the penultimate governor of Kenya; and John W. Paul, governor from 1966 until 1972, had been governor of Gambia. Since the 1970s there has been massive interest, not only locally, but also worldwide, in African musical styles from Central America. Some musicologists have found similarities between the music in Belize and the rhythms from southeast Nigeria from where, it is believed, many of the slaves may have originally come—especially River

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State, Efiks, and Calabris. Blended with Western instruments, the music is now known as brukdown. There is also paranda, a style that tends to be even more African. A leading figure in Belize’s music scene, Andy Palacio, offers an English-Garifuna style popular in the United States, Cuba, Britain, and West Africa. Although there are other garifuna musicians and singers in Central America, especially in Honduras, none have achieved much fame beyond their locality. Much of their music, known locally as the congo, features upright drums and a female calland-response chorus. A few writers have pointed out similarities with some black Cuban and Haitian music. The other type of African music common in Central America is based on the calypso of the West Indies. Dance in Honduras is also heavily influenced by the rhythm of African music. The place of Africans in Central America has received heightened scholarly interest beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century. Prominent are Wilbur Zelinsky’s study, “The Historical Geography of the Negro Population of Latin America” (1949), and more recently, William V. Davidson’s “The Garifuina of Pearl Lagoon” (1980), a study of an historically African American town in Nicaragua. Such studies demonstrate the complex historical and cultural mixtures that characterize the African experience in Central America. Justin Corfield References Davidson, William W. “The Garifuina of Pearl Lagoon: Ethnohistory of an Afro-American Enclave in Nicaragua.” Ethnohistory 27, no. 1 (1980): 31–47. DiLorenzo, Kris. “The Blacks of Central America.” Crisis 93, no. 6 (1986): 28–31, 34, 60–62.

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Echeverri-Gent, Elisavinda. “Forgotten Workers: British West Indians and the Early Days of the Banana Industry in Costa Rica and Honduras.” Journal of Latin American Studies 24, no. 2 (May 1992): 275–308. Fiehrer, Thomas. “Slaves and Freedmen in Colonial Central America: Rediscovering a Forgotten Black Past.” Journal of Negro History 64, no. 1 (1979): 39–58. Gabbert, Wolfgang. “Cultural Cleavages in Central America: The Case of the Afro-Americans and the National State in Costa Rica.” Asien, Afrika, Latinamerika (Switzerland) 27, no. 2 (1999): 159–178. Leiva Vivas, Rafael. Trafico de escalvos negros a Honduras. Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Editorial Guaymuras, 1982. Mellafe, Rolando. Negro Slavery in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Rout, Leslie B., Jr. The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Schoonover, Thomas. “Misconstrued Mission: Expansionism and Black Colonization in Mexico and Central America during the Civil War.” Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 4 (1980): 607–620. Stone, Michael Cutler. “The Afro-Caribbean Presence in Central America.” Belizean Studies 18, nos. 2–3 (1990): 6–42. Westerman, George W. “Historical Notes on West Indians on the Isthmus of Panama.” Phylon 22 (Winter 1961): 340–350. Zelinsky, Wilbur. “The Historical Geography of the Negro Population of Latin America.” Journal of Negro History 34 (April 1949): 153–221.

AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY As early as the colonial period, repatriation was considered a favorable solution to the perceived problems posed by a growing free black population in what would become the United States. Southern whites feared that large groups of freed African Americans living in their midst would encourage slave insurrection and lead to

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African village in Liberia established by the American Colonization Society, ca. 1822. (Library of Congress)

miscegenation. In the North, many resented the competition that freed blacks created in the urban labor market. Meanwhile, the American Revolution forced many to apply rights theory to the plight of the African American, and the abolitionist movement was well underway by the dawn of the nineteenth century. A number of diverse interests, then, were present in Washington, D.C., in December 1816, when the American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded. The ACS’s ultimate goal was to establish a colony along the West African coast, and it called upon the federal government to allocate resources to facilitate settlement of African Americans. To appease slaveholding legislators and philanthropists, the ACS emphasized that it was not opposed to slavery and asserted that free blacks, not slaves, posed the greatest threat to society. www.abc-clio.com

However, a number of ACS supporters believed that by repatriating African Americans, whites could begin to undo some of the wrongs committed during the Atlantic slave trade. Nevertheless, land was ceded along the Atlantic coast for the repatriation of free blacks only, to be named Liberia after the Latin word for “freedom.” The first ACS-sponsored voyage to Liberia left in 1820. The American Colonization Society administered the colony of Liberia until its independence in 1847. While the AmericoLiberians had initiated efforts to patrol the Atlantic coastline, where slave trading continued despite a U.S. ban, southern U.S. legislators accused them of undermining their slave-based economy. As the debate over states’ rights raged in the United States, the federally funded ACS found itself on the defensive. It reiterated that the

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organization sought only to remove African Americans from the country, not to bring about an end to slavery. This line brought them into conflict with American and British abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison led the charge against the ACS, accusing it of pandering to politicians and of racism and hypocrisy for characterizing African Americans as “nuisances” while expecting them to “civilize” native African Liberians. Garrison’s criticism contributed to a marked decrease in migration to Liberia during the 1840s, as well as to the withdrawal of funding by the ACS’s American and British benefactors. A weakened ACS, combined with increased Americo-Liberian calls for self-determination, hastened Liberian independence. Carmen Lenore Wright See also: Abolitionism; Delany, Martin Robinson; Liberia References Beyan, Amos J. The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State: A Historical Perspective, 1822–1900. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991. Smith, James. Sojourners in Search of Freedom: The Settlement of Liberia by Black Americans. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987.

AMERICAN FREEDMEN’S INQUIRY COMMISSION The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission is a bureau that was established to determine the social conditions resulting from the emancipation of American slaves in 1863. In response to Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freeing African Americans in Confederate-held territory from the bondage of slavery, the U.S. secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, established the American Freedmen’s www.abc-clio.com

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Inquiry Commission in March 1863. Stanton appointed three commissioners with the task of collecting testimony to determine the best course of action to protect and improve the lives of freed African Americans. The commission was composed of Samuel Gridley Howe, James McKaye, and Indiana U.S. representative Robert Dale Owen, all social reformers and abolitionists. The commission collected testimony from army personnel, slaveholders, government officials, abolitionists, and former slaves throughout the United States and Canada. From the testimonies of these individuals and visits made to different parts of the United States and Canada, the commission was able to determine the social conditions resulting from emancipation. The commission drafted three preliminary reports before submitting its final version to the secretary of war on May 15, 1864. The commission believed that emancipation would not be complete until full civil and political rights were established for all freed African Americans. To ensure civil and political rights, the commission suggested the establishment of a temporary government agency to assist former slaves in their transition to freedom. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, distributed food, clothing, provided medical assistance, leased abandoned and confiscated land, and helped establish educational opportunities for African Americans. Michael LaMagna See also: Civil War, American; Emancipation Proclamation References Blassingame, John W. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977.

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96 AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION Frankel, Oz. “The Predicament of Racial Knowledge: Government Studies of the Freedmen during the U.S. Civil War.” Social Research 70, no. 1 (2003): 45–81. Sproat, John G. “Blueprint for Radical Reconstruction.” Journal of Southern History 23, no. 1 (1957): 25–44.

AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION The American Missionary Association (AMA) was founded after the Amistad affair by prominent abolitionists to work for the end of slavery. In addition to its antislavery work, it also founded ten black colleges to provide higher education to African Americans during and after the Civil War. Founded in 1846 through the consolidation of various abolitionist societies, the American Missionary Association was a nondenominational organization with the goal of ending slavery. Although the association claimed not to be affiliated with a particular religion, the strong connection between the AMA and the Congregational Church was apparent. The origin of the AMA can be traced to the Amistad affair of 1839, an incident wherein Africans aboard the slave ship La Amistad mutinied against their Spanish captors off the coast of Cuba. Established to defend the Africans, members of the Amistad Committee, including Lewis Tappan and Simeon Jocelyn, later joined together to form the AMA. The commitment of the AMA to social justice and the abolition of slavery can be seen in the assistance its members provided to freed slaves. The legacy of the AMA is the educational opportunities it provided African Americans during and after the Civil War. It opened over 500 schools at all educational levels throughout the South. Eventuwww.abc-clio.com

ally, the AMA transferred control of its elementary and secondary schools to the local public school systems and focused on higher education for African Americans. This resulted in the establishment of the predominately black colleges of Atlanta University, Berea College, Dillard University, Fisk University, Hampton University, LeMoyne-Owen College, Talladega College, and Tougaloo College. The commitment of the AMA to promoting equality was not limited to African Americans; they also worked on behalf of Native Americans, immigrant groups, and others. Michael La Magna See also: Abolitionism; Amistad Case, The References DeBoer, Clara Merritt. Be Jubilant My Feet: African American Abolitionists in the American Missionary Association, 1839–1861. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. Richardson, Joe Martin. Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.

AMERICAN REVOLUTION “I do hereby further declare all indentured Servants, Negroes, and others . . . free, that are able and willing to bear Arms” (Lanning, 2000, p. 201). With this Proclamation of 1775, John Murray, earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, officially invited all men of African descent to join the British in their efforts to suppress Patriot insurgencies. Blacks fought in substantial numbers for both the Royal and Continental armies during the American Revolution (1775–1783), most often giving their allegiance to whichever side they felt would best ensure their freedom. Dunmore’s decision to free Virginia’s slaves

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Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of November 1775, giving freedom to all Virginia slaves who are willing to take up arms for the British cause. (Library of Congress)

was counter to Continental commanderin-chief George Washington’s initial impulse to keep African Americans from participating in the war. Within weeks of Dunmore’s address, several hundred blacks had volunteered to fight in Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, and by the end of the war, more than 2,000 slaves enlisted in this unit. When the thirteen American colonies broke away from Great Britain in 1775, nearly 20 percent of the residents of the United States were of African descent, the vast majority of them enslaved. Despite General Washington’s ambivalence about the enlistment of African American soldiers, blacks fought valiantly for the Patriot side from the onset of the conflict. Crispus www.abc-clio.com

Attucks, a young sailor and former slave, was killed during the Boston Massacre (1770) when British troops fired on a riot. African Americans participated alongside Continental forces in the early battles at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill in 1775. By 1777, General Washington had altered his position on the enlistment of blacks. Faced with a shortage of troops, Washington was forced to incorporate African Americans into his war effort, and by the end of the Revolution, more than 5,000 blacks had served in the Continental army and navy. Agrippa Hull, Price Hall, Cornelius Lenox Remond, and Cuff Whitmore were among the many African Americans who served with distinction for the American cause. Nevertheless, more blacks died fighting for Britain, many being slaves recruited away from their American owners by the British army. While the lure of freedom was strong, escape was extremely dangerous for slaves. In 1740 South Carolina passed a law that permitted whites to kill any slave caught outside of his owner’s premises— even if the slave did not resist arrest. In 1755 Georgia enacted a similar code, whereby rewards were given for the bodies of dead male slaves. For those slaves who did make it safely to the British lines, there was no guarantee of protection. According to Boston King, a former slave who later recorded his experiences, Loyalist commanders were often known to leave ill African Americans to die or heal on their own. Yet African Americans proved invaluable to the British, especially as guerrilla fighters who could carry out attacks on the communities of their former owners. Colonel Tye was the most renowned of these combatants. Originally a slave in Monmouth County, New Jersey, Tye escaped and joined

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Dunmore’s Ethopian Regiment in 1775. With his special knowledge of local terrain and facilities, Tye led raids on Patriot homes, where food and fuel were stolen in surprise attacks. Although the British never officially commissioned blacks, Tye eventually joined a group called the Black Brigade, which was instrumental in the efforts to protect New York City in the latter years of the war. Both the Continental and Royal navies also sought the services of black men. As many as 25 percent of the African Americans who participated in the Revolution worked on ships; escaped slaves often went to sea in order to reduce the chances of being captured by their former owners. Though African American sailors were most often assigned to common labor (they were much cheaper to hire than whites), their efforts as pilots benefited both navies. The vast majority of black sailors worked in the vicinity of Maryland and Virginia, and in some instances, white Patriots were allowed to avoid enlistment if they substituted one of their slaves to serve in their place. In 1782 Britain and the United States came to terms on a treaty that allowed for American independence. As part of the agreement, British forces were required to return any property—including slaves— that was taken from Patriots during the war. Sir Guy Carleton, acting commander of the British forces, would not grant this request, as his government had promised freedom to anyone who fought for the British cause. In order to create an official record of those who had participated in the war, British brigadier general Samuel Birch began to document the names of black Loyalists in “The Book of Negroes.” At the end of the war, approximately 4,000 black www.abc-clio.com

men, women, and children left the United States for the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and Nova Scotia. (Many of those who relocated to Nova Scotia were uncomfortable in North America and eventually fled to Sierra Leone.) Other black Loyalists were unsuccessful in their attempts to leave the United States, and like many blacks who fought for the Patriot side, they eventually migrated to Florida or American Indian territories. Although over 100,000 slaves escaped during the war, a great number of these men and women were returned to slavery after the conflict. And while Vermont had banned slavery as early as 1777 and was soon followed by other northern states, slave owners in the American South continued to import slaves to replace those who escaped during the Revolution. Despite the fact that the Declaration of Independence (1776) espoused democracy and personal liberty, approximately 20 percent of the American population would be denied the rights of citizenship for almost another century. Clark Barwick

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References Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Knoblock, Glenn A. “Strong and Brave Fellows”: New Hampshire’s Black Soldiers and Sailors of the American Revolution, 1775–1784. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003. Lanning, Michael Lee. Defenders of Liberty: African Americans in the Revolutionary War. New York: Citadel Press, 2000. Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. New York: Norton, 1973.

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AMISTAD CASE,THE The Amistad case was a nineteenth-century trial that defined issues of property and rights in the United States in relation to the transatlantic slave trade. A Spanish schooner named Amistad left Havana for Port Principe, Cuba, on June 28, 1839. The ship carried a captain, cook, crew, two “owners” of African captives, the captain’s slave, and fifty-three African captives, including forty-nine men, three girls, and a boy. The captives had been recently kidnapped from West Africa and brought to Havana aboard the slaver, Tecora. Four days out of the harbor during the voyage from Havana to Port Principe, the African captives, in the middle of a stormy night, revolted and took over the ship. One African, Sengbe Pieh, whom the Spanish men named Joseph Cinque before he entered the Amistad ship, led the rebellion. The captain and cook were killed, and two of the crew were either killed or escaped in a small boat. Two of the captives were killed as well. The Africans spared the two “owners,” Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes, since, having little or no contact with the modern sea vessel, they needed assistance in operating the ship. Threatening the two white men, Cinque forced them to steer the ship back to Africa under careful watch, ensuring that they were moving eastward. However, the whites, discussing in their own language strategies to rebel, began to move the ship north and west during the night, when the sun was down and the stars, a navigational tool unknown to the blacks, were out. For almost two months, the rebels and their former “owners” sailed and drifted within the vast waters of the Atlantic, pushing and pulling the ship east during the day and northwest during the night. www.abc-clio.com

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On August 26, 1839, Cinque and a few other Africans, seeking food and water, anchored the ship off the shore of Montauk Point on Long Island, New York, and went ashore with a few gold doubloons that they had found on the ship. Shortly after, Lieutenants Richard W. Mead and Thomas R. Gedney, patrolling the coastal waters aboard the U.S. Navy’s Washington, spotted the tattered ship. They found a large number of blacks and two whites aboard it, along with gold doubloons and other valuables. As this situation seemed unusual to the military men, they disarmed the blacks, arrested them, and towed the ship and its contents to New London, Connecticut. After an initial hearing regarding what had happened on the ship, Judge Andrew T. Judson announced that a September hearing would decide if the blacks should stand trial for murder. All the blacks, with no one to post bond, were transported to the nearby New Haven jail. During the first hearing in midSeptember 1839, Judge Smith Thompson of the District Court of Connecticut in Hartford ruled that the case was to be tried in Connecticut, but since the incident occurred on the high seas and did not involve U.S. citizens, the courts had no jurisdiction regarding the murders. However, the issue of whether or not the slaves were property would be decided in another trial. After the initial trial, abolitionists supporting the slaves hired Josiah W. Gibbs, professor of linguistics at Yale College, to assist in breaking the language barrier that was obstructing the Africans’ voices. Gibbs, after learning some of the Mende language from Cinque, found James Covey, a Mende native, freed captive from a slaver, and sailor for a British patrol ship. Covey agreed to serve as a translator for the Amistad Africans.

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The second trial, which began on November 19, 1839, in Hartford, was postponed after two days, until January 7, 1840. The defense lawyers presented witnesses to support their claim that the Amistad captives were not from Cuba but from Africa, and since the international slave trade had been abolished the act of transporting the Africans was illegal. Professor Gibbs testified that the captives did not speak Spanish, but only Mende. Judge Andrew T. Judson announced on January 13, 1840, that the Amistad captives were born free and thus should be delivered to President Martin Van Buren for transport back to Africa. The defense team appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, and a third trial took place. Tappan gained assistance from former president John Quincy Adams, who argued brilliantly on behalf of the captives. Justice Joseph Story, on March 9, 1841, announced that the Amistad blacks were kidnapped Africans and that they could either stay in America as free blacks or return to Africa. The group, which became known as the Amistad Africans via newspapers and magazines, decided to return to Africa and arrived in Sierra Leone in mid-January 1842. John Kille See also: Abolitionism; Slave Revolts/Maronnage; Slavery (History) References Cable, Mary. Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship Amistad. New York: Penguin, 1971. Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Echo of Lions. New York: Morrow, 1989. Jones, Howard. Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Owens, William A. Slave Mutiny: The Story of the Revolt on the Schooner Amistad. New York: John Day, 1953.

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ANANSE A spider-trickster and hero of the folktales from the Akan ethnic group (in modern Ghana) who was transported with the slave trade to many areas of the Americas, Ananse (also spelled “Anancy,” “Anansi,” “Annancy,” “Nancy,” and “Nansi”) has remained a protagonist of Afro-Caribbean lore. He is also still employed in various ways by contemporary Ghanaian, Caribbean, and black British writers. Like other human and animal tricksters from all over the world, the Akan spider (also existing under different names in several West African groups’ tales) profanes all ethical and religious beliefs by being selfish, mean, hypocritical, vulgar, and sexually exuberant—his only goal being the satisfaction of his own biological needs. At the same time, though, Ananse helps focus attention on the nature and limits of the taboos he breaks, thus creatively regenerating them. When he is sentenced to death by the sky-god Nyame for one of his mischievous tricks, Ananse tells his son Ntikuma to dig a tunnel underground, dive into it, and make an appeal for his father’s life: believing that he is hearing the voice of the earth goddess Asaase Yaa, Nyame frees Ananse. In this case the spider-trickster ridicules the supreme deity, but at the same time he brings to the fore the validity of the balance between earth and sky, Asaase and Nyame, female and male element—a fundamental principle in Akan society. Ananse here assumes a role as link between the physical and the supernatural dimensions, but sometimes he becomes a creator or, better, a catalyst of creation, thanks to the etiological endings of his tales. Further functions carried out by his tales include enabling children to develop autonomy and peer relations, acting

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as a safety valve for social attrition, and entertaining. Ananse’s import for contemporary Ghanaian authors became particularly evident during the independence period, when the national policy of recovering native cultures led many playwrights (such as Efua Sutherland, Joe De Graft, Martin Owusu, and Yaw Asare) to abandon Western naturalistic models and to include the storytelling format—and therefore Ananse—in their plays. The disillusionment of the following historical phase was conveyed by the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah in his Fragments (1969), where Ananse becomes symbolic of the greed for material wealth that is corrupting the ideals of independence. Ananse’s multifaceted nature, then, allows various, if not opposed, forms of borrowing by writers at the turn of the twenty-first century. The Middle Passage transported Ananse to many Caribbean areas: his presence is registered in the slaves’ lore from Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica, Curaçao, Haiti, Jamaica, Suriname, Trinidad, and the Virgin Islands, among other places; in the United States, he survived as the African American female trickster Ann Nancy (or Aunt Nancy) from South Carolina and Georgia. In the new, ruthless context of Caribbean plantations, Ananse sheds his godlike qualities and acquires more earthly features. His subtle cunning, the art of the weak, is used not only to ensure sheer survival, but also to deceive and overthrow the powerful. In one of the most common tales, he boasts that Tiger is no more than his riding horse. When Tiger confronts him, he pretends to be sick and asks Tiger to carry him on his back so that he can meet the people and deny what he has said; Tiger accepts, and is thus www.abc-clio.com

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humiliated when the spider rides him like a horse. In the entertaining storytelling sessions among slaves, Ananse’s outwitting of bigger animals could be seen as a vicarious rebellion against slave owners and overseers. Yet the rawness of slavery keeps the tales firmly anchored to an extreme realism: sometimes Ananse is defeated; he also outwits weaker creatures (presumably standing for fellow slaves); and his cruelty could occasionally be identified with the overseer’s. Once again, his attributes include extreme opposites, and the spider-trickster may represent, for a slave audience, its hero, object of hatred, and scapegoat all at the same time. Generally speaking, Ananse shows how cunning and indirection are necessary tactics for surviving in a racist and dangerous environment. From the start of the twentieth century, Walter Jekyll, Martha Warren Beckwith, and Philip Sherlock successfully popularized “Anancy tales” in print. Laura Tanna’s Jamaican Folktales and Oral Histories (1984), a result of tale-collecting fieldwork from 1974 to the early 1980s, proves that the tradition is still alive, albeit dormant. In a pattern similar to what happened in Ghana, the emergence of Ananse in Caribbean written literature after a long period of colonial neglect coincided with the recognition of the literary dignity of folk forms. This recognition was pioneered by the popularization of tales and poems in dialect by Louise Bennett through books, drama, radio, and television. Contemporary works that have found inspiration in Ananse’s role as a sly underdog include V. S. Reid’s historical novel, New Day (1949), where shrewd Anansean strategy is suggested as the way Jamaican self-government in 1944 was attained, and Trevor Rhone’s

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play Smile Orange (1971), where the hotel waiter Ringo astutely exploits tourists to improve his status. Ananse’s bossy connotations are best rendered through the ambiguous politician Arthur in Couvade (1974), a play by Michael Gilkes. Contemporary Caribbean authors have also creatively developed Ananse’s folkloric features into new forms. Some depart from the misogyny that often characterizes Ananse lore to infuse the spider’s adventures with a gender-oriented significance, as in Velma Pollard’s poem “Anansa” (1988). Wilson Harris transforms Ananse’s metamorphic powers—traditionally, he can change from spider to man and modify his own shape—into a linguistic technique, namely a prose that erodes any fixed polarization, thus merging different characters, reality and dream, in the oneiric ambience of the Guyanese forest. A similar “Anansean technique” can be found in the novels by the Ghanaian Kojo Laing, while Edward Kamau Brathwaite identifies such a transformative potential with the attitude of disruptive creativity that poetry should always have toward its language. Andrew Salkey published three volumes of stories in which the spider-trickster is confronted with contemporary issues such as nuclear weapons or the Vietnam War, whereas Roy Heath turns him into the bizarre simpleton protagonist of his two novels, Kwaku (1982) and The Ministry of Hope (1997). Finally, black British authors such as John Agard, Maggie Harris, and Beryl Gilroy employ Ananse as an image capable of reactivating a link with their Afro-Caribbean roots. Pietro Deandrea See also: Akan; Bennett, Louise; Caribbean Literature; Folklore, African; Gilroy, Beryl Agatha

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References Agard, John. Weblines. Newcastle, UK: Bloodaxe, 2000. Pelton, Robert D. The Trickster in West Africa—A Study in Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Salkey, Andrew. Anancy’s Score. London: BogleL’Ouverture, 1973. Sutherland, Efua Theodora. The Marriage of Anansewa. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1975. Tanna, Laura. Jamaican Folktales and Oral Histories. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica Publications, 1984. Tiffin, Helen. “The Metaphor of Anancy in Caribbean Literature.” In Myth and Metaphor, edited by Robert Sellick. Adelaide, Australia: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1982.

ANCESTOR WORSHIP Ancestor worship is the anthropological term for veneration of ancestors in African religions. In his anthropological work, Principles of Sociology (1885), Herbert Spencer coined the term “ancestor worship” to understand the relationship between members of a community that celebrated their departed members through sacrifice and offering. Although many African cultures honor their ancestors through libations and the giving of food, some scholars have questioned the appropriateness of applying the term wholesale to African religions. Nonetheless, the veneration of the dead is a central practice of most African communities. The offerings of food and drink symbolize the continuation of the relationship between surviving and departed members of the community, the latter being still viewed as a central component of the family, sometimes having a larger role and impact in the community than the living. The rituals spiritually bond the ancestors to their surviving family members and

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are symbolized through the exchange of gifts and favors. The ancestors often continue the role they played in the community while alive, such as a maternal or paternal role. Not only do the living desire to honor their departed, but the ancestors also desire to be remembered and venerated in the community. As keepers of the customs and laws, ancestors play an important role in the present. As such, most African traditions prioritize continued communication with the dead. Because of the presumed continuity in family relationships, the term “worship” becomes even more problematic. Because of the fluidity of many African religions, it is difficult to isolate the veneration of ancestors from the larger cultural context and components of the African cosmology. In contrast to many Western traditions, death in many African cultures is a gradual process, and the boundaries between the natural and supernatural realms are blurred. After physical death, the departed individual remains a part of the community through the memories of friends and relatives. If the dead person appears in the community, she or he must be recognized by name. In many cultures, the current members must have had a direct experience of the individual while she or he was alive and be able to recall the individual’s name, personal traits, values, words, and important life moments. In general, the departed appears only to the eldest members of their family and very rarely to the young. In some cultures, the appearance of a particular insect or animal such as a caterpillar or hyena may also indicate the arrival of an ancestor. Ancestors also visit living members through dreams and divination. If neglected, the departed can bring tragedy upon the community to draw www.abc-clio.com

attention to the neglected elements of the relationship, forcing the living to respond and correct the situation through prayer and offering. In most cultures, the rituals are performed as preventative measures rather than in response to calamity. Similarly, the ancestors do not seek to harm their descendants, but to guard life and warn them of potential trouble. Ultimately, misfortune serves to restore harmony in the community. Religious specialists in the community are often the ones who analyze and diagnose the cause of the misfortune. Good family health, prosperity, survival to adulthood, and a good birthrate would all be seen as signs of harmonious relationships with the ancestors. As long as the dead are recognized by a member of the community, they may appear for as long as four or five generations. Because the eldest member of the community most often knew the departed for the longest period of time, she or he often performs or supervises the ritual ceremonies to honor the dead. Often a symbolic meal is served as an act of remembrance. The sacrifices offered to the departed are particularly important, because living members who have forgotten their ancestors face illness or misfortune from their mistreated dead family members. However, in most societies a central virtue of ancestors is patience, and therefore calamity comes only after all other reminders are exhausted. The role of sacrifice is not to exile the ancestors or limit their power, but to restore the relationship and receive blessings from their descendants. Ancestors can also intervene in the community unprovoked and can be scolded by the living for their unwarranted behavior and intrusion in the community. After the last individual who knew the dead person

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dies, the departed becomes completely dead and moves outside of immediate familial ties. Rather than vanishing out of existence, the departed become part of the spirit world. While they may still appear to living members or speak through a medium, in most African societies ancestors become part of the intermediary spirits between a God (High God), sometimes referred to as the Great Ancestor, and human beings. Until that point, ancestors play a large role in daily life. Presenting proper sacrifice and offering, carrying out the instructions of ancestors given either while they were alive or during an after-death experience, becomes essential to maintaining harmony in the family and community. Because of the ancestors’ continued influence in the community, children were believed, in many African societies, to bare the physical and personality traits of departed members. It follows that children are named after ancestors and are expected to go into the profession or sphere of life in which the departed excelled. In this way, the spirit of the ancestor continues to influence the present and future of the community. Because of this view of death, marriage becomes essential to ensuring that persons, through the memories of their children, will remain a part of the community. Barrenness is seen as a curse, since it limits the continuation and rebirth of ancestors in the children of the community. Burial rites are very important, because if they are absent or incorrectly performed,the transition of the dead to the spirit realm can be delayed and the dead may wander the world as ghosts. In many societies, the burial rites are a long process that includes the preparation of the body, which is often expensive, a wake, several periods of mourning, and elaborate decorations for the grave, www.abc-clio.com

often including the personal items of the deceased person or objects or activities that they enjoyed. While the offerings and ceremonies range from simple to more formal rituals and sacrifices, the veneration of the ancestors is a prevalent trait in most African societies. Julius Bailey See also: Akan; Burial, African Practices in the Americas; Religion (Africa) References Magesa, Laurenti. African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. Mbiti, John S. The Prayers of African Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1975. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999.

ANGOLA Located on the southwest coast of Africa, the Republic of Angola has a population of approximately 10,978,000, with 40 percent of the country covered by forests and woodlands. The Portuguese arrived in the region in 1482 and gradually took over first the coastal areas and then the hinterland. In 1589 a Portuguese governor was appointed, and Angola remained a Portuguese colony until November 11, 1975, when it gained its independence. Owing to its connections with Portugal, Angola had many ties with Brazil in terms of trade, shipping, and cultural exchanges. Some of the early Portuguese seafarers sailed from Angola to Brazil, with Angola being a source of slaves for South America. One of the men who sold Angolan slaves to French military establishments in the Caribbean was Pierre Escourre from Bordeaux. Later, Angola was also a source of cuttings and seedlings for agricultural crops that were developed in Brazil. When Angola was a Portuguese colony, a number of Brazilians

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came to work in there, and in 1974, when the bulk of the white population of Angola was airlifted out of the country, quite a number settled in Brazil. U.S. missionaries have long been interested in Angola, especially after U.S. journalist Henry Morton Stanley passed through a part of Angola in 1877 after locating David Livingstone. William Taylor (1821–1902), from Rockbridge County, Virginia, was elected a missionary bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1884, and for the next twelve years he supervised missionaries going to, among other places, Angola. One of these, Héli Chatelain (1859–1908), was born in Switzerland but moved to New Jersey where he studied theology. Becoming a U.S. citizen, in 1889–1890 he was in Angola as a guide and translator for the American Eclipse Mission and was U.S. consul in Louanda (now Luanda) in 1891–1892. Returning to the United States, he was the author of several linguistic works and Folk-Tales of Angola, published in Boston in 1894. He then returned to Angola, residing there from 1897 until just before his death. At the same time, Merlin W. Ennis (1874–1964) was working in Angola, having translated the Bible into Umbundu and writing Umbundu: Folk Tales from Angola (1902). He founded the Elende Station in Angola in 1906, remaining there until 1944, when he retired to Lexington, Massachusetts. Another U.S. citizen in Angola was Reed Paige Clark (1878–1958). An economic adviser to the Liberian government, he was consul in Louanda from 1919 until 1924. Ralph Edward Dodge (b. 1907), from Terril, Iowa, was to play a small but very important part in Angola’s history. After training as a missionary, he went to Angola under the auspices of the Board of Missions www.abc-clio.com

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of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Angola from 1936 until 1941, and again from 1945 until 1950. During his second term there he met a young man who was working with the Luanda Public Health Service and helped him apply for a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Lisbon. The man, Agostinho Neto (1922–1979), went to Portugal, but his studies were suspended for two years owing to his political activities, so the American Methodist Church provided him with a scholarship to finish his degree. Returning to Angola, Neto was jailed, released, and jailed again. He then escaped to Morocco, from where he led the nationalist struggle, becoming a dedicated Marxist. On November 11, 1975, Neto was proclaimed Angola’s first president, leading the Communist government through four years of civil war until he died in 1979. The Americas were heavily involved in the civil war. On the one hand, the U.S. government backed the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola or UNITA) rebel movement of Jonas Savimbi, which opposed the Neto government. While Neto’s government did recruit some U.S. mercenaries, of much greater military importance was the large number of Cuban soldiers who served in Angola in support of the Neto government. At the conflict’s height, 2,500 Cubans were serving in Angola. As a result of this connection, many Angolans studied in Cuba, with quite a few settling in Havana. In spite of the war in Angola, trade between the United States and Angola rose between 1982 and 1984 from $856 million to $1.1 billion. At the same time, the U.S. government was sending millions of dollars to UNITA. In addition, the United States

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was a venue for the sale of many diamonds sold by the movement to finance its army. When Cuban soldiers finally left Angola in 1989, elections were held, with international peacekeepers provided by many countries, including Argentina. After these elections, opposition to the Marxist government from the United States declined, although Savimbi contested the results and the war started again, although on a much smaller scale than before and ending with Savimbi’s death in 2002. On May 19, 1993 the United States recognized the Angolan government. Ambassadors were exchanged, with Edmund T. DeJarnette serving as the first U.S. ambassador to the country in 1994–1995, succeeded by Donald K. Steinberg and then Joseph Gerard Sullivan. In 1980, 3,853 people born in Angola were residing in the United States. In 1990 the figure was 2,252. No figures are available for 2000. Justin Corfield See also: African Methodist Episcopal Church; Cuba; Peacekeeping and Military Interventions; Portuguese Empire References Blashford-Snell, John. In the Steps of Stanley. London: Hutchinson, 1975. Piper, Mark. “Cuban Military Mails in Angola.” American Philatelist 115, no. 2 (February 2001): 150–157. Stockwell, John. In Search of Enemies: How the C.I.A. Lost Angola. London: Andre Deutsch, 1978. Wilcken, Patrick. Empire Adrift: The Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro. London: Bloomsbury, 2004.

ANIKULAPO-KUTI, FELA (1938–1997) One of Africa’s most popular musicians and most famous dissidents, Nigerian Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, was larger than life and rebellious to the core. His influence in the www.abc-clio.com

popular culture of the United States and Europe has increased in recent years due to fascination with his heroic persona. Best known by his first name, Fela reflects the circularity of influence within the African Diaspora: a musician from Lagos absorbed American funk and the Black Power Movement and synthesized these elements into afrobeat, which in turn influenced Western musicians. The cross-cultural essence of afrobeat appeals to contemporary audiences accustomed to music that mixes different styles. Fela’s family was solidly Christian and middle class. While Fela attended the Trinity College of Music in London from 1958 to 1963, he was exposed to classical music and American jazz. He formed his first band, Koola Lobitos, and they performed a popular West African dance music, highlife. After a return to Nigeria, Fela toured the United States in 1969. There, the band was renamed Nigeria 70 and he was introduced to the Black Power Movement. Inspired by Malcolm X, Fela—upon returning to Lagos later that year—changed his name from the Anglicized “Ransome” to “Anikulapo,” which in Yoruba means “one who wears death in his pouch.” The band’s name was changed to the PanAfrican Afrika 70, and the music evolved into a new style, afrobeat. The driving sound of afrobeat incorporated highlife, rock, and the funk of James Brown and featured multiple electric guitars and African instruments. Lyrics, in the lingua franca of pidgin, ridiculed Africans emulating their colonial masters as well as the Nigerian military and government. The American counterculture of the late 1960s manifested itself in Fela’s lifestyle. He openly smoked marijuana and conducted interviews dressed only in bikini

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briefs. Fela’s outspokenness led to jail time in 1974. In 1977 he declared his commune, the Kalakuta Republic, autonomous, and the military responded violently. Upping the ante the following year, Fela entered politics with his Movement of the People Party. An emphasis on politics over music caused band members, including drummer Tony Allen, to quit, and the music suffered. In 1981 the band was renamed Egypt 80, reflecting Fela’s spiritual conversion, which was informed by Egyptologist and Afrocentrist thought. At Fela’s nightclub, the Shrine, performances were preceded by elaborate Yoruba ceremonies. For most of the remainder of Fela’s career, political dissent continued overshadowed his music. Fela died of AIDS in 1997. Fela’s influence was felt by David Byrne, Brian Eno, Jimmy Cliff, Miles Davis, Branford Marsalis, James Brown, and Bootsy Collins. Many rap and hip-hop artists have sampled Fela, and DJs mix Fela with dance music to create afro-house. Ginger Baker, Lester Bowie, and Roy Ayers collaborated with Fela. Fela’s son Femi carries on his father’s political and musical heritage and is a leading AIDS activist. Recent tributes include the CD Red, Hot + Riot: The Music and Spirit of Fela Kuti (2002) and “Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti,” an exhibition organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City during 2003. Monica Berger See also: Black Power Movement; Hip-Hop; Jazz and the Blues; Jazz, African; Music (African) References Darnton, John. “Nigeria’s Dissident Superstar.” New York Times Magazine, July 24, 1977, 10–12, 22–28.

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Olaniyan, Tejumola. Arrest the Music!: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Olorunyomi, Sola. Afrobeat!: Fela and the Imagined Continent. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. Schoonmaker, Trevor, ed. Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Veal, Michael E. Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000.

ANNAN, KOFI (1938–) Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian citizen, was secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2007. Annan is best-known as the seventh UN secretary-general and the first elected by UN staff. His first term as secretary-general ran from January 1997 until January 2002; subsequently, he was appointed by acclamation to a second fiveyear term of office beginning in January 2002. Annan was born in Kumasi, Ghana, on April 8, 1938. Annan’s first position with the UN was with the World Health Organization’s budget office in 1962. Before his tenure as secretary-general, Annan served in numerous important UN posts. As secretary-general, he placed considerable emphasis on maintaining an international commitment to Africa, as is evident in his influential 1998 report, The Causes of Conflict and the Promotion of Durable Peace and Sustainable Development in Africa. In April 2001, calling it his personal mission, he issued a five-point “Call to Action” addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic and proposed the establishment of a Global AIDS and Health Fund. Annan acted with diplomacy in volatile political situations involving Iraq’s compliance with Security Council resolutions (1998), civilian rule in Nigeria (1998), a stalemate between Libya and the

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Security Council (1998), violence in East Timor (1999), Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon (2000) and further efforts to resolve Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and combating terrorism (2001–2007). He called for a Global Compact to share the benefits of globalization fairly. In 2001 he and the UN received the Nobel Peace Prize, on which occasion he was credited with bringing new life to the UN. Alana Trumpy See also: Ghana; Health, Public; Human Rights; Terrorism; United Nations References Meisler, Stanley. A Man of Peace in a World of War. New York: Wiley, 2006. Koestler-Grack, Rachel A. Kofi Annan. New York: Chelsea House Publications, 2007.

ANTHROPOLOGY At the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists like Felix von Luschan (1854–1924); Franz Boas (1858–1942); and Boas’s U.S. followers Alfred L. Kroeber (1876–1960), Robert Lowie (1883–1957), Edward Sapir (1884–1939), Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), and Margaret Mead (1901– 1978), contributed to a new understanding of cultural systems by introducing new concepts of comparative approaches. These anthropologists initiated a paradigmatic shift in the social sciences from the biological to the cultural sphere. Their research changed notions of American democracy and its promise of equality in political, social, economic, and cultural history. Anthropologists’ early commitment to overcoming traditional stereotypes regarding the supposed inferiority and primitiveness of African cultures provided some of the ideological groundwork for political organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored www.abc-clio.com

People (NAACP), with its thirty-two founding members, among them W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), William E. Walling, Mary White Ovington, and Henry Moskowitz, and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, led by trailblazers such as Robert E. Park, Jessey E. Moorland, and Carter G. Woodson. Anthropologists like Boas, Benedict. and Alexander Goldenweiser (1880–1940) reevaluated aesthetic products of African peoples. In the wake of the new developments within pragmatic philosophy that were initiated by John Dewey, Boas and his followers promoted the revolutionary concept of cultural pluralism. The leading African American intellectual of the early twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois, recognized in Boas a seminal figure in the challenge of overcoming the color line. “Franz Boas came to Atlanta University where I was teaching history in 1906 and said to a graduating class: You need not be ashamed of your African past; and then he recounted the history of black kingdoms south of the Sahara for a thousand years. I was too astonished to speak. All of this I had never heard and I came then and afterwards to realize how the silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear or even be unconsciously distorted” (Du Bois, 1939, p. vii). Boas was a pioneer in modern anthropology and is commonly referred to as the “father of American anthropology.” The Boas school created an important link between African American culture, modernism, and multiculturalism. In addition to addressing specialized audiences through scholarly journals and books, Boas, Sapir, and Benedict reached not only a broad white audience but also the black community by

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contributing articles to The Crisis, Opportunity, The Nation, The Liberator, and The New Republic. These activities fostered crosscurrents of thinking on the nexus of race, culture, and democracy, thereby injecting African American arts with vigorous productive energy. For example, Sapir became a member of the writers’ workshop of Jean Toomer (1894–1967) in Chicago, and Boas’s student, Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), employed scientific fieldwork in Eatonville, Florida, as a basis for a new vernacular prose style in novels such as Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). In the 1920s the increasing selfawareness and cultural self-reliance of African Americans found its most prominent expression in the artistic movement called the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance writings fostered transatlantic literary interest in African American vernacular language and culture, particularly in European capitals such as Berlin, London, and Paris. Of equal importance was the exuberant reception of jazz music, African American dance, and the visual arts. Some of the groundbreaking beginnings of the new school of American anthropology can be traced back to Germany. Under the guidance of Adolph Bastion (1826–1905) and Rudolph Virchow (1821–1902), Felix von Luschan became a central figure at the Museum für Völkerkunde (Museum of Ethnology) in Berlin. Committed to the principle of collecting and analyzing cultural artifacts comparatively and inductively, the so-called “salvage anthropology,” Luschan elevated African art to a signifier of complex cultural systems comparable to those of European cultures. Thereby, he departed from www.abc-clio.com

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established anthropological strategies that drew their inspiration from the philosophical racial discourses of thinkers such as David Hume (1711–1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant’s belief that Africans were mentally child-like and intellectually inferior to Europeans was discredited by Luschan’s fieldwork on sub-Saharan art and its analysis, comparison, and, ultimately, display in Berlin museums His collection of Benin art and publications led to a reevaluation of African art that challenged long-standing categories of “superior” and inferior” peoples based on concepts of race. In 1915 Luschan lectured in the United States, where he confronted the question of the “color line,” informed Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) about his findings, conducted research on the heredity of African American immigrants, and popularized a nonracialist vision of the human species. With references to sensationalist and racist European displays of Africans in zoos, Luschan criticized racial activists such as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954) and Hermann Klaatsch (1863–1916) and his followers in a lecture at the University of Illinois in 1915. “[They] connect the tall Negroes with the gorilla, and the African Pygmies with the chimpanzee, the Chinese with the orang[utan] and the Japanese with the Gibbon” (Smith, 2002, p. 32). American scientists like William Benjamin Smith (1850–1934) and Robert W. Shufeldt (1850–1934) had, according to Luschan, hardly anything to say on the race question from a scientific standpoint. Luschan held that too much of racial discourse was socially constructed. Despite his endorsement of racial tolerance, Luschan remained an ambiguous personality who slowly moved into the Darwinian camp, supporting

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colonialism, eugenics, and German nationalism, a tendency that found its most ardent expression in Eugen Fischer (1874–1967) and Hans Gunther (1891–1968). They propelled the disciplines of anthropobiology and human genetics. In Germany, these scientific aberrations played into the hands of National Socialist claims of “Aryan” supremacy and the genocide plan of the “final solution.” At the Berlin museum, Franz Boas conducted research on the language and culture of various tribes of Africa and Alaska, which led to his substantial criticism of “scientific” racism as propelled by physical anthropology. When Boas emigrated to the United States in 1886, he was confronted with outspoken racism against immigrants and African Americans. Following Luschan, Boas was able to free anthropology from its pseudo-scientific justification of racist attitudes regarding physical inferiority and of proto-fascist, elitist, concepts in Europe. He used methods of anthropometry (physical anthropology and their techniques of measuring head sizes and shapes) to counter the assumption of racial formalism regarding the stability of human “types.” Boas warned that by confining considerations on the question of race in the United States to the intermixture of European types, it would be clear “that the consent that is felt by many in regard to the continuance of racial purity of our nation, is to a great extent imaginary” (Boas, 1974, p. 322). In his immensely popular and provocative book, Anthropology and Modern Life (1928), Boas held that environment, culture, and language affect mental functioning rather than physical characteristics. With his research on black Egyptianism and Ethiopianism, he continued to advocate www.abc-clio.com

the complexity and greatness of West African civilizations. With books such as The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) or Race, Language, and Culture (1940), Boas not only provided scientific proof to counterbalance notions of African primitivism. He also initiated far-reaching projects to foster a strong sense of self-awareness among Africans and African Americans, thereby enhancing racial pride. Boas encouraged gifted African American students to pursue anthropological research and continue an academic career despite the tremendous obstacles of racial prejudice within academia. Among those who felt stimulated by his call to “scientific arms” were Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Huff Fauset (half-brother of the Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Fauset), and James F. King. Boas proved that the social and natural environment played a crucial role regarding the performance of specific tasks. These findings refuted the belief that only northern Europeans brought the proper biological and racial features to the American context, making them alone fit for assimilation to the “American way of life.” The unsettling conclusions of Boas’s research caused great public uproar and resistance among conservative elites. Alain Locke drew on Boas in his essay, “The Eleventh Hour of Nordicism” (1935), where he explained in respect of the race question, “that this situation is finally changing after nearly two decades dominated by such attitudes is due to the influence of just a few strong dissenting influences—the most important of which has come from the militant but unquestionably scientific school of anthropologists captained by Professor Boas. They have dared, in season and out, to challenge false doctrine and conventional myths, and were

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the first to bring the citadel of Nordicism into range of scientific encirclement and bombardment. An essay in itself could be written on the slow but effective pressure that now has ringed the Nordic doctrines and their advocates round with an evertightening scientific blockade” (Locke, 1983, p. 232). The Boasian school held that cultural contacts are a source of creative growth for individuals and societies. Instead of insisting on a traditional concept of Western civilization following a singular evolutionary plan, cultural pluralism in the sense of Boas and his students recognized that all cultures are mixed and constantly undergo transformations. These ideas opened new perspectives on American contributions to modernity and its cultural hybridity. Frank Mehring See also: Art, African; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Ethnicity; Exploration and Explorers, Africa; Folklore, African; Harlem Renaissance; Hurston, Zora Neale; Race, History of; Transculturation References Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Boas, Franz. Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: Norton, 1928. Boas, Franz. Race, Language, and Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1940. Boas, Franz. Race and Democratic Society. New York: J. J. Augustin, 1945. Boas, Franz. “Race Problems in America.” In A Franz Boas Reader, edited by George W. Stocking Jr. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Folk Then and Now. 1939. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1975. Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935. Kroeber, Alfred Louis. Anthropology. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933. Locke, Alain, “The Eleventh Hour of Nordicism: Retrospective Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1934.” In The

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Critical Temper of Alain Locke, edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart. New York: Garland, 1983. Luschan, Felix von. Die Altertümer von Benin. Berlin and Leipzig, Germany: Vereinigung Wissenschaftlicher Verleger Walter de Gruyter, 1919. Mead, Margaret. Anthropologists and What They Do. New York: F. Watts, 1965. Smith, John David. “W. E. B. Du Bois, Felix von Luschan, and Racial Reform at the Fin de Siècle.” Amerikastudien/American Studies. 47, no.1 (2002): 23–38.

ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA Antigua, Barbuda, and the uninhabited Redonda constitute an island nation in the Lesser Antilles of the eastern Caribbean Sea. The vast majority of Antigua and Barbuda’s population are the descendants of the thousands of African slaves who were brought to the islands to work on sugar plantations. The colony of Antigua and Barbados was administratively part of the Leeward Islands from 1871 until 1967, when it entered into free association with Britain. It achieved full independence in 1981. The official language of the nation of Antigua and Barbuda is English. It is composed of six parishes and is a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as its titular head. The largest of the islands, with 108 square miles (280 square kilometers), Antigua has an intricate coastline, with reefs and shoals. Barbuda is a flat coral island of 62 square miles (161 square kilometers). A game reserve has been created in Barbuda owing to its woods and great variety of wildlife. The island has also become a sanctuary for the frigate bird. The original inhabitants of the islands were pre-agricultural Amerindians who populated the islands around 3000 BCE. After them, groups of Saladoid people, and

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subsequently Arawaks and Caribs, settled on the islands. Columbus disembarked on Antigua during his second voyage in 1493 and renamed the island after the Church of Santa Maria la Antigua in Seville, Spain. The Spanish and French established minor settlements, and in 1632 Antigua was colonized by the first English settlers. The soil of both Antigua and Barbuda was highly fertile. As it happened with the rest of the English colonies in the Antilles, the growing of tobacco and other experimental crops was soon discarded in favor of sugar, by far the most profitable business. In order to grow sugar, the land was divided into vast plantations, and the first Irish Catholic indentured servants were imported to work on them. Because of the climate and tropical diseases, these “white slaves” were in a few years replaced by Africans. Although slave rebellions were as frequent as in the rest of the English territories, the density of the forests in the interior provided the slaves with another way of breaking away from their cruelest servitude: self-governing maroon communities of escaped slaves flourished, at least as long as the plantation owners did not deforest the woods. Other means of slave resistance ranged from neglecting one’s labor to sabotage to suicide. African slaves also contested their owners’ tyranny by adapting African customs and cultural traditions to their Caribbean space. The successes of slave rebellions and the diversity of the cultural origins of African slaves led to a rich and complex variety of local traditions. Slaves in Antigua and Barbuda were officially emancipated in 1834, although former slaves often remained economically dependent on working for former plantation owners. Harsh labor conditions persisted www.abc-clio.com

well into the twentieth century. In 1939 the Antigua Trades and Labour Union was created to regulate and ameliorate the harsh labor conditions. However, agriculture is still important, though the sector nearly collapsed in 1972 when the sugar industry closed down. Since the 1970s its economy has being growing steadily. Although the main industry of the nation has become tourism, manufacturing is steadily growing, the main industries being those involved in the processing of agricultural products. Virginia Fernández Canedo See also: British Empire; Pre-Columbian America; Slave Revolts/Maronnage References Klein, S. Herbert. La esclavitud Africana en América Latina y el Caribe. Translated by Graciela Sánchez Albornoz. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1986. Montiel Martínez, Luz María. Negros en América. Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992.

APPIAH, KWAME ANTHONY (1954–) Kwame Anthony Appiah is a philosopher, historian, novelist, and literary critic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born of a Ghanaian father and an English mother, Appiah has used his writings to bridge the philosophical divide between Africa and America by deconstructing traditional racial identities in his writing. He is one of the most important philosophers of Africa, race, identity, and ethics of his lifetime. Appiah was born on May 8, 1954, in London to a Ghanaian father, Joe Appiah, a politician and lawyer in Ghana, and a British mother, Peggy Cripps, an author and historian. Appiah grew up in Kumasi, Ghana. He later earned his BA (1975),

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MA (1980), and PhD (1982) in philosophy from Cambridge University. After graduating from Cambridge, Appiah took a variety of teaching positions in the United Kingdom, Ghana, South Africa, and United States, including a professorship at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. While Appiah is an important linguistic philosopher, his works on race and ethnicity have earned him his greatest acclaim and criticism. Many of Appiah’s books and articles discuss the epistemology of being African, the history of Africa, and the metaphysics and ethics of identity, especially African identity. The inspiration for his philosophical tracts on race and identity stem from his own varied identity as an Anglo-Ghanaian gay man. His books discussing Africa or race, which stem from his Ghanaian experiences and heritage, include The Ethics of Identity (2005), Africana: The Encyclopedia of African and African American Experience (2003), Bu Me Bé: The Proverbs of the Akan (2002), Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1996), and In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992). In My Father’s House and Africana are Appiah’s two most famous works on African and African American identity, culture, and history. The book In My Father’s House deconstructs Pan-African identities that are based upon color or race, which he believes are not correct biological categories for determining an identity. The book also shows how Africa can learn from the West and still keep local, regional, and continental cultural identities based upon shared experience, not race- or color-based essentialism. As a professor of Afro-American Studies and philosophy at Harvard University (1991–2002), Appiah teamed up with www.abc-clio.com

Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. to create Africana. The idea originated with the famous African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century; Du Bois thought that African American history and European American scholars grossly misportrayed African and African American culture. Scholarly experts wrote the over-3,000 encyclopedia entries in Africana. Brett Bennett See also: Akan; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Enlightenment Philosophy; Ethnicity; Gates Jr., Henry Louis; Ghana; Race, History of; West, Cornel References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Peggy Appiah. Bu Me Bé: The Proverbs of the Akan. Accra, Ghana: The Center for Intellectual Renewal, 2002. Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Amy Gutman. Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

APPRENTICESHIP (BRITISH EMPIRE) Apprenticeship is the term for the transitional four-year period (1834–1838) between slavery and its full abolition that occurred in most of Britain’s slave-based colonies. A compromise between pro- and antislavery forces, apprenticeship allowed slave owners continued access to the unpaid labor of their former slaves, adding compensation in the form of labor for their loss of human property to the £20 million in monetary compensation they received. Initially proposed as a twelve-year period

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during which formerly enslaved people would become the “apprentices” of their former owners, the system envisaged by the British Abolition Act of 1833 was to last for six years. In the end, apprenticeship produced such opposition on the part of both former slaves, who objected to the delay in the attainment of “full freedom,” and former slave owners, who opposed the increased imperial intervention that accompanied it, that it was abolished in 1838. The British Abolition Act set out the broad outlines of apprenticeship, while local details were worked out in colonial legislation (for those “old” colonies with their own elected legislatures, such as Jamaica and Barbados) and in Orders in Council (for the more recently acquired crown colonies, such as Trinidad, which had no elected chamber). The British act legislated that children under the age of six became completely free. Other former slaves became “apprentices” and were designated either “praedial” (agricultural) or “nonpraedial” workers. Praedial apprentices owed their masters or mistresses forty-five hours of unpaid work per week, four and a half hours of which were to be allocated to work on provision grounds, parcels of land on which slaves could cultivate their own food. Nonpraedial apprentices—mostly domestic workers—could be required to work unlimited hours and were to be freed after four years, in 1838, while praedials would be freed after six, in 1840. Former slaveholders could no longer legally inflict direct punishment, corporal or other, on their apprentices. Apprentices had the right to purchase their freedom by undergoing a complex process of valuation. The system was overseen by a new group of state officials, the stipendiary or special magistrates, who adjudicated in cases of offences www.abc-clio.com

committed under the terms of the abolition act. (Criminal acts, such as theft, were supposed to be tried in the common law courts, although in practice, many stipendiary magistrates heard such cases as well.) Stipendiary magistrates, presented in the law and in some of the historiography as neutral third parties, consistently ruled more frequently in favor of apprenticeholders than apprentices. While many magistrates were openly racist and pro-planter, the imbalance in outcome of cases derived at least as much from the content of apprenticeship law, which aimed to enforce a system of unfree labor, as it did from the personal bias of individual magistrates. Apprenticeship was one of a number of gradual abolition plans proposed in British governmental circles in the early 1830s. Like the other schemes proposed, the apprenticeship system assumed that neither slave owners nor slaves were equipped for life in a society organized around free labor and that both needed a period of training and state supervision before adopting their new roles, envisaged to be those of employer and employee. The choice of the term “apprenticeship” invoked an imagined state of tutelage for former slaves who were not, however, apprenticed in the sense of learning a skill or a trade, but rather to the state of being free—that is, contractmaking—people. For instance, the designers of the system hoped that apprentices and apprenticeholders would make contracts for labor beyond the mandated forty-five hours per week, although in practice this took place relatively rarely. The design of apprenticeship incorporated efforts to reconstruct the gender relations and identities of enslaved people. Monogamous Christian marriage was encouraged, while women and men were

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marked out as different kinds of people through the prohibition of flogging for women while it remained a punishment that could be inflicted, at the order of a stipendiary magistrate, on men. Colonial governors and stipendiary magistrates exhorted apprenticed men to take on the role of head of household and provider for their nuclear families. The colonial legislatures of Antigua, Bermuda, and the Virgin Islands decided to forego an apprenticeship period. In those colonies, slavery was fully abolished on August 1, 1834, superseded in many cases by legislation governing vagrancy and contracts that imposed severe controls on formerly enslaved people. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, apprenticeship came into force on August 1, 1834, while in the Cape Colony (South Africa) it began on December 1, 1834. In several places, including St. Kitts and some Jamaican parishes, apprentices’ initial reaction to their new status took the form of strikes and protests demanding an end to compulsory unpaid labor. These were suppressed by British military force. Such conflicts were symptomatic of a wider range of daily struggles that belied the many initial reports of the system’s success. Some of these conflicts arose over issues created by the apprenticeship system, for example, the work and subsistence of free children or the organization of the hours of the compulsory working week. Others revolved around concerns that had led to conflict during slavery, such as religious freedom, the extent of deference expected by planters of unfree workers, the work requirements placed on breast-feeding women and mothers of many children, and the provision by masters and mistresses of clothing, dietary protein, and health care. These were long-standing conflicts, but www.abc-clio.com

they were played out during apprenticeship at heightened intensity because of apprentices’ raised expectations and apprenticeholders’ efforts to extract as much short-term profit as possible from their apprentices in the knowledge that the system would be short-lived. British abolitionists soon realized that apprenticeship had not ended the oppression of former slaves. Making use of information supplied largely by missionaries, they publicized the problems of the system and pressured the Colonial Office to increase the regulation of apprenticeship. By 1837 they were campaigning strongly in favor of the system’s immediate abolition. Ultimately, the colonial legislatures, under heavy pressure from the Colonial Office, decided to abolish apprenticeship completely from August 1, 1838. These decisions were taken for a variety of reasons, including planters’ desire to escape “interference” by the Colonial Office and stipendiary magistrates; pressure from British abolitionists; and fear of mass strikes and uprisings on the part of praedial apprentices when the nonpraedials achieved freedom. The British system of apprenticeship became a model in some respects for other emancipations in the Atlantic World. These included the patronato system of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the apprenticeship system in Suriname, and the Freedmen’s Bureau regulation of freedpeople’s lives and labor in the U.S. South. Diana Paton See also: Abolitionism, British; American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission; British Empire; Slavery (History) References Eudell, Demetrius. The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

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116 ARCHITECTURE Holt, Thomas. The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Paton, Diana. No Bond But the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Scully, Pamela. Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853. Oxford: James Currey, 1997. Williams, James. A Narrative of Events, since the First of August 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica. Edited by Diana Paton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

ARCHITECTURE Cultural contact between Europe, the Americas, and Africa has influenced the architectural structures of each. Architecture refers to the art and science of designing buildings and structures. While the definition of what architecture is varies from one place to other, that is, from one culture to another and from historical period to period, “good” architecture nonetheless is widely acknowledged to contain three core elements: beauty, utility, and solidity. With regards to the architecture of Africa and the Americas, a number of distinct models may be seen. Architecture in the Americas goes back for literally thousands of years, but it underwent fundamental change following the colonizing of both the North and South American continents by Europeans from the sixteenth century onward. However, prior to the arrival of European influence, Native Americans lived in highly developed societies with distinct customs; rules; beliefs; and, significantly, built forms. Often designed with regional differences due to, for example, the influence of local climate, www.abc-clio.com

availability of building materials, and the distinct ways of life of particular Native American groups, edifices ranged from earth mounds in West Virginia (United States) and the elaborate, and large-sized, pole-framed dwellings of the Iroquois Indians in New York State (United States) to the snow and ice houses of the Inuit and Yupik in the Canadian Arctic and Alaska (United States) and the temples of the Aztecs (Mexico). In places such as Central America, large-scale stone pyramids, thoroughfares, and cities were erected—for example, Tenochtitlan and Teotihuacán in Mexico—that highlight the importance of architecture to the cultural expression and rituals of native peoples such as the Aztecs, Mayans, and Toltecs. In South America, too, peoples like the Incas created elaborate structures and urban settlements as their empires grew; an example is Machu Picchu in Peru, which was erected on a mountain peak. Yet with the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s, many native design cultures vanished, like that of the Meso-American peoples mentioned previously, and indigenous design forms in some instances even adopted westernized forms, for example, gables at the front of the longhouses erected by Atlantic Indians in the United States. Until the late 1800s and early 1900s, European traditions hugely influenced the design of American buildings. In Brazil, architecture was dependent on Portugal for inspiration until the 1800s, and in Mexico, Spanish design was hugely influential until the 1900s. With the rise of industrialization, the lessening influence of the colonial motherland and the rise of independent nations, and the search for national design styles, architecture in the Americas took on new forms. In so doing, it utilized new

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materials, such as steel, and new technologies, such as the mechanical elevator. North American cities, as a result, adopted new vertical scales, led by Chicago and New York from the 1890s, with their many-floored skyscrapers that are today synonymous with U.S. cities. Representing the large egos, mercantile status, and substantial riches of private corporations, these buildings had a practical advantage in places such as Manhattan, in New York City, by providing a structural means to circumnavigate the problem of a scarcity of central urban land. Many skyscrapers today, especially those in New York, are world famous even if extreme. High-rise building in the Americas has somewhat slowed due to the impact of the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001 on New York’s World Trade Center. However, tall building design, very much part of the move toward modernist designing, is well and truly rooted in the Americas. Frank Lloyd Wright’s design and open-plan influence, consolidated by the likes of Mies Van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, ensured that North American cities have tall buildings erected to geometric shapes with metal and glass facades and horizontal bands across the tops. Modernism has also taken hold in South America as well, in part because of the influence of Le Corbusier, who visited Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s and who consequently helped style the original forms of architects such as Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa. In Africa, traditional design forms, as in the Americas, have a significant richness, with the northern area of sub-Saharan Africa having been influenced in past centuries by Arabic culture while the southern area of the continent was affected by the Bantu peoples and their cultures. Similarly www.abc-clio.com

to Native American architecture, Native African designing was influenced by available materials, or lack thereof, as in the case of the holy city of Lalibela, in Ethiopia, which was erected from natural rock. Hence the widespread use of uncomplicated, unfussy materials like adobe for bricks; wood or woven leaves and branches for roofs, which are applied to roundhouses in Togo and Benin; painted facades of mud edifices in Nigeria; thatched roofs in the Congo; and wooden-ribbed housing in Cameroon, elements of which also were adopted in other places such as North and South America following the onset of slave exportation by European nations. Travel and conquests by Africans such as the Moors brought Muslim architecture to Europe, particularly Spain. Significantly, too, African architecture in Egypt during the reign of the pharaohs—with its decorative columns and horizontal and vertical lines that help create balanced, ordered edifices of large scale—influenced the rationally minded ancient Greeks, who in turn inspired the Romans and subsequently most of Western Europe as part of the cultural awakening of the Renaissance. In short, Africa indelibly influenced the palette of European architectural evolution, while soon after Europe, in turn, fundamentally shaped Africa. Modern Africa has been profoundly affected by the processes of slavery and colonization by European nations such as France, Germany, Portugal, and Britain from the 1500s. European vernacular design was brought to Africa for the purpose of erecting public buildings and residential buildings for the elites of African colonial society, that is, the non-native population. With regards to housing, a notable designer was Arts and Crafts–inspired Herbert

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Even so, the history of African architecture is closely related to the politics of colonial rule. From the mid-1900s, the changing cultural condition in Africa created by the move from colonialism to independence brought a major architectural shift as Africa for the first time experienced a move toward modernism. At the end of the colonial period in the 1950s, modern architecture was employed as a means to display the intended colonial welfare state, yet after independence new governments and elites utilized modernism as a means to convey strength, optimism, and hopefulness about Africa’s future. Ian Morley See also: Africa, Precolonial; Architecture, Plantation; Art, African; Pre-Columbian America References Elleh, Nnamdi. African Architecture: Evolution and Transformation. New York: McGrawHill, 1996. Prussin, Labelle. African Nomadic Architecture. Seattle: Washington University Press, 1995. Segre, Roberto, ed. Latin America in its Architecture. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981.

Bet Giyorgis (St. George’s), one of a number of rockhewn churches built under Lalibela, a Christian king of Ethiopia during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. (iStockPhoto.com)

Baker in South Africa, a British designer who amalgamated local stone, thatch, and timber with an adaptation of the vernacular (Cape gable). Similarly, local elites combined elements of Western design vocabularies with local traditions, and in so doing created a hybrid architectural culture. With regard to public architecture, classical designing was often employed and hybrid forms were not permitted as colonizing authorities steadfastly maintained control over the styles to be used in order to continue to highlight status hierarchies and support existing colonial contexts. However, the British, for instance, slowly shifted away from importing design styles to adopting components from local styles. www.abc-clio.com

ARCHITECTURE, PLANTATION The knowledge of African slaves and the conflicts inherent in transatlantic slavery would play a central role in the architecture and design of plantations. Plantations in the New World were important economic units, and their architecture and design reflected the knowledge and skills brought by African slaves to the Americas, the economic interests of plantation owners, and the inherent conflicts between masters and slaves. Africans would, in effect, influence architectural design in the Americas through their presence on the plantation.

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The Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States offer important examples of plantation architecture and design. Slaves were greatly utilized in the Caribbean and, because of the limited amount of arable land, the homes of these slaves were located on the plantation where the soil could not be tilled. These homes were one-to-two-room huts that were square or rectangular in shape and were arranged in neat rows. The huts were constructed of available materials, which varied from island to island. These slave dwellings were built by the planters and also, sometimes, by the slaves. The floors were tamped earth and sometimes held a raised platform for a bed. The walls were constructed out of wattle, a weaving of branches, vines, or split bamboo over a plaster of clay. Roofs were made of palms. All these techniques of construction and similar types of materials were in wide use in West Africa. In Brazil, a certain type of architecture called the fazenda, or plantation house, was developed from the 1500s to the 1800s. The arrival and use of slaves, which assured the survival of the colonial economy in Brazil, demanded a separation of master and slaves. Most of these plantation houses were built in the Portuguese baroque or neoclassical style; the change from baroque to neoclassical was inspired by European architect Grandjean de Montigny. Montigny designed various buildings and spread a distinctive type of architecture in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A key feature of these plantations was separate quarters for the slaves. These dwellings were usually laid out in a square-shaped configuration to form an open courtyard directly behind the plantation house. On some of the larger plantations, the owner had outbuildings that were used for housing www.abc-clio.com

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the abundance of slaves surrounding the great house. The fazenda of Freguesia is on one of the oldest sugar plantations in Bahia, Brazil. It was built in the eighteenth century and was heavily influenced by the Portuguese baroque style. African slaves played a role in building the project. The chapel is the crowning element of this plantation and is heavily adorned with baroque-style architecture. Between 1837 and 1840 Brazil produced over 90 percent of all coffee exports in the world. As in the case of sugar, plantations and slaves were prevalent. Also, due to the great demand for the tanks that held the coffee and the sluiceways that transported it, slaves were commonly utilized in their production. The slave quarters on the coffee plantations were laid out in the same square configuration and courtyard as on the sugar plantations. One of the more prominent coffee plantation homes in Brazil was the fazenda called Retiro, located in Rio de Janeiro. It is a stunning example of a square-shaped plantation with a large, open courtyard. The house was owned by the Werneck family and was landscaped by Roberto Burle Marx. It is one of the few plantation homes that has been designated a national monument. Once again, the slaves and owners worked together to create a beautiful, two-story, baroque-style plantation. The African slaves stayed in the outbuildings and in the courtyard apartments as well. This architectural feature perpetuated the separation of slave and owner. In the United States, slavery influenced the layout and general function of plantation design much as in Brazil. New spatial layouts were devised to maintain the slaves’ functionality while concealing their role in the hierarchical realm of the plantation. African influence on architecture in the

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United States can be best exemplified by looking at Mount Vernon, Monticello, and the plantation of Thomas Spalding. George Washington’s Mount Vernon home in Virginia was built between 1730 and 1787, and it displays the architectural elements required for the patriarchal plantation system. The first feature to be noticed is the placement of the mansion on the site. The “big house” is placed on higher ground than the main entrance path, enhancing the structure’s monumental feel. This impression is increased by the large amount of land in front of the house and the large trees surrounding it. It is further enforced by the curve of the service lane toward the slave quarters, which were placed so as to be completely invisible from the main house. This separation is rendered even more complete by making the back walls of the slave quarters completely solid, thus, forming a wall-like barrier to the garden area of the main house. Even though this arrangement was created for the benefit of the plantation owner, it served a purpose for the slaves as well. The separation between master and slave gave the slaves a sense of privacy while in their common sleeping and living areas. In this sense, privacy contributed to the function of the structures. Privacy was probably one of the only ways in which the slaves were able to define and control their own environment at Mount Vernon. Yet even though the presence of slaves had a noticeable impact on the architecture conceived at Mount Vernon, the design scheme at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello was even more attuned to the hierarchical gap between master and slave. First, slaves had a more direct impact on the architecture of Monticello because they participated in its actual creation. For the lack of www.abc-clio.com

available white craftsmen, the slaves of Monticello served in their stead. The slaves who worked on Monticello served as cabinetmakers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, and smiths. Their high skill level proves that slaves were capable of creating their own architectural designs and putting them into production, although they generally lacked the freedom to display such abilities. Whatever freedom the slaves had in creating and building Monticello was crushed by its design, for the slaves were completely separated from the realms of the plantation owner. A number of the design features at Monticello allowed for the slaves to be readily available for service while remaining hidden. They included a rotating door that had semicircular shelves on one side and tiny stairways unobtrusively located in the cross-passageways from different wings. Such ingenious architectural features as these allowed the slaves to perform all of their necessary tasks and move throughout the house without imposing themselves upon the refined environment of their master. Along with the interior features, the general layout of the plantation highlighted the presence of the master and the expendability of the slave. At Monticello, the main house was at a consistently higher ground level than any slave walkway or housing compound. Therefore, Jefferson was able to incorporate a passageway from the main house to the slave quarters that was completely invisible from any vantage point of the mansion. Also, Jefferson devised the surrounding landscape and structures of Monticello so that one could not see from the parlor the slaves as they performed the daily functions of the plantation. It is believed that Thomas Jefferson’s incorporation of such

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designs was influenced by a study of the slave castle at Elmina on the West African coast. There, hidden access routes were utilized to connect the upper realms of the white man to the lower recesses, where the slaves were kept for exploitation. However, no matter the initial influence for his design schemes, Jefferson’s home is a significant landmark in the development of plantation design. Yet apart from plantation design, one must also observe the treatment of slaves in city settings. In contrast to the designs and spatial layouts utilized in the plantation settings, city homes had to incorporate the same separation between master and slave without the option of simply placing the slave dwellings some distance away. The proximity of slaves to each other increased their opportunities to communicate and organize uprisings. Therefore, keeping all these factors in mind, many designs placed the main house near the street, with minimal housing for the slaves at the very back of the site. These structures were usually surrounded by very high walls and open only to the main house. This development, along with the omission of alleys, made it impossible for the slaves to focus their attention on anyone besides their master. Building these structures was difficult because it took time, materials, and land away from the wealthy white population; thus, the idea of slaves “living out” became popular at this time. This meant that slaves lived in warehouses, utility sheds, and stables. In these places, African people began to demonstrate their ability to understand and develop architecture of their own. Many slaves in these settings rearranged and created new spaces to suit their various needs. Gradually, as moving slaves away from their masters became more frequent, www.abc-clio.com

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African people began to build sheds and shanties on the outskirts of towns. In the nineteenth century, slaves were used to build plantations in the U.S. South. In Georgia, skilled slaves made a distinctive contribution to the culture of coastal locations. An example is the site of Thomas Spalding, a slave owner on the island of Sapelo. There, Spalding used his slaves to build his mansion as well as his sugar mill, cotton gin, and other machinery. Spalding not only depended upon his slaves to build his plantation, but also used them in running it. An example of such a slave is Sandy Maybank, who belonged to Charles C. Jones and who directed the construction of Jones’s rice mill and supervised all milling operations. The buildings on Jones’s site were constructed of materials the slaves found in their environment. These materials consisted of a mixture of crushed sea shells, water, lime, and mud, a combination called Tubby. The layout of Spalding’s and Jones’s plantations is also important. To accommodate the slaves, many plantations had all the necessary facilities for their care and maintenance. In most cases, these plantations were arranged to be like modern small cities. For example, Spalding’s plantation on Sapelo Island had a hospital, a building for the care of slave infants, and slave quarters that were designed facing a main street with yard space at the back for gardening. Although most of the plantation was destroyed during the U.S. Civil War, some of the slave quarters remained, illustrating the durability of the building construction. The influence that Africans had on plantation architecture differed with each project. Sometimes the slaves were skilled craftsmen, as at Monticello, and sometimes they were merely laborers. During the

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slavery era, a separation of master and slave was required, and the separation can be seen directly in the way architecture was produced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States. The infusion of Africans into American society brought new ways of constructing and new ways of designing in the United States. Mohammad Gharipour See also: Architecture; Plantations and Plantation Systems; Slavery (History) References Crain, Edward E. Historic Architecture in the Caribbean Islands. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Hughes, David. Afrocentric Architecture: A Design Primer. Columbus, OH: Greyden Press, 1994. Johnson, Charles, and Patricia Smith. Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998. Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

ARISTIDE, JEAN-BERTRAND (1953–) Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a charismatic priest of Haiti’s poor, served three times as his country’s president, in 1991, 1994–1996, and 2001–2004. Aristide was born on July 15, 1953, to a family of peasants of moderate means outside Port-Salut in southwestern Haiti. When he was still an infant, and after the death of his father, the Aristide family moved to the capital, Portau-Prince. Educated by Salesian priests, Aristide studied in Israel, Greece, and Canada. He was ordained a priest on July 3, 1982. In 1985 he was assigned to the St. Jean Bosco parish in one of Port-au-Prince’s slums. www.abc-clio.com

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest, became the first democratically elected president of Haiti in late 1990. (UPI)

Aristide quickly acquired a reputation for courage, as he delivered fiery sermons targeting dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc) and his henchmen, the Tontons Macoutes. This earned him the hatred of Duvalier and his successors, who ruled Haiti during the period of instability that followed Duvalier’s departure (1986–1991) and made him the target of up to seven assassination attempts. On September 11, 1988, as Aristide was preaching mass at St. Jean Bosco, armed gunmen assaulted the church, killing thirteen before setting the building on fire. (Aristide miraculously escaped.) Another devoted, though less violent, enemy was Haiti’s Catholic hierarchy, which resented Aristide’s revolutionary message and his sympathy for the theology of liberation, a liberal reading of the Gospel

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popular in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. The Salesians expelled Aristide from the order in December 1988. (Aristide renounced the priesthood in October 1994.) Aristide’s message was highly popular with Haiti’s poor. He dared to stand up against the Macoutes who tyrannized the country’s inhabitants. His anti-American rhetoric was in tune with most Haitians’ political convictions. In a country plagued by widespread poverty and deep inequalities, he professed interest in, though not outright adoption of, Communism. A dark-skinned Haitian, he capitalized on the dark-skinned majority’s resentment against the mulatto minority that dominated Haiti’s economic life. Aristide astutely delivered most of his speeches in creole, the French-African dialect used by poor Haitians, rather than the academic French that the Haitian elite traditionally favored. When presidential elections monitored by the international community were held on December 16, 1990, Aristide won a decisive first-round victory with 67.48 percent of the vote. Political controversy plagued Aristide’s first presidency (February 7, 1991– September 30, 1991; October 15, 1994– February 7, 1996). His decision to raise the minimum wage angered the country’s economic elite and foreign donors; the army grew restless after Aristide fired most of its senior officers shortly after gaining office. But criticisms focused mostly on Aristide’s human rights shortcomings. On April 4, 1991, former president Ertha PascalTrouillot was sent to the national penitentiary, then put under house arrest. She was released only after intense international pressure. In a famous September 27, 1991, speech, Aristide made a nominal apology www.abc-clio.com

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for the practice called Père Lebrun, or necklacing, a torture popular among his supporters that consisted in throwing a tire filled with burning gasoline around a suspected Macoute’s head. Raoul Cédras, whom Aristide had appointed as interim commander-in-chief, overthrew Aristide in a September 29 coup that Aristide and his supporters accused U.S. president George H. W. Bush of supporting. Aristide flew to Venezuela and exile. In 1993 Aristide settled in Washington, D.C., and asked U.S. president Bill Clinton to help restore him to power. Following three years of failed diplomatic and economic sanctions, U.S. forces landed in Haiti on September 19, 1994. Aristide returned on October 15. He left office at the end of his first term in February 1996, then returned for a five-year term in February 2001. Aristide’s second presidency was marked by economic and political turmoil. Opposition parties, accusing Aristide’s supporters of electoral fraud, boycotted the 2000 presidential elections, then denounced Aristide’s presidency as illegitimate. They also accused Aristide of sponsoring political assassinations, either through the Haitian National Police or through paramilitary groups known as chimères (chimeras). Due to political instability, foreign donors canceled most of the funds pledged following the U.S. intervention of 1994. In the fall of 2003 the United States asked Aristide to distance himself from Amiot Métayer, who led a group of chimères called the armée cannibale (cannibal army) in the city of Gonaïves. When Métayer was subsequently murdered, his supporters accused Aristide of ordering Métayer killed to improve his relations with the United States. In February 2004

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Métayer’s brother Butter allied himself with Louis-Jodel Chamblain, the leader of a paramilitary group who had terrorized Haiti in 1991–1994, and former police chief Guy Philippe. They launched a rebellion that soon spread to the city of Cap Haïtien, then marched on the capital, Portau-Prince. At the prodding of his former French and U.S. supporters, Aristide left Haiti on February 29, 2004, for an initial exile in the Central African Republic. (Aristide later claimed he had been abducted by U.S. troops.) Following Aristide’s departure, four major power centers emerged in Haiti: remnants of Aristide’s chimères; Philippe’s troops; French and American peacekeepers; and Gérard Latortue, chosen by a committee representing Haiti’s various political parties to become interim prime minister. Jean-Bertrand Aristide married HaitianAmerican lawyer Mildred Trouillot in February 1996. They have two daughters. Philippe R. Girard See also: Duvalier, Jean-Claude; Haiti; Human Rights References Aristide, Jean-Bertrand. La vérité en vérité. Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Le Natal, 1989. Aristide, Jean-Bertrand. In the Parish of the Poor. New York: Orbis Books, 1993. Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, and Christophe Wargny. Jean-Bertrand Aristide: An Autobiography. New York: Orbis Books, 1993. Danner, Mark. “Haiti on the Verge.” New York Review of Books (November 4, 1993): 25–30. Danner, Mark. “The Prophet.” New York Review of Books (November 18, 1993): 27–36. Danner, Mark. “The Fall of the Prophet.” New York Review of Books (December 2, 1993): 44–53. Girard, Philippe. Clinton in Haiti: The 1994 U.S. Intervention in Haiti. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. Wilentz, Amy. The Rainy Season: Haiti since Duvalier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

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ARMS TRAFFICKING Arms trafficking refers to the buying and selling of weapons to military and paramilitary groups internationally, both through state-sanctioned and extralegal transactions. In Latin America and Africa, arms trafficking has been part of regional conflicts and conflicts between external powers that are conducted through third and fourth parties in proxy warfare. For Latin America, most arms trafficking during the cold war served American and Soviet proxy conflicts. During the same period, African arms trafficking served regional conflicts to overturn or maintain disputed governing bodies. Modern arms trafficking in Latin America was heavily tied to U.S. regional and international interests during World War II and the cold war. During World War II, Latin American nations declared their allegiance to the Allies and received great financial assistance from the United States. Relying on U.S. monetary support and military power, Latin American governments subsequently leveraged their position during the cold war by using the specter of impending Communism to claim that any internal conflicts would favor Soviet-style policies. In response, the United States often provided aid in the form of weapons, military training, and equipment to quash violently such uprisings. In a mirror image, Latin American revolutionary groups received similar arms support from Cuba, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. While direct overseas weapons deliveries or sales and formal military assistance dominated the twentieth century, more recently a secondary international arms system was introduced to Latin America by private arms deals with guerilla forces,

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typically funded by narcotics sales. Coca cultivation, processing, and distribution groups hire guerilla forces for protection. Profits from narcotics trafficking, in turn, are used by the revolutionary groups to purchase weapons. In some cases the arms sales are private legal purchases, but usually private sellers and dealers illegally transport these weapons to Latin America. In other cases, arms sales have been made by purchasing surplus weapons from postconflict U.S.-Soviet proxy war regions. The private and internal trafficking of weapons dominates today’s Latin American market. In contrast, Africa’s arms traffic after World War II was made possible by military aid from multiple parties, such as China, Iran, the United States, the Eastern Bloc, and the Soviet Union. Decolonization in the 1960s created a power vacuum. In this context, money and weapons were provided to bolster groups supporting capitalism, socialism, Communism, or rule governed by the Islamic faith. Intense conflicts arose in Sudan, Gambia, Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, and other areas. The vast majority of weapons used in these regional conflicts were manufactured elsewhere and partly shipped as official aid packages. The majority of the military hardware in such shipments did not consist of large weapons systems such as aircraft, tanks, or naval vessels, but rather assault weapons, mines, field-expedient artillery, and mortars. Africa lacked the necessary infrastructure to utilize and maintain mechanized infantry. Vast numbers of assault weapons were sent to Africa with complex consequences. A domestic cottage industry emerged to retrofit civilian weapons to accept military ammunitions. South Africa established small arms productions facilities. When the www.abc-clio.com

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cold war ended, massive aid shipments from the U.S. and Eastern Bloc nations declined; by that time, however, there were so many weapons on the black market that it was nearly three times more expensive to purchase small arms officially than to acquire them extralegally. As monetary aid from the United States and the Eastern Bloc dried up, Latin America’s and Africa’s black markets became the driving forces behind further arms transfers. Latin American conflicts and arms hoarding are typically restricted to either official military forces or guerilla elements. However, in Africa, enough weapons had been shipped by the end of the cold war so that small arms could be more easily obtained. Furthermore, Africa lacks the infrastructure necessary to control the threat of arms. Additionally, in contrast to Latin America, many African governments rely on weapons as a means to maintain their own power. Disarmament and arms control remain difficult in both Latin America and Africa. Weapons in one region often circulate to neighboring countries after a conflict. This was the case with Mozambique and South Africa; Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and, on a larger scale, Peru and Colombia. Even if disputed areas are settled by formal disarmament methods, a lack of secure handling and corruption amongst personnel charged with the transfer and destruction of such arms results in the weapons being sold back or exchanged for other goods. Arms are often shipped along channels similar to those used for contraband items such as rhino horn, fur, ivory, and narcotics. Josiah Baker See also: Cold War; Decolonization, African; Military Forces; World War II

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126 ART, AFRICAN References Adekanye, ‘Bayo. “Arms and Reconstruction in Post-Conflict Societies.” Journal of Peace Research 34.3 (August 1997): 359–366. Brayton, Abbott A. “The Politics of Arms Limitations in Africa.” African Studies Review 26, no. 1 (March 1983): 73–89. Vines, Alex. “Angola and Mozambique. The Aftermath of Conflict.” Conflict Studies 280 (May–June 1995): 1–27. Willet, Susan. “South Africa: Arms Trade Dilemma.” International Security Digest 541.1 (November 1994): 47–74.

ART, AFRICAN African art includes expressive art forms such as painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, pottery, beadwork, metal, and wood from the Stone Age to the present, shaped by travel and trade within the African continent and between Africa and the Americas. From its ancient civilizations to contemporary culture, Africa has been a continent of extraordinary artistic creativity. A vast diversity of art traditions and forms are produced and practiced by people living in a wide variety of landscapes: deserts, mountains, rain forests, and savannahs, large cities and small rural villages. Local traditional faiths have a long oral tradition providing explanations for the creation of the world, and the visual arts serve along with religion to teach and provide instructions in moral values, social conduct, and philosophical beliefs. Evidence of the origins of artistic expression in Africa emerges from the early prehistoric period to ancient Nubian and Egyptian dynasties. Along with the art form, whether cave painting, pyramid, sculpture, mask, textile, or beaded necklace, there is a distinct connection between the use of these objects, religion, and other social systems. www.abc-clio.com

Stone Age The impulse to create art has prehistoric beginnings found in the ancient rock paintings north of the Sahara Desert in the Tassili n’Ajjer region of Algeria (ca. 8000–6000 BCE). These early Stone Age pictures are composed of symbols and images cut into rock or painted with naturally occurring pigments such as ocher (yellow clay), kaolin (white chalk), and charcoal (black ash). They portray animals and horned figures, goddesses and hunters, and scenes of everyday life, all rendered in remarkably detailed naturalism.

Ancient Art In the north, ancient civilizations along the great Nile River in Egypt included the Kush kingdom in Nubia (ca. 800 BCE) and the Egyptian dynasties with their artistic splendor. Both Nubia (located in both Egypt and Sudan) and Ethiopia became important sites for early Christianity. The divine ruling kings commissioned the finest paintings and sculpture to serve as a system of sacred communication between the human and spiritual worlds. In sub-Saharan Africa (countries located south of the Sahara Desert), ancient pottery heads were excavated in the town of Nok in northern Nigeria and dated to ca. 800 BCE–200 CE. The heads were at one time part of full human figures. Clothing and ornaments depicted on the surviving figures portray body adornments and dress nearly identical to those found several centuries later, ca. 900–1400, in figures from the Yoruba city of Ife. Ife is considered the sacred site of creation for the Yoruba people living in southwestern Nigeria. Ife flourished as a great center for the arts, where the finest bronze workers were commissioned by the Oni (owner) of Ife. The

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Cave paintings of people with cattle, ca. 4000 BC–2000 BC, at Tassili-n-Ajjer, in the Sahara Desert of Algeria. (Corbis)

artists were notable for their highly skilled technique of cire-purdue (lost-wax) casting, as well as an elegant realism, attention to the finest detail, and idealized renderings of important royal ancestors. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the legendary kingdom of Benin began to extend its power and authority over a wide area of Nigeria. The skill of the Ife craftsmen was so highly valued and celebrated that the Oba (king) of Benin had them move into his royal family compound. The Oba commissioned a dazzling array of objects highlighting himself and queen mother, their spiritual wealth and affiliations signifying wisdom, high rank, dignity, and achievement. The works incorporated images of court officials, chiefs, political www.abc-clio.com

allies, and conquered men. The Oba’s warrior exploits and divine power were recorded and commemorated on large carved ivory tusks, inserted in cast bronze heads and displayed on royal ancestral shrines. Thousands of objects were created and installed in the Benin palace over several centuries immortalizing the king and reflecting the historical importance of the royal ruling lineage.

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Art and Transformation Carved wood masks, both sacred and secular, are one of Africa’s best-known and expressive art forms. The purposes, functions, and contexts in which they are used are

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Statue for the soul of a local Nubian prince, ca. first–third century AD found in the excavations of Karanoq, ancient Nubia. (Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

diverse and complex. Masks are carved to represent a range of distinct ancestors, animals, or natural forces that have particular significance to the individual family lineage or community. Masquerades are performed during rites of passage from adolescence to adulthood. They entertain while also communicating important social values and behavior, they mark the beginning and end of the agricultural seasons, and they emerge at funerals to provide the deceased a safe journey into the spiritual world. Their appearances before audiences on these special occasions often include music, drumming, singing, and stunningly vigorous dance before a gathered audience. This is accomplished by donning a full costume comprised of not only the carved mask, www.abc-clio.com

which may be painted or anointed with sacrificial material, but also distinct clothing often adorned with cowry shells, bells, mirrors, coins, plant fiber, animal hair, teeth, and other symbolic attachments. The dancer may also wear special arm and leg ornaments along with rattles or whisks held in the hand. In other words, the emphasis is on the complete ensemble and how it moves with motion and gesture and activates communication during a ceremonial performance. Geometric patterns and colors further identify the mask’s association with natural forces and phenomena such as rivers, mountains, trees, winds, heaven, and earth. Once transformed, the masked character may even channel a spirit language such as low guttural sounds or high-pitched whistles. The dancer’s intent is to conceal his earthly identity in order to transform and embody the invisible spirit that is

Bronze casting of Ife king, ca. thirteenth-century Nigeria. (Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY)

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called to visit the human community during important ceremonial performances. Masks display an astonishing variety of form. Each style can be identified as distinct and representative of a particular ethnic group and area. The Yoruba of southwest Nigeria, for instance, are considered one of the largest and most prolific artproducing peoples in West Africa. Yoruba carvers use one of the more naturalistic approaches when rendering the faces of ancestors and other special characters. For example, Gelede masqueraders perform at annual ceremonies honoring the ancestral mothers and the powerful community of deceased female elders. The masks provide a symbolic function by reinforcing and protecting the memory of the departed mothers. Animals from the surrounding landscapes play an important role in masked

Ceremonial mask from Angola representing a female ancestor, ca. twentieth century. The scars indicate tears associated with the ritual separation of sons from their mothers. (Manu Sassoonian/Art Resource, NY)

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Initiation mask representing antelope, Democratic Republic of Congo, ca. twentieth century. (Manu Sassoonian/Art Resource, NY)

societies. The appearance of the ChiWara antelope headdresses of the Bamana peoples of Mali signals the beginning and end of the planting and harvest season. The antelope represents the mythical ancestor who helped to guide this agricultural community to plant bountiful harvests. Danced in male and female pairs, the masqueraders wear the carved headdresses attached by a basketry cap on the top of their heads. Their bodies are covered with full raffia costumes, signifying the uncultivated forest area. The dancers carry two long sticks, and in a bent posture they mimic the graceful movements of the antelope. The Dogon of Mali incorporate masked dancers into collective dry-season funerary rituals, which take place over six days, during which individual and group performances are carried out by a special group of initiated men. The complex

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Dongon tribesmen in traditional masks, Mali. (Corbis)

ceremony, called dama, is an elaborate presentation that can include more than seventy masked characters. One of the most frequently seen is the kanaga mask, which is highly abstract in form. The kanaga mask is carved in a rectangular form worn over the face, with twin slats at the top. The dancers move in whirling, dynamic motions. The Mende of Sierra Leone are exceptional for their women masqueraders, members of the all-female Sande society that is unique among masking societies in Africa. The women dance in their own helmet masks, worn over the head to the shoulder, called Sowei. The Sande society is responsible for the training, initiation, and socialization of young girls into adulthood. The male counterpart is the Poro society, whose members also use masks during rites of passage and often represent www.abc-clio.com

the town authority in both judicial and social matters.

Art and the Spiritual World Figure carvings are among the most central and essential of objects commissioned for use in context with important sacred and secular rituals. These powerful symbolic images function as sites of worship and devotion to a particular deity or invisible force in the spiritual realm. They support the individual or community with a private place to come to petition for protection, prosperity, and personal welfare. To influence the spirit to engage with the human world, some figures are carved in a highly abstract style by inventing an earthly form for a spiritual force. Still others function as a site for a specialist priest to activate the shrine figure by pouring a libation or blood sacrifice from an

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Carving of female figure with offertory bowl. Luba, Congo. Nineteenth century. (Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY)

animal, usually a goat or chicken, which is then cooked and eaten as part of a community feast. In addition, iron nails or blades can be inserted into the carved figure to swear an oath of atonement, healing, and reconciliation. These rituals are seen as a process that helps to set the earth and heaven in a world of balance and harmony. Carvings are commissioned to commemorate important warrior kings, leaders, or chiefs. These can function as memorials to both the deceased and the living and as a visual biography of the history of important town lineages. Women and children are also an important theme in figure sculpture. This image of maternity symbolizes the importance of the role of women in giving birth and increasing the community. www.abc-clio.com

Among the carved wood sculpture of the Luba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo can be found the female figure. Representing the spiritually powerful wife of the diviner holding a bowl, it signifies the important role of women to contain life and offer sacred substances at encounters with the divine king.

Art and Royalty The Ashanti of Ghana are historically associated with vast natural resources of pure gold that was both mined and traded by them. A spectacular array of cast gold was made as emblems of the authority of the king, treasures entrusted to him by the Akan state and passed on to his successors. The paramount chiefs are known to wear

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multitude of mediums: painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, pottery, beadwork, metal, and wood. Travel, imported materials, and new technologies have allowed contemporary artists to generate new forms and reach beyond the borders of their towns and cities to embrace Europe, the Americas, and Asia, reflecting the continued vibrancy of African cultural expression. Deborah Stokes See also: Africa, Precolonial; Cush Kingdom; Kente Cloth; Nigerian Traditional Dances; Religion (Africa) References Bascom, William. African Art in Cultural Perspective: An Introduction. New York: Norton, 1973. Beier, Ulli. Contemporary Art in Africa. New York: Praeger, 1968. Boone, Sylvia A. Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Cole, Herbert M., ed. I Am Not Myself: The Art of African Masquerade. Monograph Series, no. 26. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Regents of the University of California, 1985. Drewel, Henry J., and John Pemberton. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought. New York: Center for African Art and Harry Abrams, 1989. Phillips, Tom, ed. Africa: Art of a Continent. London: Prestel, 1996. Visona, Monica Blackmun, Robin Poyner et al., A History of Art in Africa. New York: Harry Abrams, 2001. Willett, Frank. African Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1993.

Ashanti soul washer’s gold badge. Ghana. (The Newark Museum/Art Resource, NY)

gold rings on every finger, multiple bracelets, an abundance of kente cloth often woven to include threads of gold, and layers of gold amulets and charms. As part of the king’s arrival on ceremonial occasions, he is followed by a retinue of attendants who carry umbrellas, fans, weapons, and shields to symbolize both worldly and spiritual protection. Stools are the principal and most fundamental symbols of the Akan state. Both secular and sacred, functional and symbolic, the soul of the leader is transferred to his “seat” at death. The Golden Stool of the Ashanti is considered their most sacred and spiritually powerful object. Seen only on rare ceremonial occasions in public, it sits on its own throne, one higher than the king himself.

Contemporary African Art Africa today continues to be the home of creative artists working and producing in a www.abc-clio.com

ATLANTIC WORLD The “Atlantic World” is a critical and theoretical concept for cultural study through transatlantic, circum-atlantic, and point-specific analysis of peoples, goods, intellectual production, and health issues. The Atlantic World as a unit of study and

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analysis is a relatively new concept. It most literally refers to a geographic region, but it also encompasses the identification of a shifting set of identities as exerted by this region’s various components. It is usual to begin with Columbus’s voyages from1492 and the intersection of Europe, the African Atlantic, and the Americas that they heralded. David Armitage has identified three frameworks of analysis for the Atlantic World: “circum-Atlantic history,” which emphasizes a holistic approach to the Atlantic region; “trans-Atlantic history,” which centers on a comparative approach; and “cis-Atlantic history,” which identifies a particular point or region within a wider Atlantic context. The concept of an Atlantic World seeks to outline the manner in which the inhabitants of this world were enmeshed: by the goods extracted and produced in one area and consumed elsewhere; by flowing intellectual and cultural currents; by kinship networks; and by diseases emanating from afar. We can broadly periodize our study of this region into three eras. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the creation of an Atlantic World as a European oceanic frontier analogous to the Mediterranean. Initial movements emanated primarily from the Iberian Peninsula, and the cultural and political ties that bound them to the Americas gradually became more formal. The next three centuries saw the development of more “modern” colonial relationships, the beginning of whose end has been traced by some to the slave revolts and black revolutionary activity against French forces in Haiti, or St. Domingue, in the late eighteenth century. The abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere by 1888 provides another possible end point for this era. This may be problematic for our www.abc-clio.com

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understanding of an Atlantic World, however, given that it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that slavery was abolished in much of Atlantic Africa. In the twentieth century, rather than the Americas being Atlanticized by European and African expansion, the opposite effect could be detected: as the United States rose to world predominance, the European state system lost its traditional structures and influences could be exerted from West to East. Indeed, this phenomenon even characterized what Paul Gilroy labels as a particularly “black Atlantic” culture. Thus, in the twentieth century, the African American intellectual, W. E. B. Du Bois, could articulate a “double consciousness” that referred to a dual mindset in which Africa and the Americas equally and mutually influenced a developing “Atlantic” mentality. Thus, inherent in a scholarly identification of an Atlantic World linking Africa and the Americas is a challenge to notions of national exceptionalism on either side of the Atlantic Basin. Set within this world during both its colonial and national eras, the United States had more similarities with than differences from other colonies and new nations in the Americas and the eastern Atlantic. Networks, therefore, came about that consisted of people of African descent in the United States and in Canada and British and American abolitionists. Such networks allowed these groups to organize migrations from West to East rather than East to West. They were responsible for the British colony of Sierra Leone and the American settlement of Liberia, for example. Indeed, we may view the American Revolution from within a wider Atlantic World that encompassed Africa, the

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Americas, and Europe. In this light, it did not lead to any explicit changes in the structure of the British state. Rather, in an Atlantic context, it produced a more abstract change in notions of British nationhood. We may view this difference through a comparison with the Caribbean Atlantic world during the same period. The revolution in the mainland American colonies did not create an allied sense of Jamaican-ness, for example. Rather, with the loss of white Americans from the British Empire, white inhabitants of the Caribbean identified themselves more closely with this same Empire, making race, rather than liberty, a key factor in its makeup. In the context of an Atlantic World, then, the American Revolution created a new distinction between nations defined by a conception of liberty and empires whose identities were formed in racial terms. Indeed, such a cisAtlantic approach may even provide a new interpretative framework for the westward expansion of slavery as well as the dispossession of Native Americans in the United States during the nineteenth century. The notion of an Atlantic World may thus complicate any “exceptionalist” approaches to the study of U.S. history. It is important to note that many of the European settlers in the Atlantic World maintained a self-conscious collective identity that emphasized a shared endeavor, albeit one that was often in competition with those with whom it was shared. Whether we analyze this world in its Anglo-American, Ibero-American, or Franco-American contexts, many of those involved would have identified themselves as being from particular localities, or even economic guilds, as opposed to larger nation states. This may, for example, explain often complicated Anglo-French and www.abc-clio.com

Huguenot-Dutch alliances, which allowed access to the Caribbean under Hispanic control in the first and second periods of Atlantic expansion. Early Caribbean sugar producers were advised by Dutch experts who had honed their skills in Portuguese settlements on the Brazilian Atlantic, which connected them to the Amazon. Moreover, it was the Portuguese experience (ironically medieval in nature) in utilizing enslaved peoples in Atlantic Africa that could be translated into more modern colonial terms in the Western Atlantic and transferred to other European powers. Recent scholarship, however, points to medieval, and even biblical, precedents for the formation of this Atlantic World. Quasi-religious legends such as the land of Ophir, the islands of the seven cities, or the mythical figure of Prester John provided medieval means to conceptualize the region’s expansion in the early modern, and even modern, era. One may also highlight the medieval encounters between Europeans and the indigenous inhabitants of the Canary Islands, Madeira, the Azores, and the African Atlantic littoral. The guanches of Tenerife, for example, were not regarded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as either white European or black African. They therefore provided a kind of conceptual halfway house between Europe and the Americas, given that European perceptions of indigenous Caribbean societies in the early modern period reflected the same ambiguities. Indeed, early-fifteenth-century Portuguese and Italian encounters with the African Atlantic coast were in many ways medieval and feudalistic in origin. European naval power could not be fruitfully deployed in coastal battles along the African Atlantic littoral, which had a specialized

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and difficult maritime culture that consisted of uncharted seas and narrow coastal inlets. This meant that any African counterforces did not need to engage outside of coastal waters. African vessels were often designed for coastal trade, given their earlier experiences of connecting trading boats with Saharan caravans, which would meet the vessels at tributaries or inlets. In this way, a natural African naval advantage often obliged Europeans (and European interlopers) to trade on African terms. This might include the payment of customs, duties, and gifts. Interestingly, experience like this in Atlantic African contexts would be incorporated into Western Atlantic encounters in the following centuries. For example, the Venetian traveler Alvise Ca Da Mosto, who acted on behalf of the Portuguese, often deferred to African rulers and customs, while other Portuguese representatives dealt with African Atlantic polities in feudal—rather than colonial— terms. Ironically, the institution of slavery, which dominates our understanding of a developing transatlantic world, in many ways developed because of medieval, rather than colonial, similarities between existing networks of African and Arab slavery and Iberian forms of feudal labor. Only with the growth of capitalistic structures would the Middle Passage rupture these medieval continuities and characterize the Atlantic World in more colonial terms, buttressed by commodities produced through an often ruthless system of plantation slavery in areas such as Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. We should thus be aware of the disparity between African and European migration in this Atlantic World. For example, between 1600 and 1800, over one million www.abc-clio.com

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Europeans migrated to British America, including mainland and Caribbean colonies, compared to well over two million Africans during the same period, the vast majority of whom went to the Caribbean. In the entire Atlantic World, including areas such as the parts of Brazil administered by the Dutch and Portuguese, over 7.5 million African captives moved across the Atlantic to the Americas in the period before 1800. Indeed, the idea of an Atlantic World in fact helps us to understand the manner in which slavery, and the production of sugar, developed according to a pattern of linked environmental and socioeconomic change. Portuguese feudal links with Atlantic Africa allowed local forms of forced labor to be transferred into a more formal structure in the Atlantic islands of Madeira, São Tomé, and the Azores. Here, patterns and experiences provided a model that other groups would use in the Caribbean and the Americas, giving rise in the Atlantic World to what some scholars label the “plantation complex.” In Madeira, a model was created in which large tracts of land were cleared, enslaved people were imported, and complicated sugar mills built. On the other side of the Atlantic, Hispaniola’s sugar production depended on technology developed in these arenas, as well as inflows of capital and debt served by merchants whose livelihoods were made in the Eastern Atlantic. We should not, however, allow our analysis of the growth of trans-Atlantic slave systems to paint a picture of an Atlantic World that was divided between coerced labor, in its “new” frontiers, and labor induced by currency, in its “old” ones. In hubs such as Amsterdam and London, for example, guilds, indentured servants, and sharecroppers often found themselves inserted in a monetarized economy.

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Moreover, Old World Atlantic cities such as Bordeaux, whose industry came in the seventeenth century to be dominated by New World connections, demonstrated that the periphery of the region could often influence, and change, what historians would label as the “center.” The Atlantic World could also produce new, syncretic identities. Forms of European Christianity could either be forced upon unwilling populations in the Americas or could combine with indigenous beliefs to create new systems. Similarly, Creole culture might develop in the region, where enslaved, or previously enslaved, Africans could mold Christian concepts with older African customs and beliefs within a new context that could itself continually alter these identities according to changing circumstances. Indeed, it is with this idea in mind that we are brought back to the revolutionary black Atlantic identity in Haiti, influenced as it was by local Creole and European identities and events. The combination of the two at the end of the eighteenth century uniquely demonstrates the specifically “Atlantic” world that scholars deploy as the most appropriate analytical tool in such circumstances. Sharing a stage with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Haiti’s fifteen-year struggle for racial emancipation and national independence challenged notions about racial hierarchy that were gaining legitimacy in an Atlantic World dominated by Europeans and the slave trade. It also demonstrates, however, that the concept of an Atlantic World is more than a mere tool of analysis. Rather, these new intersections of Creole and European identities formed from within the Atlantic context, were often self-consciously perceived in contemporary terms. www.abc-clio.com

Societies in the Atlantic World were not necessarily located along the Atlantic Ocean itself: Africans could live far away from the Atlantic African coast but nonetheless find themselves ensnared in the slave trade through Saharan Arab slave networks that connected to newer Atlantic European ones. Many Amerindians far away from the Atlantic coast encountered pathogens, flora, and fauna that transformed their lives before they even met a European arriving from an Atlantic hub. It is through the analysis of such interconnections that we see the validity, and usefulness, of the notion of an Atlantic World. Gideon Mailer

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See also: Colonialism; Columbian Exchange; Creole/Criollo; Diaspora; Mexico (AfroMexican Identity); Pre-Columbian America; Slavery (History) References Armitage, David, and Michael Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Bailyn, Bernard. “The Idea of Atlantic History.” Itinerario 20 (1996): 19–44. Canny, Nicholas, and Anthony Pagden, eds. Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Curtin, Philip. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Elliott, John H. The Old World and the New, 1492–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Klooster, Wim. “The Rise and Transformation of the Atlantic World.” In The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination, edited by Wim Klooster and A. Padula. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004. Schwartz, S., ed. Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other

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ATTUCKS, CRISPUS (1723–1770) Crispus Attucks was an African American hero of the American Revolution. In what has become known as the Boston Massacre, he was shot down in the street on March 5, 1770, while leading a protest against the presence of British troops. Attucks’s father was a slave brought to Boston from Africa, his mother a Natick Indian. He was enslaved in Framingham, Massachusetts, until age twenty-seven, when he ran off to sea. Except that he was employed as a sailor and sometime rope maker in Boston, little is known about the twenty-year span between Attucks’s escape from slavery and the time of his involvement in the Boston Massacre. As a runaway slave and a sailor, Attucks must have been attuned to the various abuses of power under which the British held their subjects throughout the Atlantic World, not the least of which was the press gang—an institution many equated with slavery. Thus, it is not surprising that his sympathies were with the colonists, who were largely against the British occupation. From the moment of his death until this day, Attucks has been lionized as an American hero; indeed, Boston colonists continued to memorialize his death until the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and Boston abolitionists established Crispus Attucks day in 1858. For many, he remains a symbol of the way in which African Americans throughout American history have laid www.abc-clio.com

Crispus Attucks, an African American killed in the Boston Massacre, became a symbol of the American struggle for independence. (Library of Congress)

down their lives for key American values, even as they have struggled to reap the full reward of those values. Matthew D. Brown See also: American Revolution References McLeese, Don. Crispus Attucks: Heroes of the American Revolution. Vero Beach, FL: Rourke Publishing, 2005. Hiller, Zobel. The Boston Massacre. New York: W.W. Norton, 1970.

AVELLANEDA, GERTRUDIS GÓMEZ DE (1814–1873) The first published book of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab (1841), is considered by critics such as Catherine Davis to be the only feminist-abolitionist novel published by a woman in nineteenthcentury Spain or its slaveholding colony, Cuba. Poet, novelist, and playwright, often

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Portrait of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Published in 1841, her most controversial novel, Sab, has been compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a literary protest against slavery. (Library of Congress)

called la Avellaneda or Tula, she was born in Camaguey, Cuba, in 1814, and died in Madrid, Spain, in 1873. Throughout her lifetime, the Cuba of her birth remained a slaveholding colony of Spain. Nonetheless, the sociopolitical realities of nineteenthcentury Cuba eventually led to a Cuba that sought independence beginning in 1868. Cubans abolished slavery in 1886, and gained independence from Spain in 1898. La Avellaneda’s life and writings announced, if not foreshadowed, the circular trajectory of this dialectic: subjugation-emancipationsubjugation, slavery-postslavery-slavery. Because of her mastery of rhyme and meter as well as her output, impressive both in quantity and quality, la Avellaneda is considered to be first and foremost a poet. Although she claims to have started writing poetry at the age of nine, her first extant poem was written in 1836 aboard a frigate taking her from Cuba to Europe. Many of www.abc-clio.com

her poems carry the theme of nostalgia for the country of her birth. It was not until 1859 that she would return to Cuba, where she remained until 1864 before returning to Spain. It is important to note that Sab was published eleven years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Set in the Cuban countryside, the novel traces the demise of slaveholding Cuban society. It is the story of a mulatto slave’s unrequited love for Carlota, his master’s daughter, who is engaged to Enrique Otway, a greedy Englishman with fair, rosy skin, blue eyes, and golden hair. Sab, the tormented slave who gives the novel its name, feels that his soul is free, although his body is enslaved and base, and at the same time is convinced that no woman could possibly love him or want to join her fate to that of a poor mulatto. His feelings predate pride in Cuban blackness because he is very much ashamed of what he calls his accursed race and is literally dying to be white. The novel calls for the immediate abolition of slavery and the manumission of all slaves. Upon publication, it was banned in Cuba, and la Avellaneda omitted it from her complete works. There is much debate over the question of la Avellaneda’s patriotic affinities. According to the critic Hugh Harter, no dichotomy existed, and the accusation that she had turned her back to Cuba deeply hurt her since, much like the characters in her plays and novels, she exemplified Cuba, or the union in the New World of the Spanish, the African, and the Indian. The idiosyncratic circumstances of her birth allowed her to be both the colonizer and the colonized. Just like her protagonist, Carlota, la Avellaneda was the colonizer for all the obvious reasons, for she was the privileged daughter of the slaveholding gentry;

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she was also the colonized, because she herself was a criolla, a Cuban, a woman, and a child of Cuba, of a subordinated people. Beatriz Rivera-Barnes See also: Caribbean Literature; Cuba; Literature, Latin American; Spanish Empire References Cotarelo y Mori, Emilio. La Avellaneda y sus obras: Ensayo biográfico y crítico. Madrid: Archivos, 1930. Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis. Sab. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001. Harter, Hugh A. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Kirkpatrick, Susan. Románticas: Women Writers and Subjectivity. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1989. Luis, William. Literary Bondage. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

AVIATION Following the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903, many people in the Americas and in Africa became interested in aviation, but few considered the possibility of travel across the Atlantic until the first transatlantic flights in 1919. The first nonstop flight across the North Atlantic, by British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown in July 1919, aroused much interest in flying. Seeing the possibilities in Africa, South African pilots Pierre van Ryneveld and Quentin Brand in 1920 were the first to fly from Cairo to Cape Town. In 1922 Portuguese naval pilot Sacadura Cabral and his commanding officer, Vice Admiral Gago Coutinho, the navigator, decided to take up the challenge. They flew from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro. Although they stopped on the Cape Verde Islands and crash-landed on St. Paul’s Rock, off the coast of Brazil, technically they were the first pilots to fly from Africa www.abc-clio.com

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to any part of the Americas. Altogether, their flight used three Fairey IIID floatplanes. After their crash on St. Paul’s Rock, a local plane that was loaned to them seemed incapable of reaching mainland Brazil, so they cabled Portugal for another plane. It arrived but had been damaged while at sea, and a third plane had to be used. They eventually made it to Pernambuco and then to Rio de Janeiro. In spite of their problems, they were regarded as the first to fly the South Atlantic and won a $50,000 prize. One of the original planes is on display at the Maritime Museum in Lisbon, and a replica of the plane is on display on the embankment to the River Tagus at Belém parish, Lisbon. With many other records being broken, in 1926 Ramón Franco, younger brother of Francisco Franco, later dictator of Spain, piloted a flight from Spain to Argentina. His plane also stopped in the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands, making him the first Spaniard to fly from Africa to the Americas. He touched down in Fernando de Noronha, Brazil, and then flew on to Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires, spending a total of fifty-nine hours in the air. Ramón Franco was killed in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War en route to bombing Valencia. In May 1927 Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight; on October 14–15 of the same year, Frenchmen Dieudonne Costes and Joseph le Brix flew a Breguet 19 from Saint Louis, Senegal, to Port Natal, Brazil, the first nonstop aerial crossing from the mainland of Africa to the Americas. Another French pilot, Jean Mermoz, flew from Dakar for Brazil on May 12, 1930, to inaugurate the first airmail service across the South

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Atlantic, but he crashed into the sea and had to be rescued. The next major move in the field of aviation was the transport of passengers. In 1930 the German airship Graf Zeppelin crossed the South Atlantic, going over the Azores. On March 20, 1932, zeppelins began their first regular transatlantic flights, from Germany to Brazil, some passing over Africa. After these records, aviators tried their hand at achieving other “firsts.” On January 6, 1931, when the Italian general Italo Balbo led twelve Savoia-Marchetti S55s from Portuguese Guinea to Brazil, they became the first formation to cross the South Atlantic. Mermoz and his crew flew from Senegal to Brazil, nonstop, in 17 hours, 27 minutes, on January 16, 1933, the fastest journey from the African mainland to the Americas at that time. Mermoz joined up with the famous French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exúpery to fly in Argentina—Mermoz was lost after his plane disappeared, believed crashed, while flying from Dakar to Natal (Brazil). SaintExúpery had flown extensively in French West Africa before moving to South America. Soon after Mermoz flew, Jim Mollison flew from London to Senegal and then to Brazil, becoming the first person to have flown across both the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic solo. On November 11–13, 1935, New Zealander Jean Batten flew from Senegal to Brazil in a Percivall Gull, being the first woman to fly solo across the South Atlantic. She was late arriving in Rio de Janeiro, and the Brazilian air force set off to look for her. They eventually found her plane bogged on a beach 175 miles away;

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she was in a nearby fishing village. After patching up the plane, she flew to Rio and was awarded the Brazilian Order of the Southern Cross, the first British woman not in the royal family to receive the award. She subsequently flew to Montevideo and then to Buenos Aires. On August 15, 1937, Lufthansa started seaplane flights from the Azores to New York, refueling from seaplane tenders stationed along the route. The military importance of the Azores as a refueling stop was recognized by the British, who occupied it during World War II, along with the Americans. In May 1947 it was used as a base for the planes involved in the first aerial refueling of British flights from London to Bermuda. After World War II civil aviation grew rapidly. On January 1, 1946, an Avro Lancastrian from British South American Airways was the first commercial flight to leave London’s new Heathrow Airport. Nowadays, passenger flights flying from African cities are, of course, regular services connecting Africa and the Americas. Justin Corfield

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See also: Cape Verde; Military Forces; World War I; World War II References Lascano, Diego M. Saltando el charco: Imágenes y crónicas del cruce aéro del Río de la Plata entre 1907 y 1940. Montevideo, Uruguay: Librel Editores, 1999. Longyard, William H. Who’s Who in Aviation History: 500 Biographies. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1994. Mackersey, Ian. Jean Batten: The Garbo of the Skies. London: Macdonald, 1990. Rivero, Clara. “Antoine de Saint-Exúpery en la Argentina.” Todo es Historia (Buenos Aires), no. 395 (June 2000): 82–93.

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B BAHAMAS The Bahamas has cultural retentions from Africa that can be traced through its political history from colonization and slavery to independence. An archipelago of over 700 islands and 2,400 cays, the Bahamas is an independent nation in the Caribbean. The islands of the Bahamas are located in the Atlantic Ocean, just east of Florida in the United States and north of Cuba and Hispaniola. The Bahamas extends over 760 miles and is regarded as having the clearest and most beautiful water in the world. The 700 islands that make up the Bahamas include 30 inhabited islands, and the total estimated land area is 5,358 square miles, with the highest land elevation being 206 feet on Mount Alvernia in Cat Island. Overall, the terrain of the Bahamas is flat with some rounded hills, and its climate— controlled by the Gulf Stream—is subtropical to tropical. The islands of the Bahamas stand with numerous coral reefs on two shallow submarine banks, and all the islands, rocks, and cays are made up of limestone. The capital of the Bahamas is Nassau, which is on the island of New Providence, where about 70 percent of the population resides. The remaining major islands are called the Family Islands, and they include Grand Bahama, Abaco,

Andros, Bimini, Berry Islands, Eleuthera, Cat Island, Exuma, San Salvador, Long Island, Acklins, Crooked Island, Rum Cay, Mayaguana, Ragged Island, and Inagua.

People and Culture The population of the Bahamas, according to the 2000 census, totaled 306,611, and people from the Bahamas are known as Bahamians. Some 85 percent of the Bahamian population is of African descent, 12 percent is of European descent, and 3 percent is Asian and Hispanic. The official language is English, spoken by almost all inhabitants, and many people also speak Bahamian patois or dialect. The Bahamas is a religious country; it has more churches per capita than any other nation in the world. Christianity is the main religion, and Baptists form the largest denomination, followed by the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. Some people, especially in the southern and eastern islands, practice Obeah, which is an African religious and spiritual practice similar to Voodoo and Santeria. The rich cultural heritage found in the Bahamas can be traced to its African legacies. Obeah, bush medicine, Bahamian patios, the Junkanoo festival, and Bahamian dances, folktales, and music all have origins

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in Africa. Bush medicine is the use of medicinal plants to cure common ailments. The Bahamian dialect or patios came from the country’s European and African heritage, with a vocabulary and sentence structure similar to other creolized languages across the African Diaspora. The Bahamian festival Junkanoo was created during slavery to celebrate the days free from work during the Christmas season, and its African roots lie in the use of goatskin drums. Junkanoo is celebrated twice per year, on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, and the festival has thrived since the 1800s. The music of Junkanoo is very distinct, using goatskin drums, cowbells, and horns. Other forms of Bahamian music include goombay and rake-and-scrap. Fire dances, ring plays, and jumping dances are Bahamian dances with African roots. Additionally, Bahamian folktales and oral stories reveal the country’s African heritage with characters and stories that can be traced directly to West Africa and shared across the African Diaspora.

History The original inhabitants of the Bahamas were Lucayan Tainos, a subgroup of the Arawaks. Archaeologists have asserted that many Amerindians in the Caribbean islands shared similar languages and culture, and they are often referred to as Tainos, which means good or noble. When Columbus landed in 1492 on the island of San Salvador in the eastern Bahamas, he believed he was in the East, specifically India, and therefore mistakenly called the native people Indians. After observing the shallow sea around the islands, he spoke the words baja mar, meaning shallow water or sea, and this effectively gave the area the name Bahamas. The Lucayan Tainos were known to be very peaceful, and they lived off the www.abc-clio.com

land and ocean through farming and fishing. They built sturdy thatch huts, used stone tools, and made pottery. Moreover, they had well-defined social, political, and religious systems; however, Europeans treated them as primitive and even childlike. When Columbus arrived in the Bahamas, there were an estimated 50,000 Lucayan Tainos inhabiting the islands. He enslaved them and shipped them off to Hispaniola and Cuba to work in mines. Slavery, disease, and other hardships wiped out entire tribes within twenty-five years of European contact. Spain lost interest in the Bahamas after colonizing other islands such as Hispaniola and Cuba. As a result, most of the Bahamian islands remained uninhabited for over one hundred years until England laid claim to the archipelago. The first major settlement was established in 1648 on Eleuthera by dissident English Puritans, known as the Eleutheran adventurers, who arrived in the Bahamas seeking religious freedom. The adventurers gave the island its name, and despite experiencing food and supply shortages, the group established settlements across Eleuthera and Abaco. During the late 1600s and the early 1700s, the Bahamas became a major stronghold for pirates and privateers. It was an ideal place for piracy because of its numerous islands and harbors, which made exceptional hiding places. Some famous pirates associated with the Bahamas include Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and Sir Henry Morgan, among others. They used Nassau as one of their major ports. After the Bahamas became an official British colony in 1717, the United Kingdom ruled through governorships. The first governor-general of the Bahamas was Woodes Rogers, a former privateer. He

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successfully expelled the pirates and restored commerce. From the mid-to-late 1700s, however, the Bahamas was still considered to be a failing colony by many of the governors after Rogers. The population of the Bahamas during that time was only a few thousand people, almost half of them slaves. During the American Revolution, the British government issued land grants to American colonists who were still loyal to England. They sought refuge in the Bahamas and brought their slaves with them. They were known as the Loyalists and settled in Eleuthera, Abaco, and New Providence. The sparse population of the Bahamas tripled in a few years because of these new residents and their slaves. The new planters started to grow cotton, but the soil was unsuitable for that crop, and the plantations soon failed. But the Loyalists and other ruling classes in the Bahamas tried to maintain the plantation system because it was the foundation of their wealth and status. After Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the planters and merchants in the colonies fought vehemently against emancipation. As a result, slavery was not outlawed in the British colonies until 1834, and in the Bahamas, the Emancipation Act was not fully enforced until August 1, 1838. Furthermore, it did not mean complete freedom for the slaves. Rather, they became indentured labor for many years with little or no pay; in addition, former slave owners received monetary compensation from Britain for the freed slaves. While land was supposed to be allocated to the former slaves, for the most part they never actually received what they were promised. But in some cases, specifically in New Providence, former slaves did receive plots of land. Aside from some land allocation, www.abc-clio.com

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for over a century black Bahamians were treated with very little respect by the white ruling classes. The political climate of the Bahamas has been strongly affected by the inequality of whites and blacks. After emancipation, the education provided for blacks in the Bahamas during the mid-tolate 1800s was substandard, which served to maintain white dominance for many decades. The poor condition of education for blacks continued through the 1950s, while the majority of whites were educated abroad or at expensive private institutions. The lack of education and the poverty among blacks created considerable resentment toward the white ruling classes. Most black Bahamians could not vote because of a law limiting the franchise to propertyholders, which ensured the continuance of white rule. This law was repealed in 1886, nominally expanding the franchise to the larger black population, but that did little to change economic and political dominance by whites. The ruling white Bahamians believed they were superior to black Bahamians, and this produced inequality and segregation. Laws against discrimination were passed in 1956; however, tensions and prejudice remained. The Bahamas was granted self-governing authority by Britain in 1964, and the mostly white government remained in power until defeated by the black majority party in 1967. The Bahamas gained full independence from Britain on July 10, 1973, and the country has for the most part flourished since becoming an independent nation. The economic changes in the Bahamas from the end of slavery to the dependence on tourism at the turn of the twenty-first century have been tumultuous. During the U.S. Civil War, the economy prospered as a

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consequence of Confederate blockade running because Britain used Nassau as the port of exchange between British vessels carrying manufactured goods and Confederate boats carrying Southern cotton. (The Union blocked British ships from entering Southern ports between 1861 and 1865.) The next boom in the economy started in 1919 as a result of Prohibition in the United States, with the Bahamas becoming a major transit for smuggling alcohol into the United States. However, the end of Prohibition in 1934, along with the later collapse of the sponging industry, devastated the economy. It revived during World War II, when the Bahamas served as an Allied air and sea way station in the Atlantic, a function that created many jobs. The tourist and banking industries began growing in the Bahamas during the 1950s, but major expansion began during the years of radical economic, political, and social changes from 1963 to 1973. The Bahamas has become a stable, developing country that is heavily dependent upon tourism and offshore banking. Angelique V. Nixon See also: American Revolution; British Empire; Civil War, American; Columbus, Christopher; Creole/Criollo; Folklore, African; Obeah; Slavery (History) References Craton, Michael. A History of the Bahamas. 3rd ed. Waterloo, ON: San Salvador Press, 1986. Craton, Michael, and Gail Saunders. Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People. Vol. 2. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Eneas, Cleveland W. Bain Town. Nassau, Bahamas: Timpaul Publishing, 1976. Glinton, Patricia. An Evening in Guanima: A Treasury of Folktales from The Bahamas. Nassau, Bahamas: Guanima Press, 1994. Glinton-Meicholas, Patricia. More Talkin’ Bahamian. Nassau, Bahamas: Guanima Press, 1995.

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Rouse, Irving. The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Williams, Eric. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.

BAKHITA, JOSEPHINE, SAINT (1869–1947) Canonized on October 1, 2001, Josephine Bakhita is the first African woman former slave to become a saint. Born in Africa but brought to Italy, Bakhita not only converted to the Catholic religion but also entered the convent. Bakhita is one of the few African nuns who lived in Europe. Following a practice common to nineteenthcentury abolitionism in the United States, Bakhita dictated her own life story, following the suggestion of her prioress. Her biography has caught the attention of a varied audience, and she has been the inspiration for a musical show and a documentary film. Bakhita was born in Olgossa in the region of Darfur in Sudan around 1869. She grew up in a large wealthy family. Her father was a respected kinsman to the tribal chief. Bakhita’s family first experienced slavery when the eldest daughter was kidnapped by slave merchants who had previously ransacked the village. Bakhita, then only six years old, was witness to the brutal capture. Bakhita herself was captured by two Arabs at the age of eight or nine while she was in the fields searching for herbs in the company of a friend. Once she was captured, the little girl, separated from her friend and in shock, could not even remember her own name and was called Bakhita by her captors, which means “the lucky one” in Arabic. In the company of the slave traders and other slaves who were

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captured later, a bare-footed Bakhita walked through small villages, towns, and deserts for months. She was sold five times and tried to escape once, but she was caught. Bakhita recalls the time she spent at a Turkish general’s house as having been the most dreadful of all. Although not a day passed without some kind of physical punishment being inflicted on Bakhita, her most terrible experience took place when she was tattooed. This was a customary practice that raised the slave’s market value and the prestige of the masters who owned them. As a result of this commonly practiced marking of the slaves, 192 incisions were inflicted on Bakhita’s breasts, arms, and stomach. For more than three months Bakhita remained motionless and suffered in excruciatingly painful agony. This nightmare continued until the Italian consul in Khartoum, Callisto Legnani, visited the Turkish general and became interested in Bakhita’s future. In 1883, having been a slave for almost fifteen years, Bakhita was purchased by Legnani with the intention of freeing her later. The consul’s family took good care of her during the two years they remained in Sudan. In 1885, when the consul was recalled to Italy, Bakhita asked to travel with him, and the Legnani family accepted. Once in Italy, Bakhita eventually chose to stay at the Canosian sisters’ Catechumenate, where she could be instructed in the Catholic religion. Bakhita, entrusted to the Canosian sisters, was baptized on January 9, 1890. She was around twentyone years of age. When baptized, she received three Christian names: Josephine, Margaret, and Fortunata. Bakhita remained in the Cathecumenate for four years before deciding to enter the convent. On December 7, 1893 Bakhita joined the novitiate at the Institute of the Cathecumenate in Venice, starting her www.abc-clio.com

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religious career. She took her vows on December 8, 1893, and became a Canosian sister. However, due to her lack of formal education, she was relegated to the household chores. She worked in the sacristy and as a doorkeeper. From Venice she was first posted to Schio, near Venice, in 1902. At the request of her mother superior, Bakhita wrote down her story in 1910, while she was still in Schio. Apparently, Bakhita received hundreds of visitors, and it was this circumstance, together with the prospect of collecting money and gaining vocations for the missions in Africa, that led Bakhita’s superior to request her now to dictate her life to Italian writer Ida Zanolini. The biography was published in 1930 under the title Storia Meravigliosa (Wonderful story). It not only sold well but also attracted hundreds of visitors to the Canossian convent. In view of Bakhita’s growing popularity, she was sent to the Canossian novitiate in Vinercate, to be more conveniently located for travel all over Italy. On her superior’s advice, Bakhita was sent to various convents to give talks on her life in Africa, her experience in slavery, her conversion, and her decision to embrace the Christian religion. In her broken Italian, which is preserved in the original text, Bakhita gave voice to her heartbreaking story. Bakhita, affectionately called “madre moretta” (little black sister), suffered from chronic arthritis and asthmatic bronchitis, which became progressively aggravated until she died at Schio, Italy, on February 8, 1947, following an attack of pleurisy. She was buried in an aristocratic family vault. The canonization process started when Pope John Paul II proclaimed her Blessed Bakhita at St. Peter’s Square on May 17, 1992. Years later, the same Pope John Paul II proclaimed her a saint on October 1, 2001. Maria Frias

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146 BARAKA, AMIRI See also: Catholicism; Chikaba; Religion (Africa); Sudan (Darfur Region) Reference Ukken, Clare. Bakhita: From Slavery to Sanctity. Nairobi, Kenya: St. Paul, 1993.

BARAKA, AMIRI (1934–) Amiri Baraka is an African American poet, essayist, and dramatist who spurred the Black Arts Movement (1960–1975). The rage expressed by black dramatists in the 1960s may have peaked with the arrival of Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) on the theatrical scene. Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. The depression of the 1930s, World War II, and the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy in the 1960s provoked his disenchantment with world and American politics and with America’s racial policies. In 1957, following his undesirable discharge from the Air Force, for which he had no regrets, Baraka moved to New York City. On settling in Greenwich Village, Baraka devoted time to writing poetry and experimenting with drama. The Beat community in New York City afforded him the atmosphere to develop an art that has been defined as “populist modernism.” Populist modernism integrated “populist” black experiences with those aspects of modernist Western literature and literary theory that were considered excellent and, therefore, appropriate. His involvement with the Beat movement, from 1957 to 1962, was the first phase of Baraka’s rebellion against the bourgeois separation of life and art, since it was at this time that he began to suscribe to the notion of art as an extension of the artist. To reinforce this ideal, he advocated bohemianism, an antibourgeois stance that www.abc-clio.com

Amiri Baraka, poet and leading force in the Black Arts Movement. (Library of Congress)

attacked bourgeois life and aesthetic styles. By the mid-1960s Baraka was becoming increasingly involved with Pan-Africanism, protest rallies, and the African American Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, Baraka was drawn to to the ideas of the Nation of Islam, and the radicalism of Malcolm X, particularly by his contention that racial confrontation was inevitable. As part of his pursuit of revolutionary and nationalistic ideals, Baraka in 1967 became a Kawaida minister, discarded his “slave” name—LeRoi Jones—and assumed the name Imamu Amiri (sometimes spelled “Ameer”) Baraka. Imamu, a Muslim title and Swahili word, signifies “spiritual leader,” while Amiri, an Arabic (Berber) name, means “prince.” Baraka, also an Arabic name, means “blessed,” “sanctity,”

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or “holiness.” In 1974 Baraka dropped the title “Imamu” after he became a MarxistLeninist. Baraka’s anger and pronationalist stance are traceable to his political views and activities, in the course of which he had a number of clashes with the police and white racists. In 1967, for example, he was thrown in jail for a misdemeanor that was never proven. Affected by this background, the explosion of racial anxiety and violence in the 1960s, and the emergence of black artistic, religious, and political movements within and beyond America, Baraka’s drama championed aggressive solutions to America’s black crisis. In all, therefore, his emergence as an activist was part of an ongoing artistic and political evolution that spanned the period from the 1950s through the 1970s. The impact of Baraka’s transatlantic background on his drama was partly manifested in his emergence as a major spokesman for the 1960s Black Arts Movement, which centered on experimentation with African sociodramatic and religious traditions. In his reliance on African ritual forms, which he restructured within a black American context, Baraka borrowed from a belief system that forged a close and sacred tie between the people and their social and natural environment. It is a relationship culled from the ancient inseparability of religious practice and secular events, as expressed in folklore, ceremonies, or festivals. Although these ritual paradigms underwent transformation when they resurfaced in the New World, Baraka sought to reclaim in the United States the basic role they had in African society. African ancestral models also surfaced in Baraka’s support for and commitment to the Black Theatre Movement, an offshoot www.abc-clio.com

of the Black Arts Movement. Both movements shared the quest for a viable, antiracist, independent black theatre and influenced the founding of Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre in 1965 and his Spirit House Movers and Players troupe in 1968. Activities of the Repertory Theatre and Spirit House centered on the ideals of Baraka’s Black Revolutionary Theatre manifesto, which defied the ambivalence he associated with integrationist drama and which further demonstrated his interest in African socio-artistic values. Presented in 1965, the manifesto heralded the revolutionary drama of the 1960s, which was essentially anti-liberal, anti-academic, and anti-European. The Revolutionary Theatre put white America on trial in a manner that brought about its symbolic but hostile confrontation with the black world. As the chief exponent of the Revolutionary Theatre, Baraka played a leading role in defining a more practical task for black drama, one that advanced themes of black survival while teaching the people the relevance of struggle. In advocating rebellion in art and ideas, the Revolutionary Theatre sought to radicalize or destroy European sociodramatic ethics by refusing to endorse the reformist character that Baraka identified in pre-1960s black dramas. To fulfill the goals of the Revolutionary Theatre, Baraka borrowed from customary African rituals and sacrifice. His confidence in ritual evolved around his nationalistic “return” to ancestral precepts. In preserving this sacred worldview, his Revolutionary Theatre adopted a rite-of-passage structure that thrived on violence and sacrificial rebirth. In part, therefore, Baraka presented black drama as an extension of the oral traditions of Africa and as a genre rooted in specific African sensibilities.

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As his revolutionary drama progressed, Baraka’s status as black nationalist also developed. He increasingly incorporated black-based music, dance, language, and lifestyles as integral parts of his form, and in this way, he retained a deliberate black and African-rooted rhetoric. His tapping from a broad range of performance elements was based on a desire to involve his audience emotionally, intellectually, verbally, and physically so that his audiences were much like the traditional African spectator-participants who become a fundamental part of performance through their choric presence. Up until its demise, the Revolutionary Theatre was reinvigorated by the reciprocal energy that it distributed among its audience. Beyond the incorporation of several related genres, Baraka’s ritual drama was a bloody rite, one of exclusion and vengeance, purging black society of white profanity. Whites were symbolically judged and exterminated along with their black accomplices, a pattern aimed at ingraining the Revolutionary Theatre’s message in the consciousness of its primary audience of blacks. Bloody sacrifice became Baraka’s formula for black rebirth and American regeneration, which is why his revolutionary plays were structured on recurring archetypal, thematic, and stylistic traits. The functional basis of Baraka’s drama was thus situated in a spiritual dimension aroused and sustained through ritual. The communality generated by ritual supported his ideology and retained certain liturgical qualities that derived from his African background. As in African ritual systems, the Revolutionary Theatre did not distinguish the sacred from the secular, ritual from theatre, or theatre from life. It www.abc-clio.com

encompassed the total experience and aspirations of the black community. In essence, violence was a principal ritual instrument in Baraka’s revolutionary dramas. Beyond a strong and sadistic desire to kill whites, his plays demonstrated the possibility of change through force and determination. In this regard, Baraka found Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty theory germane to the intensity of his Revolutionary Theatre and borrowed from its brutal and exorcist suggestions, especially in his Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969). Some of Baraka’s plays initially deviate from a ritualistic pattern, but they end with ritual murders, thereby preserving the efficacy of ritual sacrifice. The following are among his most salient plays falling within this category: The Toilet (1963), Dutchman (1964), Experimental Death Unit #1 (1965), Home on the Range (1968), Junkies are Full of (Shhh . . .) (1968), and The Death of Malcolm X (1969). Other Baraka plays explore race relations in dramatic contexts that are rituals in themselves. As rituals, Baraka’s plays manifest more obvious African influences, a trend crowned by his decision to tap from African ritualistic and mythical sources in Slave Ship (1967). Other plays that adhere to this structure are The Slave: A Fable in a Prologue and Two Acts (1964) and Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show (1967). Then again, there are those other Baraka plays that are consciously situated within fantasy worlds. When he explores his ideologies in such fantasy worlds, Baraka becomes a mythmaker who devises sacred space for ritual display. Within this realm he escapes the restriction to “real” characters and settings, exploring other innovative possibilities. Baraka plays that belong to this fantasy category include The Baptism (1966), Black

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Mass (1965), and Madheart: A Morality Play (1967). In general, Baraka’s style, aims, and themes set a violent, autonomous, and defiant tone for black drama of the 1960s and spurred African American playwrights on to more daring and richer experimentation. Phillip Effiong See also: Black Power Movement; Drama, African American; Pan-Africanism References Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. New York: Freundlich Books, 1984. Baraka, Amiri. Four Black Revolutionary Plays, All Praise to the Black Man. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill 1969. Harris, William J., ed. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991. Hudson, Theodore R. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973. Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Stewart, James T. “The Development of the Black Revolutionary Artist.” In Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal. New York: William Morrow, 1968.

BARBADOS The most easterly of the Caribbean islands, Barbados has been an independent state within the British Commonwealth since 1966. The nation’s head of state is the British monarch. Its official language is English, but Bajan—the national dialect— is the most spoken. The capital of Barbados is Bridgetown. The low, flat island is 166 square miles (430 square kilometers) and forested with mahogany, palm, casuarinas, and other tropical species. More than 90 percent of the population is of African heritage. www.abc-clio.com

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Barbados’s first inhabitants came from the South American coasts in the fourth century CE. Arawaks and Caribs populated it around the eighth century. In 1536 a Portuguese sailor, Pedro Campos, named the island Los Barbados because the long roots of the fig trees reminded him of beards (barbas in Portuguese). The Spanish arrived in 1518, though they did not settle there until 1536. By 1550 there remained no Indians on the island. When Captain Henry Powell landed a party of English settlers on the island in 1627, it was virtually deserted. They experimented with such crops as tobacco, cotton, indigo, and ginger. These first crops turned out to be unprofitable: Barbadian tobacco could not compete with the excellent tobacco from Virginia, and landowners had to pay higher taxes to export it to England. From the middle of the seventeenth century, Barbados would become the center of a growing sugar industry. An epidemic disease that killed most of the population resulted in a concentration of land into the hands of a small number of landlords, who turned the land into a few vast plantations. A number of rich families who had fled from England due to the Civil War took refuge in Barbados and invested their wealth in the nascent sugar business. Barbados soon became the most populated and productive of the English colonies in the Caribbean. The industry of sugar brought about the birth of a plantation society, dependent on the work of thousands of slaves who were imported from Africa as the labor supply from Europe began to decrease around 1660. In 1643 there were 6,000 black people on Barbados; in 1835, when slavery was finally abolished, almost 90,000 black slaves were emancipated.

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African beliefs and cultural heritage often survived in Barbados. The Barbadian slave code regarded slaves as bestial and as recalcitrant pagans unworthy of missionary efforts. The fact that slaves were regarded as not human enough to convert to Christianity favored the survival of African beliefs on the island. Notably, the earliest calls for a repatriation of the descendants of slaves who wished to return to their ancestral lands were made by black Barbadians. These utopian impulses later inspired Marcus Garvey’s more radical Back-toAfrica movement. After emancipation in 1834, sugar cultivation remained a major part of the Barbadian economy. Although the traditional sugar industry collapsed in the late 1960s, the production and export of sugar is still an important sector of Barbados’s economy. At the start of the twenty-first century, tourism provides almost a half of the gross national product. Virginia Fernández Canedo See also: British Empire; Garvey, Marcus References Klein, S. Herbert. La esclavitud Africana en América Latina y el Caribe. Translated by Graciela Sánchez Albornoz. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1986. McFarlane, Anthony. El Reino Unido y América: La Época Colonial. Translated by Jacinto Antolín. Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992. Montiel Martínez, Luz María. Negros en América. Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992.

BARNET, MIGUEL (1940–) Miguel Barnet is an expert on Afro-Cuban culture, as well as a novelist, an anthropologist, and a poet. He was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1940 and opted to remain in Cuba, faithful to Fidel Castro’s regime. www.abc-clio.com

Beyond his literary and scholarly work, Barnet has served many roles in the expansion of Cuba’s presence in the global community. Barnet was one of the founders of the Cuban Academy of Sciences as well as the Fernando Ortiz Foundation. He is also a member of Cuba’s Chamber of Deputies and the Cuban representative to UNESCO. To date Barnet has published seven books of poetry, numerous ethnographic studies, and five ethnographic novels. He has helped give rise to a new genre through his renowned Biography of a Runaway Slave (1966), one of the origins of what has become known as “testimonial” fiction in Latin American letters A remarkable testimony that uses established ethnographic field practices, Biography is the product of a very special encounter. In 1963 Barnet followed up on an article about a nursing home that had several residents who were over 100 years old. It was in that nursing home that he first met the 103-year-old Esteban Montejo and began to interview him. Montejo’s life was unique in many ways. He was born a slave on a sugar plantation in 1860 and, in his own words, “lived through it all.” He could not understand how the African gods allowed slavery. In fact, Montejo blamed it on the color red. In Montejo’s eyes, when the Portuguese arrived in Africa, they lured Africans to their boats with red kerchiefs, and since black men have always liked red, they were caught, put in chains, and taken away to be sold as slaves. Alongside such myth-making, Montejo’s memories are unique, not least of all because he was able to remember differences between Congos, Mandingos, Gangas, Carabalís, Musungo Congos, and Lucumís. It would have been impossible to find a former slave in the United States able

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to do the same. Such memories suggest that Latin American slaves enjoyed greater cultural autonomy than their North American counterparts and explains why many African traditions are still very much alive in the Latin American world, particularly in the Caribbean and in Brazil. After running away from a sugar plantation, Montejo spent several years in the woods, hiding until slavery was abolished. He then fought in the Cuban war of independence from Spain and witnessed the takeover of Cuba by the United States—through trickery, in his opinion. Until Castro’s revolution, Montejo worked as a day laborer. Barnet immortalized Montejo and, through him, the intricacies of Cuba’s complex history of slavery and abolition. Beatriz Rivera-Barnes See also: Cuba; Literature, African American References Barnet, Miguel. Biography of a Runaway Slave. Translated by Nick Hill. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1994. Luis, William. Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

BAROTSELAND Barotseland, the land of Lozi kings and their constituents, is an historical kingdom with borders that once included western Zambia, eastern Angola, and Namibia’s Caprivi Strip. Today, its heartland remains intact in Zambia’s Western Province. It is an area famous in the literatures of anthropology and African history due to the scholarship of Max Gluckman and Gwyn Prins, and its unique history of colonial-era contact—from the nineteenth-century www.abc-clio.com

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travels of David Livingstone to a visit by Britain’s queen mother, Elizabeth, in 1957. It is perhaps best-known for its spectacular pageant, Kuomboka, which occurs when the waters of the Zambezi River flood the surrounding plain. During Kuomboka, the Lozi king (Litunga) rides a black-and-white striped barge that is equipped with 100 paddlers, two drum orchestras, and a giant elephant superstructure and leads a flotilla of thousands across lily-studded waters to dry land. The area now known as Barotseland did not acquire this name or recognition as a unified kingdom until the reign of King Lewanika at the close of the nineteenth century. The region’s history spans five broadly defined periods: predynastic, the arrival of the Luyana dynasty, the Kololo interregnum, the colonial era, and integration into the nation-state of Zambia. Archaeological evidence and oral histories suggest that a Lunda princess (known alternately as Mbuyu, Mwambwa, and Mbuywamwambwa) from the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo led her followers to the upper Zambezi plain sometime between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shortly thereafter she abdicated power in favor of her son, Mboo. All Lozi kings trace their descent back to Mboo and retain their authority through visits to the graves of the royal founders. Until the 1830s this dynasty was known as Luyana. During the mid-nineteenth century, the Luyana kings lost power, and the region was occupied by Sotho-speaking Kololo leaders from the south. Lubosi Lewanika had reestablished Luyana political control by 1885, but after nearly fifty years of intermarriage and exchange with Kololo, fundamental linguistic and cultural transformations had occurred.

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“Lozi” and “Barotseland” both refer to the fusion of Kololo and Luyana language and culture along the upper Zambezi River. King Lewanika established a golden era for Barotseland. He was a skilled politician who created a kingdom from the twentyfive constituent populations living in the Zambezi plain, inviting representatives from each community to his court. During his reign (1878–1884, 1885–1916), he negotiated with the British to establish Barotseland as a protectorate—not a colony. He became an international presence when he was among a select number of African kings to attend the coronation of England’s Edward VII in 1902. His talents extended beyond the political arena. He was a renowned artist who carved wood and ivory, wove baskets, and trained apprentice artists at his court. By 1905 he had established a Native Curios Shoppe at Victoria Falls and was selling Lozi art works to European and American traders, missionaries, and colonial officers. In addition, he worked with missionaries to establish the first schools in the region. All six kings to reign in the past century have been descendants of Lewanika. His son, Sir Mwanawina, signed the Barotseland Agreement of 1964 that joined the Barotseland Protectorate to Northern Rhodesia to form the modern nation of Zambia. The current king, Lubosi Imwiko II, is Lewanika’s grandson. In addition to serving as king, he is a successful entrepreneur who is working to improve environmental conservation policies for the region. Karen Milbourne References Caplan, Gerald L. The Elites of Barotseland, 1878–1969: A Political History of Zambia’s Western Province. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

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Gluckman, Max. Economy of the Central Barotse Plain. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1941. Gluckman, Max. Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property. Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1943. Mainga, Mutumba. Bulozi under the Luyana Kings: Political Evolution and State Formation in Pre-colonial Zambia. London: Longman, 1973. Milbourne, Karen E. “Diplomacy in Motion: Art, Pageantry, and the Politics of Creativity in Barotseland.” PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2003. Prins, Gwyn. The Hidden Hippopotamus: A Reappraisal in African History, the Early Colonial Experience in Western Zambia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

BAUZÁ, MARIO (1911–1993) A gifted musician, excellent composer, and superb arranger, Mario Bauzá was one of the founders and leading figures of AfroCuban or Afro-Latin jazz. He began clarinet lessons at the age of five and became a member of the Havana Philharmonic at twelve as a bass clarinetist. He accompanied Antonio María Romeu’s orchestra on his first trip to the United States in 1926. Fascinated with jazz, Bauzá made the switch to saxophone after hearing the legendary Coleman Hawkins. Bauzá was equally impressed by black-owned clubs, restaurants, record companies, and radio stations in the United States, which he viewed as an alternative to the discrimination he had faced in his native land. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, Bauzá criticized some of the New York Latin-based bands that refused to hire African-Latin musicians. Bauzá settled in New York in 1930. The opportunity to play with Antonio Machín’s group motivated him to learn the trumpet, lore has it, in less than two weeks. He was Chick Webb’s trumpeter from

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1933 to 1938, and became the musical director of Webb’s band in 1934. Bauzá played with Cab Calloway’s band from 1939 to 1941 and in the latter year he joined Machito’s Afro-Cubans, where he remained until 1975. His 1943 composition “Tanga” is considered one of the first, if not the first, AfroCuban jazz composition. Bauzá’s classical training and experience in big-band swing orchestras helped remake the Machito band. His “Cubop City” (1948) and “Mambo Inn” (1950), co-authored with pianist René Hernández, became hits, the latter a staple of the Count Basie Band. Bauzá’s knack for bringing together great artists (Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb; Dizzy Gillespie and Cab Calloway) was legendary. Bauzá facilitated the collaboration between Gillespie and Chano Pozo, which engendered a new phase in Latin jazz history. Bauzá, despite his huge contributions, did not receive the recognition he deserved until late in life with The City of New York Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture in 1984 and an eightieth birthday concert in his honor. In the early 1990s he recorded three albums, starting with Tanga (1992) and followed by The Time Is Now (1993). In 1993 Bauzá, already diagnosed with cancer, went back to the studio for one last session that resulted in 944 Columbus (his address), released posthumously in 1994. To the very end, Bauzá displayed his impeccable musicianship, professionalism, wit, and creativity. Alan West-Durán See also: Cuban Music, African Influence in; Jazz and the Blues; O’Farrill, Arturo “Chico” References Acosta, Leonardo. Raíces del Jazz latino, un Siglo de Jazz en Cuba. Baranquilla, Colombia: Editorial la Iguana Ciega, 2001.

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Chediak, Nat. Diccionario de Jazz Latino. Madrid: Fundación Autor, 1998. Roberts, John Storm. Latin Jazz, the First of the Fusions, 1880s to Today. New York: Schirmer Books, Macmillan, 1999. Yarnow, Scott. Afro-Cuban Jazz. San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 2000.

BBC CARIBBEAN SERVICE AND CARIBBEAN VOICES The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a London-based broadcasting service, launched the program Caribbean Voices to promote the creative and critical work of Caribbean artists. The BBC operated a Caribbean Service (1938–1958) from London that broadcast music, interviews, poetry, plays, short stories, critical debates, and personal messages (during World War II) to the people of the Caribbean. Programs evolved from the pioneering work of a Jamaican freelance scriptwriter, Una Marson, who joined the BBC as an established poet, playwright, and journalist. In Kingston in the 1930s, Marson had run a literary Readers and Writers club and published The Moth and the Star (1937). In London during 1938, Marson devised programs for the BBC, including music from St. Vincentian pianist William Wilson and Cyril Blake’s Band, whose performances were broadcast from BBC studios. She went on to produce Calling the West Indies during World War II, which she conceived as a means for West Indian service people to keep in touch with families back home. In 1941 Marson was appointed a full-time program assistant on the Empire Service and promoted to West Indies producer in 1942. She also contributed her own work to the poetry magazine Voice, edited by Eric Blair (George Orwell), who

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was at the time working in the BBC’s Indian section. On one of the programs she was featured alongside a distinguished set of writers including M. J. Tambimutto, William Empson, and T. S. Eliot. Voice was a successful venture that inspired Marson to produce her own Caribbean version of the literary magazine. Entitled Caribbean Voices, the first program was broadcast on March 11, 1943. Subsequent programs broadcast the published work of Neville Guiseppe of Trinidad; John Wickham, Barbadian editor of Bim; and Jamaican poets Constance Hollar and Ruth Horner. In the early years of the program, Marson struggled to find published contributors who were from the Caribbean and living in Britain. The situation changed when, in 1946, Henry Swanzy took over the production and began to seek out unpublished work, drawing on material from Caribbean and British-based writers. From 1954 to 1956, V. S. Naipaul edited the program, followed by Edgar Mittelholzer. By the time broadcasting ceased in 1958, many of the hitherto unknown talents had been recognized by publishers and critics in England and America. The importance of the program is reflected in the contributors who were featured as readers or short-term editors, namely, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Edgar Mittleholzer, Andrew Salkey, John Figueroa, Vidia Naipaul, Shake Keane, Frank Collymore, Claude McKay, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Trinidadian Michael Anthony was encouraged by Naipaul to write and to develop a new Caribbean aesthetic that English literary magazines found unfamiliar. Caribbean Voices provided a creative catalyst and was a precursor to the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). One of Caribbean Voices’s contributors was www.abc-clio.com

Edward Kamau Brathwaite, a founder member of CAM. Brathwaite understood the importance of creating opportunities for writers, artists, and cultural activists to meet, cajole each other, and criticize each other’s work. The BBC Caribbean Service also provided income for Samuel Selvon and George Lamming, who survived, if only minimally, solely on their earnings from writing. The BBC fraternity increased opportunities for contact with the London literary intelligentsia and with publishers. These activities were increasingly maleoriented. However, a number of women writers contributed to Caribbean Voices. In addition to Hollar and Horner, later contributors included Louise Bennett, Gloria Escoffery, Barbara Ferland, Vivette Hendriks, Mary Lockett, Stella Mead, Daisy Myrie, and Dorothy Phillips. Gloria Escoffery and Pauline Enriques both broadcast from London, but the majority of women contributors sent in work through Caribbean-based agents like Cedric Lindo. The program’s broadcast tapes were erased, but written scripts survive in the BBC’s archives. John Figueroa trawled through fifteen years of scripts to edit a two-volume collection of poetry from the programs: Caribbean Voices: Dreams and Visions (1966) and Caribbean Voices: The Blue Horizons (1970). For a colonized region with no sense of a literature of its own, Caribbean Voices filled a void and established a lineage for writers and critics. The program trafficked in creative output in a quite unique way. Writing produced in the Caribbean and sent to London for broadcast made the reverse passage into the radiolistening homes of a geographically vast and diversely populated Caribbean region. Sandra Courtman

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BENIN, REPUBLIC OF See also: Jamaica, Women’s Role in; Marson, Una; McKay, Claude; Reggae References Caribbean Service: BBC Written Archives. Caversham Park, Reading, UK. Figueroa, John. Caribbean Voices. Vol. 1, Dreams and Visions. London: Evan Brothers, 1966. Figueroa, John. Caribbean Voices. Vol. 2, The Blue Horizons. London: Evan Brothers, 1970. Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson, 1905–65. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998. Walmsley, A. The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972. London: New Beacon Books, 1992.

BENIN, REPUBLIC OF The Republic of Benin, with an estimated population of 7,863,000 and an area of 43,483 square miles, dates back to the precolonial kingdom of Abomey and has had complex trade relations with Europeans since the fifteenth century and with the Americas in the modern era. Benin was formerly known as Dahomey and was also a former French colony that gained full independence from France in 1960. Dahomey was an active player in the transatlantic economic order and owed her rise and splendor to the profits of the slave trade that supplied cheap labor for mines and plantations in the Americas from 1450 to 1870. The coastal town of Ouidah was one of the most important centers of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. There can be seen the remains of the ancient port from which slaves were boarded and shipped to the New World. This loss and dislocation of population were detrimental to the economy of precolonial Benin, more so than for most other areas of Africa because of the particular intensity and consistency of slave exports. The exports, www.abc-clio.com

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on the other hand, provided revenues, which were used for the purchase of imports, including new goods and new technology. Ouidah is the birthplace of Voodoo, later in vogue in the Americas, namely in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the West Indies. In Porto Novo, the reconstructed rooms of the Da Silva museum at the former house of the Da Silva family demonstrate the privileged position of the descendants of the Brazilian slaves who returned to Benin after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. After its difficult beginning as an independent country, when it was plagued by governmental instability, economic troubles, ethnic rivalries, and social unrest that led to military intervention, Benin embraced democracy in 1989 with a characteristic fervor that catapulted it onto the African stage as a model of political and economic reforms. These democratic successes have earned the country U.S. interest and support because they fall in line with American foreign policies. Indeed, starting in the 1990s, the United States elevated African democratization to a central priority of its foreign policy toward the continent. Benin has strengthened its ties with the United States, Canada, Brazil, and the main international lending institutions. The current administrative cabinet is sprinkled with technocrats who have studied or worked in North America. Benin is a prominent destination for many American governmental and nongovernmental agencies. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) oversees the implementation of U.S. assistance programs in the Benin Republic, and the agency has established an integrated focus

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for its central objectives, which include sustainable economic development, improved health and nutrition, recognition and protection of basic human rights, accountability, and strengthened environmental protection as well as democracy in Benin. One of the main current projects of USAID’s operations in Benin is to reform the education system. USAID is helping the Benin government to replace the old French system (described as authoritarian and based on rote learning) with a system allowing for student initiative and active learning. USAID also sponsors the training of Benin government officials in Western accounting and financial management practices. The agency has also assisted at the telecenter of the Songhai Center located in Porto Novo, a project aimed at fostering a mode of development based on a thoroughly scientific approach to agriculture and small-scale industry, combined with self-sufficiency, honesty, integrity, and a highly developed sense of community. In various parts of the country, and especially in the rural areas, U.S. Peace Corps volunteers are active in social development projects. Africare-Benin, a U.S.-funded organization, focuses on the basic development areas of food, water, and health, as well as the promotion of democratic governance, poverty reduction, the development of information and communications technology, and women’s education. The U.S.-based Catholic Relief Services (CRS) has an office in Benin, and its outreach projects have been significant. The National University of Benin (UNB) has established interuniversity cooperation with U.S. institutions such as Wayne State University, the State University of New York at Oswego, Bowling Green State www.abc-clio.com

University, Wake Forest University, and Agnes Scott College. Music is a sphere of significant American influence. As far back as the nineteenth century, freed Brazilian slaves and their descendants introduced samba music; they adapted it to the sound of big-band jazz and added African percussion instruments. Renowned singer Angélique Kidjo does an excellent mixture of Afro-punk, reggae, samba, salsa, jazz, rumba, zouk, and makossa. Gangbé Brass Band explores the rich Voodoo culture and ancient songs of Benin, which are combined with jazz melodies to produce a powerful contemporary sound. Starting at the end of the 1990s, hip-hop bands, including Benin’s most popular rappers, Sakpata Boys and H2O, created a modern dazzling rap based on the multitude of Beninois traditional rhythms and instruments. Ardiess started out in 1997 as a purely modern rap group that based its music on U.S. rap but has since added some local melodies. A confirmation of the extent of the influence of U.S. hip-hop on the African musical scene was the Pan African Hip-Hop Festival held in Cotonou, Benin, in 1999. Emmanuel A. Odjo

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See also: Reggae; U.S. Agency for International Development; Voodoo References Harbeson, John W. “Externally Assisted Democratization.” In Africa in World Politics: The African State System in Flux, edited by John W. Harbeson and Daniel Rothchild. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000. Manning, Patrick. Slavery, Colonialism, and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Webster, James Bertin, and Adu A. Boahen. History of West Africa—The Revolutionary Years, 1815 to Independence. New York: Praeger, 1970.

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BENNETT, LOUISE (1919–) Louise Bennett is a Jamaican-born author of poetry and radio segments and a fixture of Jamaican theater. She employs Jamaican creole and focuses on the Jamaican woman in her art. Known as Louise BennettCoverly or “Miss Lou” to her fans from Jamaica and Canada, Bennett fascinates audiences with her wit and performances. Bennett is one of the first Jamaican authors to focus on the Jamaican woman in her literature. She was a fixture of Jamaican radio and theater from the 1960s into the 1980s. Her better-known published works are Jamaica Labrish (1966) and Selected Poems (1982), as well as Aunty Roachy Say (1993), which is a collection of “Miss Lou’s Views,” her witty radio segments dating back to the 1960s. Aunty Roachy speaks in Jamaican creole, with a pervasive use of Jamaican proverbs to gain her audience’s attention and achieve an immediate effect. The arguments ingrained in common Jamaican proverbs are universally understandable; for instance, “yuh sleep wid dog, yuh ketch im flea.” For some Jamaicans, Bennett’s overt usage of Jamaican creole and Jamaican proverbs throughout her repertoire was problematic; it suggested a “lowness” or coarseness in opposition to the more “appropriate” use of Standard English, even if her poetry and radio segments were quite thought provoking and well crafted. But Bennett persisted and eventually won over the majority, who came to appreciate Bennett’s attention to the daily trappings of life in Jamaica, whether her poetic discussions revolve around the Jamaican language, social climbing, manners, traffic conditions, gun court, rent control, or international concerns such as Jamaica’s relationship with England. This last point www.abc-clio.com

comes through well in her poem “Colonization in Reverse” (1966), where she humorously describes the wave of Jamaicans moving to England. Bennett has received numerous honors befitting her cultural contributions to Jamaican culture. In 1961 Queen Elizabeth II bestowed on Bennett the honor of Member of the Order of the British Empire. In 1974 she received the prestigious Order of Jamaica. David W. Hart See also: Creole/Criollo References Bennett, Louise. “Colonization in Reverse.” In Selected Poems, edited by Mervyn Morris. Kingston, Jamaica: Sangsters, 1982. Bennett, Louise. Aunty Roachy Say. Kingston, Jamaica: Sangsters, 1993. Cooper, Carolyn. “Noh Lickle Twang: An Introduction to the Poetry of Louise Bennett.” World Literature Written in English 17 (1978): 317–327. Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Doumerc, Eric. “Louise Bennett and the Mento Tradition.” Ariel 31, no. 4 (October 2000): 23–32. Morris, Mervyn. Is English We Speaking. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publications, 1999.

BERLIN WEST AFRICA CONFERENCE The European struggle over control of the Congo played a crucial role in the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–1885 and the subsequent partition of tropical Africa. While the colonization of Africa had previously been marked by a series of bilateral rivalries and agreements, especially between the French and British, a number of European powers held interests in the

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Congo River and its surrounding territory. Organized by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany, the Conference was part of a longer series of colonial negotiations and anxieties surrounding free trade and navigation. The result was an important new development for African colonization. Rather than bilateral, the international conference set a precedent for multilateral European negotiations over shared and competing colonial interests. Delegates from Austria–Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire met to discuss the fate of the African continent. The Conference set out to provide an international framework for regulating European relations in Central Africa. For the sake of free trade, European diplomats attempted to establish international access to the Congo and Niger rivers, while at the same time negotiating territorial claims. Often, the territorial compromises led to boundaries that divided native populations. Rather than prevent potential conflict, these agreements soon had European powers scrambling to establish spheres of influence in tropical Africa simply for their currency in international negotiations. Though its final resolutions were mostly vague and limited, the Conference became a powerful symbol in the European imagination. The Conference was, for example, widely publicized in European newspapers as the final carving up of the African continent. Though a large map of Africa hung over the meeting and though the Conference had been called as a result of the fierce race to colonize and influence sub-Saharan Africa, the Conference was chiefly interested in a code of conduct for such rapid expansion. Though local www.abc-clio.com

economic competition and political conflict were clearly important, the primary concern centered on European diplomacy. The drafted resolutions focused on principles for navigation channels, international law, and humanitarian responsibilities (the slave trade was formally abolished). Rather than a formal partitioning of tropical Africa, Conference delegates were far more interested in the African coast, which had already been divided up and, as a result, posed trade and navigation problems for interior control. The Conference’s first principle, referred to as the hinterland doctrine, stated that a power which claims a portion of coastal territory also reserves the right to its adjacent inland area. Countries were discouraged from attempting to establish territory directly inland of another power’s coastal control. Nevertheless, the dimensions of this principle were vague in practice. France, for example, unsuccessfully argued that British Nigeria was a hinterland of Algeria. Equally unclear, the Conference proposed a second principle of effective possession, by which treaties would be legally and internationally valid. Anxious to avoid challenges to their own territorial possessions, most European diplomats agreed to respect previous treaties as a matter of principle. The most important principle, transformative for African colonization, was that of “effective occupation.” Effective occupation applied, however, only to newly acquired territories, coastal territories, and formal colonies. Rather than organize the colonization of the African interior, this principle not only contributed to the fierce pace of colonization, but it put an additional premium on the subjugation— violent, if necessary—of native peoples.

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The forceful control of a population— effective occupation—became a prerequisite for an unchallenged territorial claim. Brandon Jernigan See also: Abolitionism, British; British Empire References Chamberlain, M. E. Scramble for Africa. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 1999. Forster, Stig, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson, eds. Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Wesseling, H. L. Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa, 1880–1914. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991.

BERMUDA Covering an area of 22.7 square miles (58.8 square kilometres), Bermuda lies 650 miles (1,050 kilometers) east of the U.S. coast. An archipelago of 7 islands and 170 islets and rocks, the largest island is referred to as Main Island. Owing to its strategic location, both the United States and Canada had military bases on Bermuda until the last decade of the twentieth century. This old colony of the British Empire has become one of the United Kingdom’s self-governing overseas territories. Under Bermuda’s constitution, which was approved in 1968, the English monarch, represented by the governor, is the head of state. A referendum on independence took place in 1995, but it was soundly defeated. Hamilton became the administrative capital in 1815 (until then, St. George had been the capital city of the colony). About three-fifths of Bermudians are of African descent—thousands of slaves were brought to Bermuda before Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807. The territory has a www.abc-clio.com

market economy based on tourism—more than 500,000 tourists visit the island every year—and international finance—thanks to its low income taxes, Bermuda is one of the most important financial centers in the world. Throughout the sixteenth century, Bermuda was a stopping point for Spanish and Portuguese sailors seeking water and food on their way to the New World. In 1609 the Sea Venture, the flagship of an expedition sent to relieve the colony of Jamestown led by the Virginia Company’s admiral Sir George Somers, wrecked off the coast of Bermuda. The survivors became the first English community in the previously uninhabited island, which soon was formally claimed for the English crown. Indian and African slaves began to be transported to Bermuda by 1617, and soon the slave population outnumbered the white settlers. Due to the limited area of the island and the poor quality of its tobacco, Bermuda never succeeded as an agricultural colony. Before long, however, Bermuda’s farmers noticed the value of the Bermuda cedar; the island was soon reforested with this species of juniper native to the area. Such an excellent wood allowed the islanders to establish a fairly thriving shipbuilding industry. The Bermuda sloop, light and extremely easy to direct, became a success not only in the Caribbean, but also in the West Indies and Europe. Hundreds of slaves were taken from Bermuda’s farms to be trained as shipwrights. Fishing, whaling, and other naval-related economic activities were central to Bermuda. Its predominantly maritime economy led to the employment of many slaves as sailors; they enjoyed a higher degree of autonomy than most colonial plantation slaves.

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The Turks Islands, in close proximity, were deforested and devoted to the extraction of salt, which became a pillar of the island’s economy. Mary Prince, a Bermudian woman born in slavery in 1788, was re-sold as a punishment for her insolence and was sent by her new owner to work in the salt ponds. In her narrative, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, published in London in 1831, Prince exposes the harsh conditions of Turks Islands slavery. From the second half of the twentieth century, racial issues have been central to the political history of the islands. The first Bermudian political party, the Progressive Labour Party, was created in 1963 to represent the nonwhite population. The multiracial United Bermuda Party was placed in power soon after the nation became selfgoverning and was returned to office in subsequent elections. These apparently pro-equality governments did not put an end to social tensions, and in 1977 rioting broke out. Since then, efforts have been made to put an end to racial discrimination. Virginia Fernández Canedo See also: British Empire; Prince, Mary; Sailors References Klein, S. Herbert. La esclavitud Africana en América Latina y el Caribe. Translated by Graciela Sánchez Albornoz. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1986. Montiel Martínez, Luz María. Negros en América. Madrid: Editorial Mafre, 1992.

BEYALA, CALIXTHE (1961–) A prolific francophone Cameroonian novelist and advocate of immigrants’ and women’s rights, Calixthe Beyala has spent most of her life as a voluntary exile in France and elsewhere, having left Africa as a teenager. Her work explores the intersection www.abc-clio.com

of race and gender within the context of exile and cultural hybridity. Crossing geographical borders, it is from the standpoint of exile that her work endeavors to fight racism and misogyny in the francophone world and beyond. Several of her novels concentrate on the themes of African diaspora and immigrant identity and have been well received by audiences in the Americas, notably in Quebec and the francophone Caribbean; she is a frequent participant in literary salons in North America and Europe, giving a voice to the voiceless that resonates throughout the francophone world in her novels, political writings, and interviews. Her novels, letters, and political essays portray the lives of women and children in postcolonial West Africa and the lives of those living abroad in Europe. She treats themes such as poverty, prostitution, work and exploitation, childhood, and immigration, common threads in francophone literature today on both sides of the Atlantic. She employs erotic imagery and metaphors in her discussion of female sexuality, bodily difference, and identity. Exile from Africa is presented with nostalgia, though the African scenes she paints present a world of violence, of objectification, of physical abuse and rape, of prostitution, of multiple pregnancies and abortion, of polygamous families, of female genital mutilation practices, of famine. She explores the ambiguity of immigrant identity and integration among African immigrants living abroad— for instance, in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris. She portrays strong female figures in exile who maintain their traditional culture through cooking and storytelling. Her major works that have been translated into English are are C’est le soleil qu m’a brûlée (1987; The Sun Hath Looked Upon

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Me, 1996), Tu t’appeleras Tanga (1988; Your Name Shall be Tanga, 1996), and Le petit prince de Belleville (1992; Loukoum: The Little Prince of Belleville, 1995). Sarah Gordon See also: Africa, West; Cameroon; Diaspora; Literature, African American References Beyala, Calixthe. The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me. Translated by Marjolijn de Jager. New York: Heinemann, 1996.Beyala, Calixthe. Your Name Shall be Tanga. Translated by Marjolijn de Jager. New York: Heinemann, 1996. Darlington, Sonja. “Calixthe Beyala’s Manifesto and Fictional Theory.” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 2 (2003): 41–52. Hitchcott, Nicki. “Comment cuisiner son mari à l’africaine: Calixthe Beyala’s Recipes for Migrant Identity.” French Cultural Studies 14 (2003): 211–220.

BIAFRA Biafra is the eastern region of Nigeria that briefly became a sovereign republic (1967–1970). The Republic of Biafra came into existence on May 30, 1967, by the proclamation of General Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, then military governor of Nigeria’s South Eastern Region, following an edict of the Eastern Region Constituent Assembly. The new independent country was comprised of the Igbo, Efik, Ibibio, Ijaw, Kalabari, Ogoja, and Ogoni ethnic groups. The name was adopted from the ancient West African kingdom of Biafra, on the inlet of the Atlantic coastline that early Portuguese explorers called the Bight of Biafra. Two immediate causes led to the breakaway of the Eastern Region of Nigeria into a sovereign republic. First was the northern www.abc-clio.com

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Nigerian military officers’ countercoup of July 29, 1966, in which about 200 Igbo officers and men of the Nigerian army were killed, including the country’s first military head of state, General J. T. U. AguiyiIronsi. Second was the May, July, and September 1966 Nigerian genocide against Igbo settlers in other parts of Nigeria, but mainly in the north. All these created a pervasive sense of insecurity for the lives and properties of Igbo and other eastern ethnicities in the old Nigerian nation. The growing animosity between Nigeria’s political leaders heightened the cultural and religious tensions between the south and the north. Nigeria’s first military coup d’état, on January 15, 1966, upset the delicate political balance between the country’s three dominant ethnic groups: the Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa-Fulani. Northern leaders interpreted the coup as a ploy by the Christian Igbo to usurp political power from the Arab and Muslim Hausa-Fulani. The consequences were the coup of July 29, the bloodiest in modern Africa and the first black-on-black genocide of modern history, in which an estimated 50,000 Igbo settlers in northern Nigeria were butchered in a state-programmed wave of ethnic cleansing. Over 1 million survivors of the ensuing nationwide pogrom fled back to the Igbo traditional homeland in the east to help found Biafra as a protection against the brutality of Nigeria. Yakubu Gowon, a northerner who became Nigeria’s second military head of state, refused to recognize the sovereignty of Biafra. He declared a state of emergency, subdivided the existing four regions of Nigeria into twelve states, and ordered a military invasion of the Eastern Region. The thirty-month civil war that broke out

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in July 1967 displayed Biafra’s ingenuity through the technological inventiveness of its research and production unit (RAP), the efficiency of its military forces, and the perseverance of its people. As a test of its successful diplomacy, Biafra gained varying recognitions from France, Gabon, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Israel, Portugal, South Africa, and Tanzania. The Nigerian government, however, hid under the Biafran oil and armament proliferation interests of its British and Soviet Union sponsors to unleash further acts of genocide against Biafran civilians. Nigeria’s Egyptian pilots bombed the Igbo Awgu market, and the Nigerian army wiped out an entire population of old men and male children in the Igbo town of Asaba. In spite of the interventions of the Vatican, the World Council of Churches, the International Red Cross, the United States, and others, Nigeria imposed an economic blockade against Biafra. Under the program of “starvation as a legitimate weapon of war,” the Nigerian government ordered the afternoon downing of a Swedish Red Cross plane on June 5, 1969. About 1 million Biafran children died of starvation and kwashiorkor, a debilitating disease brought upon by malnutrition. Over 2 million Biafrans had died by the time of its surrender on January 12, 1970. The Nigerian-Biafran War officially ended on January 15, 1970, but the continuing agitation of the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) attests to the rampant marginalization of the former Eastern Region and the failure of the Nigerian government postwar projects of reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reconciliation. Obi Iwuanyanwu See also: Hausa; Igbo; Nigeria; Yoruba

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References Forsyth, Frederick. The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1969. Ojukwu, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu. Biafra. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Sherman, John. War Stories: A Memoir of Nigeria and Biafra. Indianapolis, IN: Mesa Verde Press, 2002. Soyinka, Wole. The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Uzokwe, Alfred Obiora. Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War. New York: Writers Advantage, 2003.

BIOTECHNOLOGY Biotechnology or, more specifically, plant biotechnology, is a broad term referring to a variety of techniques used to isolate the DNA of plants and control their genetic makeup. Three techniques are widely used in plant breeding and propagation worldwide, and have specific applications for food and fiber crops in Africa and the Americas. The first is tissue culture (or cloning), which uses cell tissue of a parent plant to regenerate a new plant. This technique is used to clone disease-free propagules from African and American staple food crops such as sweet potatoes, yams, cassavas, bananas, and potatoes. Tissue culture is central to many plant-breeding programs and is used to reproduce rapidly improved crop varieties. The second biotechnology is called marker-assisted selection. This technique allows scientists to isolate and mark specific genes that express particular traits. It is used by breeders to select for beneficial traits, providing the essential foundation for the third, and most controversial, biotechnology: genetic engineering, the creation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Genetic engineering involves the

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manipulation of the genetic makeup of a plant via the transfer of DNA between different varieties, species, and genera, as well as between plants and animals, in order to introduce a new trait to a plant. Most commonly, genetically modified (GM) crops are designed to resist attack by a particular insect pest or plant pathogen. One of the most common GMOs is Bt corn and cotton. Bt (Bacillus thurengiensis) is a naturally occurring bacterium that is toxic to the larval stage of many pests and has been used as a timed, topical application by organic farmers for decades. In Bt corn and cotton, however, the gene expressing toxicity in Bacillus has been isolated and inserted into the corn and cotton DNA. The corn and cotton tissue of the GMO then expresses the Bt trait of toxicity and is toxic to larvae throughout the crop’s life. Other GM crops express herbicide resistance, so that an application of herbicide will kill surrounding weeds but will not damage the crop itself. Scientists are also developing rice that contains beta-carotene in order to stem vitamin A deficiency in developing countries. Advocates of biotechnology have promoted GMOs as the key to the next Green Revolution—the original one being the post–World War II advances in crop and fertilizer technology that massively boosted production between the 1950s and 1980s— capable of feeding a rapidly growing world population. In Africa and Latin America, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an international consortium of crop- and regionspecific research centers, has been actively promoting research and development of GMOs for use in developing countries. Over the last decade, GMOs have come to dominate several commodity crops in the www.abc-clio.com

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United States, such as corn, soybeans, and cotton. Worldwide GMOs are grown on nearly 50 million hectares, a number that is increasing rapidly. Advocates argue that pest and herbicide resistance reduces the need for other, potentially harmful, agrochemicals. While the biotech industry has heralded such pest and herbicide resistance and increased yields, consumers worldwide have raised concerns over potential risks, including long-term effects on public health and the environment, as well as on the economic systems of developing countries. These potential risks, coupled with the higher cost of GM seed, have led many farmers in the developing world to be skeptical of the technology’s potential and to resist its introduction into local farming systems by agribusiness and development agencies. While GMOs may lead to increased production in the short term, environmental and socioeconomic realities may ultimately constrain biotech’s potential to feed populations in the less-industrialized world. Critics argue that because GMOs are a relatively new technology, the long-term ramifications of their presence in the food system have not yet been evaluated. Concerns include the possibility that widespread use of antibiotic marker genes (that identify the plant as a GMO) may induce resistance to therapeutic or prophylactic antibiotics in humans and livestock. Additionally, the biotechnology industry has not yet elucidated the potential for GMOs to create allergens, food toxins, or immune system reactions. Industry and international organizations have maintained that GMOs are safe for consumption; yet many farmers, consumers, and scientists alike fear the potential

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for genetic contamination via pollination or through the “horizontal gene flow” of GM DNA taken up by soil bacteria. Concerns that herbicide-resistant genes could transfer into weed species, or that the recombination of GM transgenes into virus or bacteria could produce new pathogens, have not been fully investigated. In addition to affecting pest species, the Bt pesticide gene inserted in cotton and corn also affects beneficial insects that many smallholder farmers rely on for maintenance of an acceptable threshold of pest pressure. The toxin has been found to remain in soil for several months, potentially destabilizing soil ecology and threatening soil fertility by destroying microorganisms that transform organic matter into mineral nutrients available to crops. Researchers have already observed increased pest resistance to Bt in GM crop systems. Similarly, herbicideresistant GMOs may ultimately lead to an increase in broad-range herbicide, ultimately resulting in increased resistance by weed species. Perhaps most importantly, however, critics argue that biotechnology as a solution to solving world hunger problems is a narrow-sighted and naïve approach. They argue that by focusing their efforts and resources on finding a “silver bullet” panacea that simply increases food production, biotech advocates distract from identifying the fundamental root causes of poverty in the developing world. Poor distribution and low purchasing power are the primary obstacles to food security. Additionally, under neoliberal economic restructuring, involving the expansion of “comparative advantage” export agriculture, many traditionally agrarian developing countries are moving from food self-sufficiency to food import dependency. www.abc-clio.com

The debate over biotechnology has significant implications in Africa and the Americas and has been central to debates over trade, aid, and development in these regions. In 2001 both the Mexican National Biodiversity Commission and a controversial peer-reviewed article reported the contamination of two local varieties of Mexican maize by GM DNA, despite a ban on GMO importation. In Brazil, the world’s largest soybean producer, herbicideresistant (Roundup Ready) soybeans and Bt cotton are growing more popular among industrial-scale farmers, despite legislation banning GMO sales. In Africa, several governments are establishing committees to assess biotechnology risks and to draft legislation concerning GMO foods. The GMO controversy came to the forefront of public awareness when, in September 2002, the government of Zambia rejected U.S. food aid during a famine on the grounds that it contained GM corn. Other countries followed suit, claiming that GMOs in their food system might contaminate potential crop exports to GMO-free markets in Europe. Others fear that North American and European biotechnology firms will isolate indigenous genetic resources and patent them (biopiracy) for use in newly developed GM crops, which will then be sold back to developing world farmers, trapping them in a neocolonial relationship of technological dependency. Nathan C. McClintock

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See also: Agriculture; Agriculture, Sustainable; Green Revolution References Altieri, Miguel A., and Peter Rossett. “Ten Reasons Why Biotechnology Will Not Ensure Food Security, Protect the Environment, and Reduce Poverty in the Developing World.” AgBioForum 2, nos. 3–4 (1999): 155–162.

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BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT 165 DeVries, J., and G. Toenniessen. Securing the Harvest: Biotechnology, Breeding, and Seed Systems for African Crops. New York: CABI Publishing, 2001. Omamo, Steven, and Klaus von Grebmer, eds. Biotechnology, Agriculture, and Food Security in Southern Africa. Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2005. Patel, Raj, with Alexa Delwiche. “The Profits of Famine: Southern Africa’s Long Decade of Hunger.” Backgrounder 8, no. 4 (2002): 1–8.

BIRCHTOWN (BIRCH TOWN) Birchtown is the Nova Scotian community of free blacks, founded in 1783, that was once the largest free black settlement on the North American continent. Three of the six settlements founded by the freed blacks who accompanied the Loyalists to Nova Scotia in 1783 as refugees from the War of Independence were called Birch Town. They were all named in honor of Brigadier Samuel Birch, a former British commandant of New York City, who had issued many of the black refugees passports. The largest of the Birchtowns, and the only one that survives, lay near Shelburne, on the southwestern coast of Nova Scotia. At its peak in the mid-1780s, Birchtown was the largest free black settlement on the North American continent. Birchtown was founded by Loyalist Stephen Blucke, leader of the black community in New York. Appointed to take charge of the evacuation of the fugitive slaves, Blucke personally led some 1,500 freed blacks to Port Roseway (Shelburne), Nova Scotia, where he arrived in August 1783. On the instructions of Governor John Parr, the freed blacks were set down at the head of the northwest arm of Shelburne Harbour (now Birchtown Bay), five miles west of the “Loyalist city” of Shelburne. www.abc-clio.com

There, after a first year in which government supplied rations, they struggled to survive by fishing and hiring themselves out as woodcutters and land clearers. The land was rocky and swampy and subsistence agriculture was inadequate to feed the people. The community was in decline by the late 1780s, and by 1791 the residents were receptive to the West African emigration and resettlement scheme proposed by the Sierra Leone Company. Thanks to Blucke’s opposition to this early Back-toAfrica movement, however, many of Birchtown’s people did not join the emigration. This in turn made possible the survival down to the twenty-first century of Birchtown as a sustainable black community. In 1993 it was designated a site of national historic significance. Barry Cahill See also: Blucke or Bleucke or Bluck, Stephen; Nova Scotia, Black Refugees in References Niven, Laird, comp. Birchtown Archaeological Survey (1993): The Black Loyalist Settlement of Shelburne County, Nova Scotia, Canada. Lockeport, NS: Roseway Publishing, 1994. Niven, Laird, and Stephen A. Davis. “Birchtown: The History and Material Culture of an Expatriate African American Community.” In Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World, edited by John W. Pulis. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. Robertson, Marion. King’s Bounty: A History of Early Shelburne, Nova Scotia. Halifax, NS: Nova Scotia Museum, 1983.

BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT The Black Arts Movement (BAM), also called the Black Aesthetics Movement, was a literary and artistic development among African Americans from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. Ideologically grounded in the Civil Rights Movement,

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the Black Muslims, and the Black Power Movement, it was a “sixties” revolution pursuing radical social change through art. Whereas the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s asserted the maturity of African American art and protested racial inequality on American soil, the Black Arts Movement sought the elevation of the status of blacks through social engagement. Writers and artists associated with the BAM embraced black cultural nationalism, adopting Black English vernacular (especially the kind of English used by Malcolm X) and a defiant tone in both speech and writing. While the Harlem Renaissance was centered in New York City, the BAM was a nationwide cultural development arising not only in the Northeast but also in such areas as Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and the Deep South. Publishing firms, theater troupes, and music associations meeting the specific needs of blacks were also established during this period. Both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, however, turned to the history, culture, and spirituality of precolonial Africa for inspiration. Important events leading to BAM included the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965. Considering the Civil Rights Movement based on the philosophy of nonviolent resistance to be a failure, black militants asserted that racial equality in America could be achieved only through black separatism and social engagement. The death of Malcolm X inspired the playwright Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)— regarded as the father of the Black Arts Movement—to collaborate with likeminded black artists to found the Black Arts Theatre/School (BART/S) in Harlem, www.abc-clio.com

New York, in March 1965. In 1968 he and Larry Neal edited an important compendium, Black Fire: An Anthology of AfroAmerican Writing (1968), in which Neal described BAM as an ideological arm of the Black Power Movement. Other Black Arts ideologues included Houston A. Baker Jr., author of Long Black Song (1972); Addison Gayle Jr., editor of The Black Aesthetic (1971) and Way of a New World (1975); and Hoyt Fuller, editor of the periodical Negro Digest (renamed Black World in 1970) and author of Return to Africa (1971), a collection of essays written upon returning from a trip to Africa. Among the most notable writers associated with the Black Arts Movement were Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hoyt Fuller, Nikki Giovanni, Maulana Ron Karenga, Sonia Sanchez, Haki R. Madhubuti (formerly Don L. Lee), Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. A relatively short-lived movement, BAM was a landmark development in African American cultural history in its emphasis on social engagement, Black English, racial separatism, and Pan-Africanism. It has inspired not only younger black writers and artists but also writers of Native American and Hispanic American heritage. The black speech style popularized by the movement survives in rap music. John J. Han

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See also: Literature, African; Baraka, Amiri; Black Power Movement; Brooks, Gwendolyn; Civil Rights Movement; English, African American Vernacular; Harlem Renaissance; Morrison, Toni; Sanchez, Sonia; Shange, Ntozake References Clark, Cheryl. “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

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BLACK ATHENA Lawrence, David. “Negotiating Cooly”: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Black Arts Poetry. PhD dissertation, University of MissouriColumbia, 2003. Sell, Mike. Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Smethurst, James Edward. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

BLACK ATHENA Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987) argues that Africa, particularly Egypt, had a substantial role in shaping classical Greek culture and the texts that are often considered sources of European and Western culture. This role, Bernal argues, has been ignored by scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who sought to promote a vision of Western civilization in which Africa had little or no influence. In the United States, the raging debate that followed the publication of Black Athena has exposed contemporary America’s continuing sensitivity to questions of race and inheritance. Indeed, while Bernal’s work sought merely to enter into the academic debate concerning the debt that European (and therefore American) civilization owed to the influence of African cultures, the implication of its revisionist history has found favor among antiracist and civil rights organizations in America. Therefore, the significance of Black Athena revolves around the veracity of its central thesis. As Bernal has written, if his work truly demonstrates that African civilizations played a highly significant role in the constitution of the www.abc-clio.com

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ancient Greek culture that informed all European societies, then racist discourse can no longer return to the ideas that blacks are inherently uncivilized or that blacks must become like the white European if they are to enjoy “civilization.” As such, Black Athena, as revisionist history, encourages the empowerment of America’s black community, and insists that African and African American self-perception change— that it step outside of the kind of discursive limitations that saw Leopold Senghor’s negritude movement willingly embrace the notion that Africa stood as the emotional correlate to the ancient Greek intellect. Bernal’s Black Athena is a wide-ranging piece of scholarship that employs a host of interpretive systems—including linguistic, historical, archaeological, and mythological—to argue for a revision of the influence of Africa on the intellectual and cultural development of Europe. The core ideas of the book are the result of two intertwined assertions. The first is Bernal’s claim that the way in which we currently understand the origins of ancient Greece is significantly different from that of earlier generations. Bernal argues that in earlier centuries, ancient Greek culture had always been understood as the product of the insertion of Egyptian and Phoenician (read African) civilizations. However, this “Ancient model,” as Bernal calls it, was seemingly replaced by our current understanding of ancient Greece as the product of a series of invasions from the north by IndoEuropean speakers—the “Aryan model.” It is from this claim that Bernal makes his second assertion that one can trace the fall of the Ancient model to certain external forces operating around the second half of the eighteenth century. Bernal highlighted factors such as a Christian reactionism that

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favored the study of Greek culture over Egyptian civilization, since it could not tolerate any suggestion that some Egyptian religious traditions were older than the Hebrew Bible; the rise in the concept of “progress,” which ensured that the very antiquity of Egyptian civilization became unpalatable to a Europe that exhibited blind interest in only those societies that were considered to be dynamic and developing; and a Romantic Hellenism that was stimulated by the Greek War of Independence in the early nineteenth century, which Bernal claims was interpreted as a struggle between Europe on one hand and the continents of Africa and Asia on the other. Bernal asserts that the growth of an institutionalized racism, premised on “scientific” claims of objective proof of the inherent superiority of Caucasian races, accounts for much of the historical rewriting that occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century. As such, even though the attention of Bernal’s work seems to be split between two fundamentally different projects— Black Athena as a revisionist history of the last three millennia of the Mediterranean area, and Black Athena as a work of historiography, which is to say, an examination of the way in which these ancient Mediterranean cultures have been written about from the fifth century BCE to the present day—it retains the singular focus of unveiling the processes that systematically underestimated, deflated, and marginalized the importance of African cultures to world history. While the Black Athena debate is perhaps best-known as an Internet phenomenon, nevertheless, initial interest in its arguments and methodology actually began with academia’s response to what was perceived as an antagonistic piece of scholarship. After www.abc-clio.com

all, Bernal’s work seemed to imply that all Western historical and archaeological scholarship was in some manner racist and, to a certain extent, anti-Semitic. Early academic responses to Bernal’s work included a special issue of the journal Arethusa (1989), which contained papers given at the 120th meeting of the American Philological Association; a special issue of the American Journal of Archaeology (1990); and a dedicated issue of the Journal of Women’s History (1993), which contained a symposium on Bernal’s work. While many academic responses to Black Athena began by acknowledging the important role that it played in reigniting interest in the genealogical relationships between ancient civilizations, the overwhelming majority of these responses highlighted serious flaws in Bernal’s theses, methodologies, and evidence. No collection of responses has questioned the scholarship behind Bernal’s work more than Mary Lefkowitz and Guy Rogers’s collection, Black Athena Revisited (1996). In this collection, noted linguists Jay Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum express fundamental misgivings about Bernal’s linguistic evidence for claiming that Europe inherited a massive lexicon from Egyptian and Semitic languages. Jasanoff and Nussbaum conclude that Bernal made no effort to go beyond the realm of appearances, while choosing to ignore and misrepresent known facts about the history of individual word forms. Similarly, Edith Hall argues that Bernal’s use of Greek mythological narratives in support of his composition of the “Ancient model” is deeply flawed because of his selective and reductive use of source materials. Indeed, the claim that Bernal’s more complex assertions about modern scholarship fail to stand up to any

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kind of rigorous examination because of his selective use of sources is one that is repeated in the criticism of writers such as Robert Palter, Robert Norton, and Richard Jenkyns. While Bernal has largely accepted criticism of his rather monolithic consideration of certain academic disciplines, it is certain that such criticism has done little to temper the force that Black Athena exerts beyond the walls of academia. Clearly, his work has proven to be an important and necessary catalyst for America’s continuing dialogue on race and the manner in which the relationship between white and black is conducted. Moreover, it has revitalized the question of how history should be taught in institutions of education, and along with it re-politicized all aspects of the African American genealogy. Grant Hamilton See also: Afrocentrism; Négritude; Race, History of References Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol.1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. 2, The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Lefkowitz, Mary, and Guy Rogers, eds. Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

BLACK CLASSICAL SINGERS Black classical singers negotiate issues of race and audience in music on the American stage and internationally. From the midnineteenth century, black Americans have excelled as classical singers. They have, www.abc-clio.com

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however, had two major obstacles to overcome. First, prejudice excluded them from opera houses, and many whites regarded their concerts more as freak shows than artistic events. Second, since the time when African Americans have been allowed to the sing at the nation’s major opera houses, they have frequently been characterized as possessing a distinctively dusky or “Negro” sound that particularly suits them for certain roles. (A blindfold test comparing, say, Leontyne Price and Leonie Rysanek would disprove that easily.) Black sopranos, for example, were pressured into performing the dramatic role of Verdi’s Ethiopian princess, Aida, even though their voices were far too light for the part. By the year 2000, blacks were overcoming these stereotypes and functioning as regular members of the operatic and concert community. The leading black singers of the nineteenth century, sopranos Elizabeth Taylor-Greenfield (1820s–1876), Marie Selika (ca. 1849–1937), and Sissieretta Jones (1869–1933) were compared favorably with white divas Jenny Lind and Adelina Patti, sang for presidents of the United States and British royalty, and yet were never offered an operatic role. Jones could have been recorded (the phonograph became usable roughly in 1900) but never was. Tenor Roland Hayes (1887–1968), who attended Oberlin College in Ohio and was a sensational concert singer in Europe and America, deeply inspired Marian Anderson and pioneered in mixing Negro spirituals and hymns with classical music on his programs. His one surviving record of spirituals (he destroyed some early recordings) from his old age is immensely important for the history of singing. The aged Patti compared his voice and technique in its prime to the great tenors who

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had first sung the operas of Verdi and Donizetti in the mid-nineteenth century, and the elegance of Hayes’s phrasing and dynamics offer a glimpse into a lost world of singing that only a handful of artists have recalled. Two black singers of different temperaments dominated the American concert stage in the first half of the twentieth century. Marian Anderson (1897–1993) of Philadelphia and Paul Robeson (1898–1976) of Princeton, New Jersey—born some fifty miles and a year apart and possessing, respectively, two of the most beautiful contralto and bass voices ever heard—both concertized extensively in Europe to win recognition in America. Both integrated classical and folk songs with Negro spirituals in their programs, calling attention to their equal beauty, and both became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Robeson, an outspoken socialist and supporter of the Soviet Union, lost his passport, his fortune, and ultimately his health and his mind for his unwillingness to compromise his principles during the early days of the cold war. Anderson, a placid and religious woman, became a symbol of the struggle for civil rights when she sang at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, having been denied use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Late in her career, on January 7, 1955, she also became the first black person to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Although several blacks sang at the Metropolitan after Anderson’s debut, the African American opera singer came of age when Leontyne Price (1927–) received a forty-five-minute ovation following her debut in 1962 as Leonore in Verdi’s Il Trovatore. Born in Mississippi, she first excelled in the performance of contemporary www.abc-clio.com

Opera singer Leontyne Price dressed in costume for Anthony and Cleopatra at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in 1966. (Library of Congress)

songs, most notably, Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs. She was also a notable lead in Porgy and Bess, Jewish composer George Gershwin’s opera about Charleston, South Carolina, blacks, where she sang opposite her husband, the superb bass William Warfield. Price’s limitless top register and tonal beauty were unmatched in the contemporary field of great sopranos who sang at the Met. Peerless in Verdi and Puccini, she disappointed her many supporters by venturing into Wagner and Strauss only on record and learning few new roles. Although she retired from the Met in 1987, she has continued to give concerts into her seventies. Replacing Marian Anderson as a national icon, it was appropriate that she sang her signature tune, “God Bless America,” in the memorial concert in her adopted New York City immediately following the September 11 terrorist attack. Several superb singers followed in Price’s footsteps from the 1960s to 1980s.

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Soprano Martina Arroyo took many of the same parts with a richer lower and middle register although less spectacular top. Mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry—at age twenty-four the first black to sing at Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival, appearing as a voluptuous Venus in Tannhauser—later sang soprano roles, as did her sometime rival, Shirley Verrett. Both mezzos offered immensely dramatic interpretations and a fire that Price and Arroyo lacked: Bumbry excelled as an erotic Salome, Verrett as Lady Macbeth, and both as Eboli and Amneris in Verdi’s Don Carlo and Aida. Coloratura Reri Grist and lyric tenor George Shirley never received equal publicity but were among the best singers of the day. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the two most famous black classical singers were sopranos Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle. Although possessing beautiful voices—Battle a delightful light one, Norman a rich dramatic soprano that she has used in unusual repertory such as Janacek, Rameau, and French song—they became known as much for their personalities as their vocal gifts. Norman has been criticized for construction of a pretentious, larger-than-life persona; the Metropolitan Opera fired Battle for her extreme displays of temperament. On the other hand, lyric–coloratura soprano Barbara Hendricks and contralto Denyce Graves are noted for their generosity—Hendricks for her work with the poor and refugees for the United Nations, and Graves—who possesses one of the deepest and most moving contraltos ever heard—for her work with students and charities in the United States. Other African American singers—tenor Vinson Cole, basses Willard White and Simon Estes, sopranos Mavis Martin and Roberta Alexander, and mezzos Hilda Harris and www.abc-clio.com

Florence Quivar—are among the finest working in the early twenty-first century. Lacking the publicity machines of the “Three Tenors” and no longer astonishing audiences by their very presence on stage, black singers are becoming part of the mainstream of American vocal music. William Pencak References Davis, Peter G. The American Opera Singer. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Pleasants, Henry. The Great Singers. 2nd ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Story, Rosalyn M. And So I Sing: AfricanAmerican Divas of Concert and Song. New York: Warner Books, 1990.

BLACK PANTHER PARTY The Black Panther Party was a radical black intellectual and political organization. It promoted Black Nationalism and resistance as an alternative to the integrationist Civil Rights Movement. In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) gained national attention as one of the most revolutionary formations in American history. Emerging in the crucible of the Black Power Movement, the BPP rejected the Civil Rights Movement’s strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience and advocated armed struggle against America’s white supremacist–capitalist state. Viewing urban black communities as colonies occupied by a system of hostile white police, the BPP fearlessly contested the power of the state to brutalize black citizens. Established in October 1966 and headquartered in Oakland, California, the BPP both influenced and was influenced by local and global affairs. Stimulated by Malcolm X’s black nationalism, Mao Zedong’s axiom of “picking up the gun,”

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and Frantz Fanon’s and Che Guevera’s theories of revolutionary violence, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, students at Oakland’s Merritt College, founded the BPP in 1966 based upon a radical critique of racial oppression and class domination. The Black Panther Party’s newspaper, The Black Panther, served as the organization’s major source of communication throughout urban America. Huey Newton, the organization’s theoretician, wrote the party’s platform and program, delineating “What We Want” and “What We Believe.” The program’s elements included power and self-determination for the black community, decent housing, critical education, full employment for black people, self-defense, the termination of police brutality and murder of black people, and the freedom of all black prisoners. One of the Black Panther Party’s initial activities was an armed patrol of the Oakland police to ensure that police did not brutalize and murder black residents and, also, to inform urban residents of their legal rights. This effort was key to the Panthers’ ability to recruit members during the organization’s early stages of development. One of the most important functions of the party was to provide a number of community survival programs, which included free breakfast for children, free health clinics, and liberation youth schools. As a vanguard formation, the Black Panther Party regarded its survival programs as contributing to the revolutionary transformation of black consciousness and of America’s repressive state apparatus. As a dimension of the Black Power Movement’s politics of indictment against America’s systemic anti-black racism, the Black Panther Party contributed to the ongoing evolution of radical black political www.abc-clio.com

thought. Beginning as a Black Nationalist formation, the party quickly repudiated that ideology by embracing revolutionary nationalism, which sought to combine anti-racist and anti-capitalist perspectives. More and more, Huey Newton advanced the position that black Americans were colonized in much the same way as were the people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, whose nations western Europeans had subjugated since the nineteenth century. It was this sense of solidarity with colonized and oppressed peoples around the world that encouraged Newton to advance the position of revolutionary internationalism in 1970. Newton argued that the United States no longer was a nation but an empire that dominated the world. Accordingly, the bourgeoisie that Marxist-Leninist adherents sought to defeat was international in character. Overthrowing this international enemy demanded an international strategy; it required the unity of struggle among the workers of the world, according to Newton. In the face of changing world dynamics, most especially the war in Vietnam, the Panthers’ efforts to refine the concept of internationalism resulted in a transition to revolutionary intercommunalism, a belief that stressed a collective striving for anticolonialism and the self-determination of peoples, who were otherwise dispersed throughout the colonial world. This new ideology was put forward at the turbulent September 1970 Revolutionary People’s Convention in Philadelphia. The idea of intercommunalism grew out of the Panthers’ fundamental ideological position on internationalism. In the face of U.S. world capitalism and imperialism, the BPP called for the world’s oppressed peoples to unite and fight under the banner of revolutionary intercommunalism.

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It was in the context of these rapidly shifting political ideas, together with increasing repression from the U.S. government, that members of the Black Panther Party traveled throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa to establish relations with international activists and leaders of socialist nations. In 1968, at the invitation of Japanese radicals, BPP leaders Kathleen Cleaver and Earl Anthony gave a series of speeches that criticized the war in Vietnam and the use of nuclear weapons. In the same year, the BPP minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, fled to Cuba in order to escape charges related to an April 6, 1968, Panther-police shootout in Oakland, California. Three years later the party sent a representative to the annual celebration of the Cuban Revolution. Significantly, the North African nation of Algeria—a nation that sheltered many exiled Panthers—officially acknowledged the connection between African and African American liberation struggles by inviting black artists and political activists to the First Pan-African Cultural Festival began in July 1968. In addition to an invited ensemble of radical activists, writers, scholars, poets, actors, playwrights, and jazz musicians, Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver reemerged in Algiers, Algeria. BPP members met numerous international revolutionaries, including representatives from liberation movements in Palestine, Vietnam, and South Africa. Thereafter, Black Panther Party members were to receive numerous invitations from international revolutionaries and progressive governments. As a result of close ties between the Panthers and the North Korean Embassy in Algiers, North Korean diplomats invited Cleaver to attend the International Conference on Revolutionary www.abc-clio.com

Poster of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Active throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panthers promoted civil rights and self defense. (Library of Congress)

Journalists in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1969. This initial visit led to another invitation by North Korean officials the following year. A contingent, calling itself the American People’s AntiImperialist Delegation and representing a cross section of progressive organizations and forces—the Black Panther Party, the Red Guard, the women’s liberation movement, the radical media, and representatives of the antiwar movement—met Cleaver in North Korea and toured the country. Unexpectedly, the Vietnamese ambassador in Pyongyang invited the American delegation of progressive activists to North Vietnam, where they were honored on August 18, 1970, during a celebration of International Day of Solidarity with Black People of the United States.

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Eldridge Cleaver initiated additional BPP exchanges with African revolutionaries. As a result of a 1971 invitation from the Congolese Socialist Youth Union, he led a delegation of Panthers from Algeria to the People’s Republic of the Congo in order to attend the International Conference of Solidarity with the People under Portuguese Domination. In the Congo, members of the Panther contingent, which included Kathleen Cleaver, established relations with African freedom fighters from GuineaBissau, Mozambique, and Angola. Also participating were socialist youth delegations from North Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union—all of which articulated their support for the struggle against Portuguese colonialism. It also was in the early 1970s that the Black Panther Party established international links with the People’s Republic of China. In September 1971, following his release from prison, Huey Newton led a delegation of Panthers, including Central Committee member Elaine Brown, to China. This visit set the stage for a larger BPP contingent in 1972—a visit to China that allowed Panther delegation members to observe the practice of MarxismLeninism in relationship to the everyday life experience of Chinese people. As the 1970s progressed, the Black Panther Party experienced mounting internal contradictions as well as increased repression by the U.S. government. Severe tensions emerged between California and New York Panther members, which resulted in a public split between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. The public display of party division affected the party’s international contingent, contributing to an increasingly precarious situation in Algiers for Panther expatriate Cleaver, his family, www.abc-clio.com

and other BPP members. Moreover, murders of New York and California Panthers ultimately led Huey Newton to purge numerous party members. In addition to internal problems, the Panthers faced increasing repression from the U.S. government in the form of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which was set in motion in the late 1960s. This state terror campaign decimated Panther leadership and rank-and-file membership. With the assistance and support of the FBI and local police informants, urban policemen raided Panther offices and homes in cities across America and deliberately shot and killed numerous Panthers. Killed while asleep in their apartment on December 4, 1969, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were two of the most prominent Panther members assassinated by the Chicago police. As internal contradictions mounted and state repression intensified, the Black Panther Party, as a revolutionary formation, declined between 1974 and 1977. Floyd W. Hayes III

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See also: Black Power Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Malcolm X; Pan-Africanism References Cleaver, Kathleen. “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969–1972).” In The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, edited by Charles E. Jones. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998. Clemons, Michael L., and Charles E. Jones. “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena.” In Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy, edited by Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas. New York: Routledge, 2001. Foner, Philip S., ed. The Black Panthers Speak. New York: J. B. Lippincott,1970. Hilliard, David, and Lewis Cole. This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard

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BLACK POWER MOVEMENT 175 and the Story of the Black Panther Party. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. Jeffries, Judson L. Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. New York: Random House, 1970.

BLACK POWER MOVEMENT The Black Power Movement was a political movement linked with the Black Panther Party, the Black Arts Movement, and Afrocentrism that fostered political and educational support for a positive valuation of black racial identity and the right to self-defense. The Black Power Movement had its beginnings in the ideology of the Civil Rights Movement. Both movements were interested in bringing about equality for the African American community. In fact, the roots of the Black Power Movement can be linked directly to the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. The Black Power Movement, however, moved away from the peaceful protests of the Civil Rights Movement and became a movement that called for more active and confrontational resistance to segregation, Jim Crow policies, and legalized discrimination in the United States. The term “Black Power” was first used by Adam Clayton Powell in a speech at Howard University, but it was made popular in 1966 by Stokely Carmichael, the national chairperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in Greenwood, Mississippi. The idea of the Black Power Movement was expressed in many ways during the 1960s and 1970s; most noticeable were the raised fists of black athletes at the 1968 www.abc-clio.com

Olympic Games in Mexico and the change in hair and clothing styles during the 1960s and 1970s. A critical change that the Black Power Movement brought about was the use of the word “black” instead of “Negro” to identify African Americans.Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, prominent leader of the Nation of Islam and later the head of the Muslim Mosque Inc., also provided a foundation for the Black Power Movement. Malcolm X’s insistence on self-defense, and on the maintenance of black cultural values, traditions, and history were a point of reference for the younger generation of African Americans in the 1960s. While these individuals supported the goals of the Civil Rights Movement, they were concerned that the nonviolent approach of King and his followers put them in a position where they had to wait for their rights. The leaders of the Black Power Movement asserted the need for equal rights today, not tomorrow, and they were willing to pursue that goal, in the words of Malcolm X, “by any means necessary.” While this assertion by Malcolm X has been interpreted to represent a call to violence, it was in fact a call to action and a call to community. It reflected a desire to effect change in all aspects of the African American experience in America. This desire was perhaps best exhibited in the actions of the Black Panther Party. Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale, the cofounders of the organization, established a ten-point program that included an insistence that African Americans had the right to selfdefense. While much attention has been given to this assertion, the Black Panther Party was also instrumental in providing much needed support in African American communities, including but not limited to soup kitchens and breakfast programs for

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schoolchildren. In addition, the party was instrumental in making a tangible connection between the struggles of minority communities and other working-class communities. A critical aspect of the Black Power Movement was a call for African Americans to define the world in their own terms. The response to this call took on numerous forms. In the artistic realm of the black community, the Black Power Movement was paralleled by the Black Arts Movement, which included the works of such artists as Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones), Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni. These artists used their creativity to form a new, more radical image of the African American as one who was unwilling to remain stagnant in the face of racism and oppression. This image also advanced, as an ideal, the individual as a person who is culturally, nationally, and internationally aware. This international awareness was particularly critical, as it included an acknowledgement of the transnational link between Africa and individuals in the African Diaspora. The role of Africa in the culture, traditions, and ideology of African Americans was exhibited in the art, literature, and styles developed during the 1960s and 1970s. Particularly noticeable was the return to natural, more Afrocentric, styles of dress and hair styling. Other important leaders of the Black Power Movement included Maulana Karenga, the founder of Kwanza, and Angela Davis, an activist and teacher. Created in 1966 and based on a range of African religions, Kwanza emphasizes seven principles of familyhood: umoja, unity; kujichagulia, self-determination; ujima, collective work and responsibility; nia, purpose; kuumba, creativity; and imani, faith. www.abc-clio.com

These principles helped to emphasize the philosophical outlook of the movement and its desire to initiate change in the black experience in America. Kwanza was instrumental in reestablishing a tangible connection between African Americans and their African past; the principles provided a transnational perspective for the African American community, affirming the continued strength and value of the African past within African American culture. Angela Davis was instrumental in voicing the needs of women at a time when much emphasis was on racial uplift. Davis discussed racial injustice while promoting women’s rights. The Black Power Movement, coupled with the Black Arts Movement, was vital in reaffirming a sense of race pride, a sense of community that was both national and transnational. Like the Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement asserted a sense of pride in African Americans’ African heritage and a desire to return to an “authentic” African American identity, one that emphasized the African in African American. The ideologies and philosophies of the Black Power Movement continue to impact both the cultural and political perspective of the African American community. The Black Power Movement was also influential in the development of international movements, such as African internationalism and Pan-Africanism. J. A. Brown-Rose

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See also: Afrocentrism; Baraka, Amiri; Black Arts Movement; Black Panther Party; Civil Rights Movement; Malcolm X; Sanchez, Sonia; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee References Breitman, George. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.

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BLUCKE OR BLEUCKE OR BLUCK, STEPHEN Collier-Thomas, Betty, and V. P. Franklin. Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Tyson, Timothy B. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Van De Burg, William. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Van De Burg, William, ed. Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

BLACK STAR LINE The Black Star Line (BSL) was established in 1919 by Marcus Garvey, in line with his vision to promote racial uplift through black-owned enterprise. The goal of the steamship line was to promote trade in the Atlantic while providing transportation for blacks who wanted to return to Africa as part of Garvey’s efforts to recolonize and rejuvenate Liberia. The three-ship fleet was funded through the sale of stock to initially eager blacks in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean. Hopes were high at the outset of the BSL’s endeavors, as the corporation provided a rare example of black economic independence in the New World. Challenges, however, soon followed. Stiff competition in the industry and racism made shipping contracts difficult to procure. Also, the poor condition of the vessels, high maintenance costs, and bad decision making on the part of the ships’ crews often meant that voyages were delayed or not completed. Merchandise was often spoiled, consumed, or lost as a result, and many of the BSL’s clients soon became creditors. www.abc-clio.com

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These factors, combined with financial mismanagement by officials of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), resulted in criticism of Garvey in both the black and white press and difficulty in obtaining credit. Despite these obstacles, the BSL continued to enjoy support from a large segment of the black population. Garvey toured constantly, encouraging blacks to purchase stock in a flagship to be named the Phillis Wheatley. When financial problems and questionable business dealings made it clear that such a ship was not forthcoming, further criticism ensued. Garvey’s difficulties culminated in an FBI investigation and charges of mail fraud. The legal challenges that followed resulted in the failure of the Black Star Line and Garvey’s conviction and deportation. Carmen Lenore Wright See also: Garvey, Marcus; Titanic; Universal Negro Improvement Association, The References Cronon, Edmund. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955. Lewis, Rupert, and Patrick Bryan, eds. Garvey: His Work and Impact. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1988.

BLUCKE OR BLEUCKE OR BLUCK, STEPHEN (1752–1795?) Stephen Blucke was a black American Loyalist and founder of the Nova Scotian settlement, Birchtown. Leader of the African American community in New York City during the sevenyear British occupation (1776–1783), Blucke led the postwar migration to Nova Scotia of the largest body of black

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refugees—fugitive slaves declared free by British military proclamations. Though referred to as “Colonel” because he was placed in overall charge of some twentyone companies of fugitive slave evacuees, Blucke was a civilian, not a soldier; the only colonelcy he ever held was command of the black militia in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. The embarkation list of refugee slaves evacuating New York (the “Book of Negroes”) treats Stephen Blucke as if he were black. In fact he was mulatto, born free in Barbados, probably of a planter father and black mother. He was well-educated and highly literate. It is not known when or why he first came to New York, but he was clearly there throughout the British occupation. Sir Guy Carleton, who became British commander-in-chief in 1782, appointed Blucke to lead the evacuation of some 1,500 freed blacks to Port Roseway (Shelburne), Nova Scotia, where they arrived in August 1783. Blucke named the separate black settlement, established five miles away, Birchtown, in honor of a former commandant of the city of New York who had issued many of the fugitive slave passports. For several years Birchtown was North America’s Negropolis, the largest freed black settlement on the continent. Blucke ruled the black community as if he were a magistrate, but he did not live among the refugees or even near them. Nor were he and they treated equally. His 200acre farm lot—five times the size of the other black land grants—was at Churchover, on the southwestern shore of Shelburne Harbour. His “spacious house,” where, tradition says, he entertained Prince William Henry in October 1788, lay on the road from Shelburne to Birchtown; it was still standing eighty years later. In September 1784 Blucke’s status as paramount leader of www.abc-clio.com

the black refugees was recognized by Governor Parr, who commissioned him lieutenant colonel of the black militia in the district of Shelburne. Blucke was both the black community’s headman and its go-between with the white community. While most of the black people were, or became, Baptists or Methodists, Blucke—as befitted an honorary member of the white establishment—was an Episcopalian, renting a pew in Shelburne’s Christ Church (Church of England). He also served as schoolmaster at Birchtown under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Blucke, who had never been a slave, did not actively oppose the resettlement scheme to Sierra Leone, but he was out of sympathy with what he considered an African adventure that would divest the refugees of hard-won land in return for a distant promised one. Blucke’s disenchantment with the scheme, which was supported by all the other black leaders and most of the freed black community in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, ensured the survival—down to the present day—of Birchtown, a dispersed rural community that is now one of Canada’s national historic sites. All the other black refugee communities in Nova Scotia were depopulated or simply disappeared as a result of the exodus to Sierra Leone in 1791–1792. The loss of about half the local black population—a plentiful supply of cheap labor—was an economic factor contributing to the rapid decline of Shelburne township in the 1790s. More were leaving Shelburne than were staying, and Blucke was among the former. He disappears from the records in April 1796 and probably left soon after. His reasons for doing so are unknown, but may relate to his having entered into a bigamous

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marriage with his wife’s ward, Isabella Gibbons, who bore him children. Barry Cahill See also: Birchtown; Nova Scotia, Black Refugees in References Cahill, Barry. “Stephen Blucke: The Perils of Being a ‘White Negro’ in Loyalist Nova Scotia.” Nova Scotia Historical Review 11, no. 1 (June 1991): 129–134. Hodges, Graham Russell, ed. The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution. New York: Garland, 1996. Ranlet, Philip. The New York Loyalists. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002. Walker, James W. St. G. The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870. 1976. Reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

BLYDEN, EDWARD WILMOT (1832–1912) A Pan-African intellectual, statesman, and educator, Edward Wilmot Blyden was born in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands of free parents. Blyden was the first West Indian to make an important contribution to the emergence of Pan-Africanism. He also laid the foundations for West African nationalism and the negritude movement. At an early age Blyden decided to become a clergyman. In May 1850 he went to the United States, where he tried to enroll at Rutgers Theological College. His rejection on the basis of his skin color was one of the main reasons why he migrated to Liberia in December 1850. He continued his formal education at Alexander High School in the capital, Monrovia. In 1858 he was ordained a Presbyterian minister and became the principal of Alexander www.abc-clio.com

Edward Wilmot Blyden, Liberian educator and statesman. (Library of Congress)

High School. In 1861 and 1862 he served as Liberia’s commissioner to Britain and the United States. From 1862 till 1871 he was professor of classics at Liberia College, a post which he combined for some time with that of secretary of state of Liberia. In 1871 Blyden moved to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he founded and edited The Negro, the first Pan-African journal in West Africa, and on two occasions he led government expeditions into the interior. Between 1871 and 1884 he was based again in Liberia, where he alternated between important academic and governmental positions. After 1885 Blyden divided his time between Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Lagos, Nigeria. He contributed to their development in his capacity as educator and statesman and as the founder of several journals and newspapers that promoted West African nationalism.

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He died in Freetown in 1912. Only one of his eight children, Isa Cleopatra, survived him. She was the mother of Edward Wilmot Blyden III, whose Sierra Leone Independence Movement organization helped to win Sierra Leone’s independence from Great Britain in 1961. In spite of his many important functions, Blyden found time to express his views on race and Africa in lectures, reviews, articles, pamphlets, and books. His most influential writings are A Voice from Bleeding Africa (1856), Liberia’s Offering (1862), Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887), West Africa before Europe (1905), and African Life and Customs (1908). Blyden adhered to the idea that humankind was divided into different races that were distinct but equal—none was inherently superior or inferior. He tried to prove in his lectures and writings, to both black and white, that the African was equal to other races. He mentioned the contributions that Africa had made to humanity before the arrival of the Europeans and also highlighted individual black achievement. In addition, he encouraged Africans at home and in the diaspora to study African history and culture and take pride in their skin color. His practice of giving the word “negro” a positive interpretation and of capitalizing it was one of several means he used to instill a new racial consciousness in Africans. It is this practice, more than any other, that has earned him the label of forerunner of the negritude movement. Blyden’s racial ideas affected his views on religion. His expeditions into the interior of Africa, where he observed Islam’s influence, and his discussions with scholarly African Muslims gradually convinced him that Islam suited the African “race” better than Christianity, as it emphasized brotherhood and lacked racial prejudice. www.abc-clio.com

Blyden resigned from the Presbyterian Church in 1886 but never formally adopted Islam. For the remainder of his life, he tried to promote Islam among Africans and facilitate an understanding between Islam and Christianity in Africa. Between 1901 and 1906, for example, he was director of Muslim education in Sierra Leone and taught English and other “western” subjects to Muslim youth with the aim of bridging the gap between the Muslim and Christian communities in the British protectorate. Throughout his life, Blyden worked toward the establishment of a modern West African state that would protect and promote the interests of peoples of African descent and serve as a symbol of African power. He saw Liberia as the steppingstone of this project. Its development would encourage the settlement of other nation-states that in time would form, with Liberia, a West African state. To enhance Liberia’s development, he influenced the Liberian government to encourage selective repatriation from the Americas. He was convinced that Africans in the Americas were the key to integrating Africa into the modern world due to the role that they had played, mostly against their will, in the economic development of the Americas. He also tried to achieve his political goal by actively championing the merging of Liberia and Sierra Leone into one nation. Blyden’s work contains many inconsistencies. He espoused racial equality while at the same time advocating the separation of the races and expressing a fear of racial mixture. Drawing upon examples from the United States, Blyden argued that there was antipathy among the races and that only by keeping them apart could the African race fully develop and demonstrate its talents. He backed his claim that people of mixed

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BOATBUILDING

race were inferior to those of pure parentage largely by offering evidence from Liberia. He presented Liberia’s mulattos as a retarding influence on its progress. They were, in his opinion, physically weaker and more corrupt than full-blooded Africans. Equally inconsistent and ambivalent are his remarks on European colonialism. On the one hand, he regarded European colonial rule as a negative influence that dismantled traditional beliefs and customs, while on the other, he welcomed it as a vehicle of progress for Africa. These contradictory ideas, however, have not prevented generations of Pan-Africanists and West African nationalists—from Casely Hayford and Marcus Garvey to George Padmore and Kwame N’krumah—from acclaiming Blyden as a great teacher. Henrice Altink See also: Garvey, Marcus; Islam, African American; Liberia; Négritude; N’Krumah, Kwame; Pan-Africanism References Hanciles, J. J. “Edward W. Blyden and the West African University: Race, Mission, and Education.” Zimbabwe Journal of Educational Research 10, no. 3 (1998): 235–249. Lynch, Hollis R. Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832–1912. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Lynch, Hollis R., ed. Black Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden. London: Frank Cass, 1971. Turner, R. B. “Edward Wilmot Blyden and Pan-Africanism: The Ideological Roots of Islam and Black Nationalism in the United States.” Muslim World 87, no. 2 (1997): 169–182.

BOATBUILDING The boats designed and constructed by Africans on both sides of the Atlantic were vital in the transportation of goods and workers. Drawings and descriptions of www.abc-clio.com

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huge hollowed trees that held as many as eighty people appear frequently in travelers’ and traders’ accounts. These canoes, called pirogues or pettiaguers by French traders, were engineered for a wide range of tasks in varying water conditions—slow, plantclogged rivers, rushing rapids, and the turbulent Atlantic surf along the coasts. African societies controlled their own interior waters throughout the Atlantic slave trade with these vessels, sometimes meeting the European ships at the mouths of rivers with warriors to prevent further incursion. Europeans found that African sailors’ skill and experience, along with their watercraft, which were suitable for local waters, could navigate the treacherous surf and bring terrified captives from barracoons to the Europeans’ tall-masted sailing ships. The African boatbuilding method of hollowing a single large tree was combined with the watercraft techniques of Native Americans in South America, the Caribbean, and in North America. By the late nineteenth century a multilog pettiauger, invented by an enslaved African man known to history only as “Aaron,” had proven its usefulness, especially for dredging oysters. There were 7,000 such watercraft on the Chesapeake Bay by 1900. Related industries of naval stores and lumbering were developed with African American labor in the South, beginning with colonial times. In the decade before the U.S. Civil War, the pine forests of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, worked almost entirely by slave labor, provided most of the naval stores for the country. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the turpentine and lumber industries moved to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas in the general westward migration of southern slaveholders and planters. Jean Libby

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182 BOLIVIA See also: Sailors; Technology Transfers References Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Ramold, Steven J. Slaves, Sailors, Citizens: African Americans in the Union Navy. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002.

BOLIVIA Bolivia is a multicultural and multiethnic republic located in the heart of South America. The country’s racial diversity, as in many African and Latin American countries, has served as both a resource and a challenge. Over half (55 to 60 percent) of its population of nine million is Native American (20 to 25 percent Aymara, 35 to 40 percent Quechua, and a small percentage of primarily Guaraní lowland Indians). However, these statistics are relative and fluid and are culturally defined. For example, in the 2001 census, 62 percent of Bolivians claimed an indigenous identity, signficantly more than in previous censuses. A second, racially mixed group of Mestizos (called cholo in Bolivia) are descendants from unions between Spanish colonizers and indigenous peoples and are some 30 to 40 percent of the population. White Bolivians comprise some 5 to 15 percent of the population, and a fractional percentage are Afro-Bolivians (blacks, mulattos, and black Indian, or zambo), the descendants of African slaves imported into Bolivia and forced to work the silver mines of Cerro Rico in the colonial city of Potosí and the coca leaf plantations of the northern inter-Andean valleys. There are also citizens of North African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and European extraction, such as www.abc-clio.com

Dutch and German Mennonites and Jewish refugees. Bolivia has been landlocked since the loss of its seacoast in 1883 and is encircled by the five South American countries of Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. The country’s landmass, which totals 621,371 miles (1,098,581 square kilometers), or about the combined size of Texas and California, incorporates a wide range of topography and climate. These range from the snow-capped Andean Mountains, to the chilly, windswept plateau known as the Altiplano in the west, to the fertile valleys and the lush subtropical and tropical savannahs and rainforests in the east. Administratively, the country is divided into nine departments, three in the Andean region (La Paz, Oruro, Potosí), three in the valleys (Cochabamba, Chuquisaca, and Tarija), and the three largest in the subtropical and tropical zones (Santa Cruz, Beni, and Pando). Colonialism established in Bolivia, as in most African and Latin American countries, both a racist and an authoritarian political tradition. In the decades from independence in 1825 to the formation of civilian political parties in the 1880s, white and Mestizo military dictators (caudillos) dominated civic life. The rule of a white, civilian oligarchy during the first half of the twentieth century ended with the Bolivian National Revolution of 1952, which instituted land reform and universal suffrage, nationalized the mines, provided extensive educational and social welfare benefits, and for the first time recognized the Indians (at least in law) as full citizens of the republic. After an accommodation with the United States—the undisputed hegemonic power in Latin America—economic aid flowed into the needy country. However, in 1964

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a military coup—the first among many— interrupted the reform process and influenced Ernesto “Che” Guevara, fresh from his guerrilla campaigns in Africa, to try to replicate the Cuban Revolution in Bolivia in 1967 and spark a continent-wide revolution. In 1982, after eighteen years of authoritarian and military rule, Bolivia held free and fair elections. Despite continued poverty and a massive debt crisis (the bane of many developing countries), Bolivians continued to struggle for rights and democratic government. In December 2005 the long process of democratization culminated in the election of the country’s first president of indigenous descent. President Evo Morales Aima received an unprecedented mandate of 54 percent of the popular vote—the largest since the revolution. In Bolivia, as with many countries of Africa, regionalism, localism, and ethnic diversity have been powerful impetuses for divisiveness and underdevelopment. Bolivia has been described as a land divided into the extractive export economy (silver, tin, and other minerals) of the Andean region and the semifeudal agricultural economy of the lowlands. And as with many third world countries, a rugged geography has hindered development and national integration. Bolivia is popularly viewed as an Andean and Indian country because until the late twentieth century nearly twothirds of the population lived in the Andes and inter-Andean valleys. Also, the largely white and Mestizo (a mixture of white Spanish and Aymara and Quechua Indians) ruling class of the highland departments dominated national politics during most of Bolivia’s colonial and modern history. However, two-thirds of the country’s land mass lies in the subtropical and www.abc-clio.com

tropical lowlands in the east. Moreover, since the 1960s the massive population influx into and socioeconomic development of the eastern departments, especially resource-rich Santa Cruz, has shifted the balance of political and economic power eastward. Today, with the mineral and economic base of the highlands in steep decline, the wealthy and entrepreneurial Cambas (the ethno-regional term for eastern lowlanders) are more reluctant to transfer wealth to the central government’s coffers in La Paz (the administrative capital) and to support the poorer Kollas (the ethno-regional term for indigenous citizens of the highlands). Despite significant economic development and regional decentralization in the 1990s, this highland versus lowland bifurcation has intensified. Cruceños (citizens of Santa Cruz) demand more regional autonomy and political and economic decentralization and threaten to secede if denied. As in African countries such as Nigeria, Rwanda, and Sudan, uneven political and economic development has exacerbated regional-ethnic tensions. Economically, the decline of Bolivia’s tin mining sector after 1985 forced thousands of unemployed and desperate highland miners to migrate to the lowlands. Many became growers of coca leaf, a legal crop until a U.S.-inspired Bolivian law criminalized production in nontraditional growing regions. Unfortunately, economic necessity and profit enticed some Bolivians into the production of cocaine paste. As the Andean drug war became increasingly militarized and violent and human rights abuses increased, Bolivia’s coca farmers, who continued to grow the primary ingredient for the drug trade, organized into a powerful growers’ federation. Since the late 1970s

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the predominantly localized struggle has grown into a national social movement (similar to new, grassroots social movements across Africa and Latin America) and political party, the Movement toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS), which brought Evo Morales, leader of the growers’ union, to the presidency. The coca leaf, which has been grown in Bolivia since ancient times by the indigenous peoples and used in native medicine and religious and cultural ceremonies, became the symbol of nationalism, ethnic pride, and opposition to U.S. imperialism. It has been in Bolivian Yungas (the tropical inter-Andean valleys north of La Paz) where coca has been grown traditionally and remains legal. There, thousands of Afro-Bolivians (perhaps 25,000) settled and farmed coca and other crops. The status of Afro-Bolivians, descendants of the approximately 100,000 slaves brought to the country from the Congo and Angola during colonial times, remains precarious economically and culturally, and the government did not include them in the 2001 census. Afro-Bolivians, unlike Afro-Latin Americans in many other countries, are a very small percentage of the population. The struggle to retain a distinct racial and cultural identity and the process of intermarriage or creolization created a black Aymara-speaking subculture in the Yungas. In dress and customs the black heritage has largely blended with those of the Aymara Indians and become an integral part of national folkloric dance and music. Examples are the Morenada dance of black slaves from the Altiplano and the Caporal dance of the Spanish overlords to the Saya music of the Yungas, which combines Andean instruments with African percussion and rhythms. www.abc-clio.com

Many Afro-Bolivians welcomed the election of an Indian president and his promise to end white colonialism and discrimination and extend ethnic and racial inclusion. Still, rather than increase the rights of peoples in relation to the state— especially for groups historically disempowered and discriminated against—some feared that greater autonomy for diverse ethnic communities might revive a negative tribalism, which has hampered nation building in Latin America and Africa in the past. Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, with two-thirds of its population at or below the poverty line, has been victimized (as have many African and Latin America countries) by the neoliberal economic, restructuring, and privatizing policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Within the country, grassroots social movements have aggressively opposed the dark side of globalization. In 2000, the citizens of Cochabamba hit the streets and for the next several years waged the Water War against the Bechtel Corporation’s privatization of the city’s water system. Lives were lost in the struggle. Not unlike the the case in South Africa, privatization had doubled and tripled rates for the city’s poor majority. A similar water privatization scheme was attempted and failed in El Alto, in the Altiplano heights above La Paz. Finally, the Gas War, which erupted in 2003, was a popular uprising against the privatization of oil and gas resources. It culminated in the fall of two governments and the May Day nationalization decree of 2006, which increased state control and revenues from this last major resource. The Gas War has been so explosive politically in large part because it represented

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the country’s last resource war. Its colonial and national history was marred by the relentless exploitation of the country’s mineral resources (much as with diamonds in South Africa and the Congo and petroleum in Nigeria and Angola) to the benefit of foreign colonizers and investors and local dictators and oligarchs. The people remained impoverished. Moreover, nationalism compounded the popular outrage because the government in 2002 sought to send newly discovered natural gas resources to U.S. markets via Chilean ports. Bolivia has had a traditionally conflictive relationship with Chile, which defeated Bolivia in a resource war over control of rich desert nitrates. In the War of the Pacific from 1879 to 1883, Bolivia lost its coastal territory and became landlocked. Like the fourteen landlocked African countries, Bolivia believes it has been geographically and developmentally handicapped by the absence of a seacoast in terms of sovereign access, resources, and trade. Indeed, the thirty-one landlocked developing states—almost half in Africa— are some of the poorest countries with the weakest growth rates, and like Bolivia (and Paraguay in Latin America) are often marginalized in the global economy. Bolivia has joined with the developing world and Africa’s landlocked states to form an alliance at the Third United Nations (UN) Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) to gain concessions from neighboring coastal states. Bolivia’s landlocked status has contributed to national frustration and inspired extensive diplomatic campaigns to regain sovereign access to the sea, such as the 2004 agreement with Peru to exchange natural gas for access to the sea. Waltraud Q. Morales www.abc-clio.com

See also: Globalization; International Monetary Fund; World Bank References Gill, Lesley. Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Life, and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Hudson, Rex A., and Dennis M. Hanratty, eds. Bolivia: A Country Study. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991. Klein, Herbert S. Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Kohl, Benjamin, and Linda C. Farthing. Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance. New York: Zed Books, 2006. Morales, Waltraud Queiser. Bolivia: Land of Struggle. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.

BRAND, DIONNE (1953–) Dionne Brand is a Trinidadian-born, Canadian-based writer and political activist. She was born in Guayguayare, a small village in the very south of Trinidad. At the age of seventeen she left the Caribbean to study in Toronto, Canada, where she has been based since. Throughout her career, Brand has combined creative and political writing with action. Art and politics, for her, are inextricably linked forms of expression in coming to terms with issues of colonial and neocolonial exploitation, racism, sexism, and the riddles of diasporic identity. Brand has belonged to the Communist Party and, while acknowledging Marxism’s failures, still remains dedicated to ideas of just distributions of wealth and labor; she has engaged in numerous community activities, for instance, in the Black Education Project or as counselor for the black West Indian community at the Immigrant Women’s Center in Toronto;

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also, she worked for the Agency of Rural Transformation in Grenada until U.S. troops invaded in 1983. Her innumerable encounters in these and many other capacities with individual histories of displacement and victimization, yet also with female courage and love, have manifestly influenced her creative writing as well as her nonfictional work. Examples of her political writing are Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots (1986, with Krisantha Sri Bhaggiydatta), Black Women at Work (1987), Bread out of Stone (1994), and A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), covering a broad range of topics from feminism and lesbianism via issues of race and representation to larger historical perspectives on the African Diaspora. Moreover, in Older Stronger Wiser (1989), Sisters in Struggle (1991), and Long Time Comin’ (1993), she also expressed herself in documentary film. In her creative writing, Dionne Brand has for a long time concentrated her efforts on poetry. She made her debut in 1978 with ’Fore Day Morning and a book of poetry for children, Earth Magic. The volumes that followed were increasingly political in scope, for instance, Primitive Offensive (1982); Chronicles of a Hostile Sun (1984), a poetic reaction to her involvement in the Grenadian revolution of 1983; No Language is Neutral (1990); the governorgeneral’s award-winning Land to Light On (1997); and Thirsty (2002). In all her poetry, however, political thrust goes hand in hand with emotional depth and a careful sense for language and its rhythms, ranging from Trinidadian creole to Toronto slang. Brand’s fictional prose fundamentally benefits from her lyricism. An earlier volume of short stories, Sans Souci (1988), was followed by two novels, In Another Place, www.abc-clio.com

Not Here (1997) and At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999); they intimately explore the political, cultural, and historical upheavals in the Caribbean and their diasporic extensions in the North American and European metropolises. Dionne Brand’s acute feeling for the intricacies of interhuman relations and the complexities of displaced identity, her combination of political and artistic vision, have established her as one of the most exiting Canadian and Caribbean writers today. Lars Eckstein See also: Caribbean Literature; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic References Brand, Dionne. Bread out of Stone: Recollections on Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, and Politics. Toronto: Coach House, 1994. Joseph, Clara A. B. “Nation Because of Differences.” Research in African Literatures 32, no. 3 (2001): 57–70. Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada. Toronto: Insomniac, 1997.

BRATHWAITE, KAMAU (1930–) Kamau Brathwaite is an award-winning Caribbean poet, cultural critic, and historian. He was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, on May 11, 1930 and was christened Lawson Edward Brathwaite. After secondary school in Barbados, he won a coveted scholarship to study history at Cambridge University in England from 1950 to 1953. He then traveled to Ghana, West Africa, where he worked as an education officer from 1955 to 1962. Afterwards, he traveled back to the United Kingdom and completed his PhD in history at the University of Sussex in 1968. Brathwaite’s journeys through Europe and Africa led him back to the Caribbean, and he taught at the

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University of West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, for nearly thirty years. In his seventies, Brathwaite divides his time between teaching as a professor of comparative literature at New York University and his home in Barbados. Brathwaite is a prominent figure in the field of Caribbean literature, and his expansive work has been vital to Caribbean Studies. Brathwaite’s experiences and travels in Africa greatly influenced his academic and creative work. He is best-known for exploring and revealing the African presence in the Caribbean through culture, history, and literature. During his impressive career, Brathwaite has continuously worked to forge a Caribbean voice through his message of cultural and regional pride that calls for unity among Caribbean people and countries. He has done this not only through his work as a historian, poet, and cultural critic, but also through his active work in forming the Caribbean Artists Movement and returning to the Caribbean to work and teach. During his time in Jamaica, Brathwaite became a central figure in developing the formal study of Caribbean literature and culture. Brathwaite’s historical works include the foundational text, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, which reveals the central role that African slaves had in forming the social and cultural particulars that make up the unique culture of present-day Jamaica. In addition, Brathwaite has written many critical essays and lectures that have been essential in the creation of a critical aesthetic and context for Caribbean literature. A number of his important essays are in the valuable collection Roots: Essays in Caribbean Literature (1993), which captures the depth of his critical work from the 1950s to the 1980s. www.abc-clio.com

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Moreover, Brathwaite has insisted on the significance of creole languages across the Caribbean, and this clearly shows in his poetry. Brathwaite has published over twentyfive books of poetry, and his unique style reveals the interconnections of the African Diaspora, links between the Caribbean and Africa, and the similarities among different islands in the region. His major poetic works include Ancestors (2001), The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), Barabajan Poems, 1492–1992 (1994), Black + Blues (1976), Dream Stories (1994), Middle Passages (1992), Shar (1990), Soweto (1979), Third World Poems (1983), and The Zea Mexican Diary (1994), among others. Brathwaite has won numerous awards and honors for his outstanding work, including the Neustadt International Award for Literature; the Casa de Las Americas Prize for poetry and literary criticism; and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Ford Foundations. Angelique V. Nixon See also: Caribbean Artists Movement; Caribbean Literature. References Brathwaite, Doris Monica. A Descriptive and Chronological Bibliography (1950–1982) of the Work of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. London: New Beacon Books, 1988. Brathwaite, Kamau. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Brathwaite, Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Brathwaite, Kamau. Black + Blues. Havana, Cuba: Casa de Las Americas, 1976. Brathwaite, Kamau. Soweto. Mona, Jamaica: Savacou, 1979. Brathwaite, Kamau. Third World Poems. London: Longman, 1983. Brathwaite, Kamau. Shar. Mona, Jamaica: Savacou, 1990.

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188 BRAZIL Brathwaite, Kamau. Middle Passages. Newcastle, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 1992. Brathwaite, Kamau. Roots: Essays in Caribbean Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Brathwaite, Kamau. Barabajan Poems, 1492–1992. Kingston, Jamaica: Savacou North, 1994. Brathwaite, Kamau. Dream Stories. London: Longman, 1994. Brathwaite, Kamau. The Zea Mexican Diary. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Brathwaite, Kamau. Ancestors. New York: New Directions Books, 2001. Brown, Stewart, ed. The Art of Kamau Brathwaite. Bridgen, UK: Cromwell Press, 1995. Reis, Timothy, ed. For the Geography of Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001. Rohlehr, Gordon. Pathfinder, Black Awakening in The Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Tunapuna, Trinidad: G. Rohlehr, 1981. Williams, Emily Allen. The Critical Response to Kamau Brathwaite. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004.

BRAZIL Brazil’s geology, population, social differentiation, history of enslavement of Africans, and contemporary politics have all helped to shape its history. With a population of 180 million and 3,286,470 square miles (8,511, 965 square kilometers)of territory, the Federative Republic of Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world and the sixth most populated. Comprising twenty-six states and a Federal District, it is divided into five regions and occupies a central position in Latin America as a whole, being not only the biggest country of the region in size and population, but also the most industrialized and economically advanced. Geographically and geologically, Brazil is a privileged land. Even though regional differences in climate, relief, and vegetation www.abc-clio.com

are sharp, as could be expected given the country’s size, natural catastrophes such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or blizzards are unknown to Brazilians. Temperatures seldom fall below the freezing point, and when they do, it is normally in the mountains in the South. Snow is rare; when it comes, it becomes a tourist attraction. Increasing heat, on the other hand, is a phenomenon Brazilians have been forced to cope with. Due not only to global warming but also to the devastation of natural forests and fast, unplanned urbanization, it is not uncommon for many cities like Rio de Janeiro to experience temperatures surpassing 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Centigrade) for several successive days (or even weeks). As elsewhere, climatic changes have brought an intensification of calamities related to the weather, mainly floods or droughts, which now may happen simultaneously in different parts of the country. Brazil remains extremely rich in natural resources, including minerals (coal, iron, limestone, aluminum, copper, and amianthus), abundant fertile soil and water supplies—about 9 percent of the globe’s reservoir, especially in the Amazon River, the greatest of the world’s rivers in water capacity, bringing around 4.2 million cubic feet of water per second into the Atlantic. The country’s most precious possession is the Amazon rain forest, which spreads over an area of 2.1 million square miles (5.5 million square kilometers), roughly 60 percent of the forest’s total extension, and contains one of the world’s richest sources of biodiversity. Deforestation, however, is rampant, reaching an average of over 8,880 square miles (23,000 square kilometers) per year since 2001, according to government data provided by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics.

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Brazil’s population has become increasingly urban. In the 1940s just 31 percent of Brazilians lived in cities; as of 2007 more than 80 percent do. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are among the biggest metropolises in the world, with total populations of respectively of 10.215 and 15.318 million. The growth of cities took place in an unorganized way, mainly through internal migration from the Northeast, where conditions of living were the worst in the country, to a quickly industrializing Southeast, where jobs could be found. Migration flows to Southeast states have decreased since the 1980s, being redirected toward areas of more recent settlement such as the states of Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Tocantis, and Roraima. Yet the effects of uncontrolled resettlement can be felt in the presence of slums, called favelas, at the outskirts of every big city in the country. These have come to occupy an increasingly important place in Brazilian culture and society. Concentrating the poor and the Afro-Brazilian population, they can be very violent places where the state authority is at times virtually absent and which thus have their own rules and codes of behavior. The favelas were (and are still) sites of intense cultural production, being the birthplace of much of which is now typical of Brazil, such as samba. Regional unevenness is paralleled by extreme social differentiation. Brazil has one of the worst distributions of wealth in the world. According to government estimates, in 2000 the richest 10 percent of the population held 47.6 percent of the country’s wealth, whereas the poorest 60 percent owned only 18 percent of it. Although parameters to determine poverty vary a great deal, geographers agree that the number of poor Brazilians is around 42 million. The www.abc-clio.com

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situation is even worse in the distribution of land, where the top 1 percent of owners have 46 percent of the fertile soil in their hands. And yet, conviviality in Brazil is much more unproblematic than these numbers might suggest. In fact, one of the greatest achievements of Brazilian culture was to unify such economically, ethnically, and regionally unequal populations. Diverse cultural expressions such as soccer, popular music, and dietary habits (rice and beans are eaten every day throughout the country) represent important elements of junction, together with the predominant Catholic religion. The media, particularly the powerful Globo Network and its soap operas, have also been central to the homogenization of the Brazilian imagination, even though patterns of Brazilian cordiality have long since been a typical trait of the land before the arrival of modern media. Brazilian history is complex in that it shares several features with the rest of Latin America while differing in other important aspects. In common with other Latin American countries, Brazil has its colonial past, characterized as it was more by exploitation than by exploration. In contrast to New England, for example, where pioneers intended to colonize and develop the land, most Portuguese settlers saw Brazil (named after a tree, the Brazil wood, from which comes a red dye) as a place one could profit from. The scars of exploitative colonization are still felt today, and for many historians, Brazil’s numerous problems may be derived from its colonial social structure. The colonial period was characterized by two fundamental demographic transformations: the extermination of Native Brazilians and the forced migration of black slaves. The former were reduced from a population of around 5 million before the arrival

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of the Portuguese in 1500 to less than 350,000 at the end of the twentieth century, and while the number of slaves brought to Brazil is still a matter of dispute, estimates varying from 3 to 13.5 million, it is agreed that until 1888, the year of abolition, the average survival time of slaves on plantations did not exceed five years. Political independence from Portugal came in September 7, 1822, in what would prove to be a typically Brazilian way of conducting politics. Instead of fighting for liberation as other Latin American countries did, Brazil was “declared” independent by Dom Pedro I, son of Dom João VI, king of Portugal. This happened as the result of a political process in which the Brazilian elites managed to convince the prince that it was safer to keep the government in the hands of a Portuguese-Brazilian royal family in an independent land than to risk losing control of the country in a revolution led by local leaders. The Brazilian Empire did not last long, however, being abolished through a military coup that established the republic on November 15, 1889. Again, change came from above, through an alliance of the military with a national agricultural bourgeoisie dissatisfied with imperial centralization and taxation, with popular involvement in the emperor’s overthrow being minimal. Again, resistance to political change was less traumatic than it could have been, for even though monarchists in the South fiercely opposed the republic, civil war and territorial fragmentation were avoided. Democracy has always been fragile in Brazil. Strictly speaking, it did not exist in the so-called República Velha (Old Republic, 1889–1930), where participation was restricted (women, for instance were not allowed to vote) and elections manipulated. www.abc-clio.com

The Revolution of 1930, led by Getúlio Vargas, put an end to this and inaugurated the populist period in Brazilian history, which would last until 1964. These were years of great change, when an agrarian, coffee-exporting Brazil started giving way to an industrial and urban country, most clearly exemplified by the construction of the new capital, Brasilia—a whole city built up in a couple of years from scratch, a perfect instance of speedy modernization. During the Vargas years (1930–1945; 1950–1954), positive institutional developments in labor legislation—such as the minimum wage, paid vacations, and pensions—and in education took place side by side with strict social control, periodic curtailment of press freedom, and occasional political persecution. Populist attempts to reconcile the interests of the working classes with those of property owners proved untenable, for when President João Goulart started to bend toward the former, a military coup ensued in 1964, leading to a dictatorship that would last until 1989. Strongly affected by the cold war, this period—like the Vargas years—witnessed the combination of political repression and economic development, but now on a greater scale. Communists were persecuted and hundreds died and were tortured (although on a smaller scale than elsewhere at this time, as in Chile and Argentina). On the other hand, in the 1970s Brazil exhibited the world’s greatest rates of economic growth. Democracy was fully restored only in 1989, inaugurated by the first direct election for president since 1962. Since then Brazil has been passing through the freest period in its political history and may indeed be viewed as one of the most democratic countries in the world, although political

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democracy still awaits the coming of economic and social democracy. Fabio Akcelrud Durao See also: Brazilian Culture; Colonialism References Fausto, Boris. A Concise History of Brazil. Translated by Arthur Brakel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hollanda, Sérgio Buarque. Raízes do Brasil. 26th ed. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 2003. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. http://www.ibge.gov.br. Kinzo, Maria D’Alva G., and James Dunkerley, eds. Brazil since 1985: Politics, Economy, and Society. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. Page, Joseph A. The Brazilians. Reading, PA: Addison Wesley, 1995. Roett, Riordan. Brazil: Politics in a Patrimonial Society. 5th ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

BRAZILIAN CARNIVAL Brazilian Carnival is officially celebrated on the Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, although it normally begins on Friday. The etymology of Carnival is dual. It may derive from the Latin carrus navalis, which designated the carriage in the form of a ship that held the image of the god who presided over a celebration in the ancient world. Or, it might be the corruption of the Italian carnevale, from the Latin carne vale (farewell to meat), which refers to the custom of eating all the meat available before Lent. Although Carnival is a celebration that defines the country’s cultural identity, its origin is European. The entrudo (entrance), the first form of carnival celebration, was brought by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century and was very popular until the early twentieth century. It was very aggressive, consisting mainly in throwing at www.abc-clio.com

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random water, flour, and “scented fruit” (oranges and lemons made of wax and stuffed with homemade perfume) at other people. There were two kinds of entrudos, the familiar, or homely one, and the popular, or street entrudo. Against the barbarous entrudo, the Brazilian upper class had, by the 1850s, envisaged a new way of celebrating Carnival: the masked and costumed ball, an idea imported from Paris. The Great Societies, groups of revelers that would parade every year through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, were another novelty imported from Europe with great success. The masked balls and the parades of the Great Societies constituted the Grand Carnival; however, the popular Small Carnival was also developing, with its parades: the cordões (laces), ranchos (ranches) and blocos (blocks). Ranchos and cordões derived from the slaves’ religious processions; the tunes were played with African instruments of percussion. The ranchos had their own music style: the marcha-rancho (the ranch march), played by wind instruments and percurssion. The blocos had a smaller number of participants and were not as organized. With the appearance of the samba schools in the 1920s, the cordões and ranchos gradually disappeared. But the blocos are still very much alive. Instead of sambas, the blocos revelers sing carnival marches. The first mention of the samba dates from 1893. The samba mixes traditional African rhythms, the batuques, with popular urban rhythms like the maxixe. In the 1920s, small carnival groups formed by young samba composers—such as Cartola, Carlos Cachaça, and Ismael Silva e Heitor dos Prazeres, adapting elements of ranchos, cordões, and blocos—would soon become

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Performers from the Beija-flor samba school dance in Rio de Janeiro’s premier Carnival parade February 8, 2005. (Corbis)

the first samba schools. The first official competition took place in 1932. Nowadays the samba schools parade is a huge spectacle in which thousands of revelers participate, wearing rich and colorful costumes arranged among the thirty or more sections of the samba schools. They all sing an original samba specially composed for the occasion based on a theme, the enredo, envisaged by the carnavalesco, the creative designer. The enredos are generally about Brazil’s history, the more critical ones satirizing current moral or political issues. The rhythmic section is the bateria (battery). Rio de Janeiro Carnival has become a model for the rest of the country. In the late 1950s, however, a new form of carnival appeared in Salvador, Bahia, with trios elétricos. Trios elétricos are trucks that support huge loudspeakers and platforms on www.abc-clio.com

which the singers and musicians perform. The trios elétricos play Axé and other music styles with a strong influence of African and Caribbean rhythms. Typical also of Bahia carnival are the blocos afro blocks, such as the Filhos de Gandhi that also parade during Carnival. Recife and Olinda, two cities in the northeast state of Pernambuco, also have important Carnival celebrations, where the blocos of frevo, a typical musical style, predominate. Roberto Ferreira da Rocha

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See also: Brazil; Brazilian Culture; Carnival, Latin American; Portuguese Empire

References Ferreira, Fernando. O livro de ouro do carnaval brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Ediouro, 2004. Queiroz, Maria Isaura Pereira de. Carnaval brasileiro: O vivido e o mito. São Paulo, Brazil: Brasiliense, 1992.

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BRAZILIAN CULTURE Brazilian culture reflects a wide range of culturally and racially hybrid identities. Some scholars have argued the primary influences have been the Portuguese, Africans, and Indians, organically interacting so as to form what is now called Brazilian culture. Recent students of the sociology of culture, however have rejected this view suggesting a greater degree of complexity. Such a view, it is argued, disregards successive flows of immigrants who arrived later in Brazil, including the Japanese, Germans, Italians, and Arabs. Second, and more fundamental, is the observation that the Portuguese, Africans, and Native Brazilians played (and still do) essentially different roles in the formation of the country and its culture. It is true that Indians left their mark, mainly in the names of places and dietary habits, and that miscegenation in Brazil, its mixing of races, has been intense. Native Brazilians, however, very early on saw their numbers drastically reduced through disease and killing, so that their present role in society is negligible. African slaves constituted the basic workforce in colonial and imperial Brazil, and black and Mestizos still do. Finally, people of European descent formed the ruling classes and continue to do so. “White” culture has always been turned to the outside, to Europe and later the United States (not always without envy), while “black” culture was shaped through an internal process of self-definition, as the millions of slaves who were forced into Brazil had to adapt themselves to an oppressive environment. There is not a single sphere of Brazilian culture that was not affected by African influence, while at the same time there is no African element of culture brought to Brazil that www.abc-clio.com

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has been left untransformed. Brazil’s cultural singularity as a Portuguese-speaking country with a black-based, mixed population is the key factor in explaining why cultural exchange and mutual influence with other South American countries has been much less intense than one might at first expect. In order to fully grasp such a complex and rich realm as Brazilian culture, it is methodologically useful to approach it alongside a fundamental axis embedded within an ambiguity in the concept of “culture” itself, which may be considered either as (1) the whole set of practices and experiences of a given group or (2) as the body of privileged symbolic artifacts deemed the worthiest of a country. Brazilian culture would then be constituted in the tension between the specificity of the “spontaneous” mode of being of Brazilians and the heritage of formal or erudite culture. Indeed, it is a thesis generally accepted that the most important Brazilian cultural manifestations emerged as a result, in one way or another, of a mixture of the two, with each influencing the other. Brazilian popular culture has always referred to “high” culture, either consciously or unconsciously, for legitimization and inspiration. Consider the two most important Brazilian cultural manifestations, music (especially, but not only, samba) and soccer. Samba associations are called samba schools (escolas de samba), and the most important dancers, the flag-bearer (porta-bandeira) and her protector (mestre-sala), were modeled after aristocratic figures and dressed accordingly. Soccer, interestingly, was imported from England—as the Portuguese vocabulary attests (futebol, gol, penalty, and so on)—and was at the beginning an elite pastime.

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However, mixtures of popular and dominant culture very often did not take place freely, but rather as strategies of survival and means of resistance, as in the case of much of Afro-Brazilian culture. Instances of this may be found everywhere. Capoeira, half dance, half fight, was devised by slaves as a way of fooling their masters, who would never allow their property to be damaged. Umbanda and Candomblé, religions based on spirits, the orixás, that possess believers, may be regarded as a fusion of African deities with other figures, including Catholic saints; they emerged as a compromise allowing slaves to give vent to their religiosity while apparently following the official creed. Even such an apparently neutral practice as eating still bears the marks of oppression: feijoada, Brazil’s national dish, a rich meat stew in black beans, was originally slave food, the putting together of leftovers (ears, tails, and feet of cows and pigs) in a nutritious, energygiving base of beans. But mixtures also occurred when erudite culture allowed itself to be swayed by the energies of the (most of the time uncultivated) people. In fact, it is possible to support the claim that every single major Brazilian artist incorporated popular elements in her or his work. This is valid for Brazilian music as a whole: Bossa Nova worked out the mixture of jazz and samba; Chico Buarque combined sophisticated lyrics with rhythms from the jerry-built shack neighborhoods, the favelas; Caetano Veloso and the Tropicália movement merged avant-gardist self-consciousness and rebellion to a festive Brazilian ethos. It is true even for strictly so-called high culture, which also borrowed from popular customs and practices. A short list of examples would include architect Oscar www.abc-clio.com

Niemeyer, who besides being the planner of Brasilia is also well known for the Sambódromo in Rio; such great names of Brazilian literature as Joaquim Machado de Assis, Guimarães Rosa, Clarisse Lispector, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and João Cabral de Mello Neto; painters Cândido Portinari and Tarsila do Amaral; the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos and Camargo Guarnieri; the dramaturgy of Augusto Boal; and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy—to name just some of the most prominent persons in the arts. And yet it remains an open question whether culture’s potential for mutual influence and modification is unlimited. In a country marked by great social inequalities, the unifying role of culture is constantly being challenged. If traditionally one of the most remarkable traits of Brazilian culture has been its capacity of mixing everything, thus avoiding ghettoization, there are clear signs now that this function of culture is under great strain. Symptoms of this include the walling-up of apartment complexes; the fencing-off of public squares; and the creation of fortresses for the rich, paralleled by the sealing-off of the favelas, now dominated by drug dealers, from intercourse with the world outside. Even Brazil’s tolerant and accommodating Catholicism has been lately challenged by uncompromising and unyieldingly belligerent new evangelical Protestant churches. Whether Brazilian culture will prove strong enough to incorporate these fragmenting tendencies into its melting pot remains to be seen. Fabio Akcelrud Durao

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See also: Brazil; Colonialism References Azevedo, Fernando de. Brazilian Culture: An Introduction to the Study of Culture in

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BRINDIS DE SALAS,VIRGINIA Brazil. Translated by William Rex Crawford. New York: Macmillan, 1950. Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. Translated by S. Putnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. New York: Verso, 1992. Wasserman, Renata R. Mautner. Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

BRINDIS DE SALAS,VIRGINIA (CA.1920–CA.1958) Virginia Brindis de Salas was a black female poet who explored African and Latin American identity in Uruguay. Brindis de Salas, who published during the 1940s, is the pioneer of black women writers in Spanish America. She is highly regarded as the preeminent female black poet of Uruguay and is to this day considered one of the most radical and controversial of all Afro-Uruguayan writers. After Pilar Barrios, who is referred to as the poet laureate of Afro-Uruguayan literature, she is the second black Uruguayan writer whose work appeared in book form. She published two volumes of poetry, Pregón de Marimorena (The call of Mary Morena) in 1946 and Cien cárceles de amor (One hundred prisons of love) in 1949. Pregón de Marimorena, a collection of ballads, tangos, songs, and pregones, is the more innovative of the two volumes. Brindis de Salas takes the pregón, a vendor’s street cry, and molds it into poetic form in order to draw attention to the life of a poor black woman, Marimorena (Brown Mary). From sunup to sundown, Marimorena walks the streets of Montevideo with her heavy load, selling the daily newspaper. www.abc-clio.com

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Reminiscent of the toil and sweat of slaves, the melodic and melancholic cry of Marimorena evokes her pain as she struggles to earn enough for a day’s meal for her family. As the central protagonist of the collection, Marimorena reflects the triple burden of being black, female, and poor in Uruguay in the 1940s. At the same time, the poet sharply criticizes Uruguay’s social marginalization of its black population and focuses on the actions of the powerful against the powerless. In turn, the story of Marimorena brings to light the social, economic, and racial stratifications of the country. Still seeing the contradictions between black reality and white reality, Brindis de Salas wrote Cien cárceles de amor. A continuation of the themes in Pregón de Marimorena, the collection reflects the ambivalent attitude of Uruguay toward its Afro-Uruguayan citizens. The poet challenges the Uruguayan community to reexamine itself as it embraces the music and dance of Afro-Uruguay while at the same time maintaining the second-class status of Afro-Uruguayan citizens. Therefore, many of the poems address the social and economic imprisonment imposed on AfroUruguay by the dominant culture. The poems in this volume continue to testify to the daily obstacles, the racism, the social inequities, and the oppression experienced by the black Uruguayan community and illustrate what it means to be black in Uruguay. Overall, Brindis de Salas transformed the silent voices of her community into speech. Both volumes represent an early attempt to erase the invisibility of black Uruguayan citizens and the struggle to make their voices heard. To that end, the themes of racism, discrimination, and poverty dominate both volumes and reveal

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insight into the Uruguay of the past and the sociopolitical issues facing black Uruguayans today. In Cien cárceles de amor, the editor notes that a third volume of poetry, Cantos de lejanía (Songs from faraway), is forthcoming; however, that collection was never published. Leading black periodicals such as Nuestra Raza (1917–1948), which were the storehouses of the legacy of AfroUruguayan intellectualism, folded. In the study of those periodicals and other historical documents, little is revealed about the life and later literary productivity of Brindis de Salas; perhaps in the years to come, the mystery of her life will unfold. Caroll Mills Young See also: Cabral, Cristina Rodriguez; Uruguay References Brindis de Salas, Virginia. Pregón de Marimorena. Montevideo, Uruguay: Sociedad Cultural Editora Indoamericana, 1946. Brindis de Salas, Virginia. Cien cárceles de amor. Montevideo, Uruguay: NP, 1949. Young, Caroll M. “The Historical Development of Afro-Uruguay’s Intellectual Movement: A Coalition in Black and White.” PALARA, no. 6 (Fall 2002): 84–93. Young, Caroll M. “The Unmasking of Virginia Brindis de Salas: Minority Discourse of Afro-Uruguay.” In Daughters of the Diaspora, edited by Miriam DeCosta Willis. Kingston, Jamaica; Miami, FL: Randle Press, 2003. Young, Caroll M. “From Voicelessness to Voice: Womanist Writing of the AfroUruguayan Press.” Afro-Hispanic Review 23, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 33–39.

BRITAIN: PEOPLE OF AFRICAN ORIGIN AND DESCENT Britain’s multiracial society of the early twenty-first century has been several centuries in the making. There is evidence of www.abc-clio.com

Africans in Britain as part of the Roman armies of occupation and as rare visitors in medieval times. More Africans came to the British Isles during the age of reconnaissance, when English ships began trading down the African coast. By the end of the sixteenth century, the number of Africans in London excited sufficient hostility that a royal injunction stated that they be expelled from the realm. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the expansion of direct trade with Africa and the development of transatlantic commerce, particularly the African slave trade, resulted in an increase in the number of Africans coming to the British Isles. Some Africans came as seamen, travelers, or occasionally as persons attached to embassies, but the majority of black people entered the country from the American colonies. They were brought into Britain as slaves or servants, their status often being blurred. By the mid-eighteenth century there may have been 10,000 black people living in Britain, probably more men than women. Most were in London and the major trading ports of Bristol and Liverpool, but several thousands were scattered throughout the country. They were engaged in a variety of jobs, often as servants, with some aristocratic families employing blacks in livery, while small black boys were “pets” to certain elite women. But blacks were also laborers, artisans, prostitutes, soldiers, and seamen. The evidence for this comes primarily from registers of baptism, marriage, and death; poor law accounts; jail records; and newspapers. Most black people were illiterate. However, by the end of the century there were a few educated and professional black men and women. These included former slaves who wrote accounts of their experiences, such as Ukawsaw

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Gronniosaw; Olaudah Equiano, who claimed in his autobiography, published in 1798, to have been born in West Africa; Ignatius Sancho, who was a friend of the novelist Lawrence Sterne and the actor David Garrick; Joseph Emedy, an accomplished violinist and composer; and John Naimbanna, son of a West African ruler, who was sent to Britain to be educated. Most black people in eighteenthcentury Britain came to the country in some way due to the African slave trade. Thus, their position was often a servile one and their color and race a badge of discrimination. However, despite a certain amount of scholarly literature exploring racial attitudes in that century, the picture of popular attitudes to race is still unclear. Black people were not sufficiently numerous to constitute a threat to the host communities; many records, for example of prisoners, often do not mention color or race; working-class black and white people lived close to each other, and intermarriage seems to have been common. There is also evidence that some slaves brought to Britain fled but then negotiated with their masters to return in exchange for a wage, adequate clothing, and gentle treatment. It would seem that in certain instances, African slaves and servants were demanding and gaining rights similar to those sought by white apprentices and servants. The position of black slaves in Britain was ambiguous. James Somerset, a slave brought to England from Boston, Massachusetts, fled his master but was recaptured. Granville Sharpe and fellow antislavery activists secured a writ of habeas corpus and brought Somerset to court from the ship where he had been imprisoned. Chief Justice Mansfield’s important judgment in June 1772 stated that no master www.abc-clio.com

could forcibly remove a slave from Britain. Contrary to many sources, the judgment did not end black slavery in Britain. A few years later, the black population of Britain increased with the arrival of several hundred black loyalists, many being former slaves who had served with the British forces during the American Revolution. Many were poor and swelled the number of those seeking relief, particularly in London parishes. A resolution to this domestic problem, and a cause supported by Equiano, was the settlement of poor blacks in the new colony of Freetown in West Africa in 1787. More research needs to be done to quantify and analyze the composition of the black population of Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. Did it decline in size due to intermarriage of black men and white women? How many people from Africa and the Americas entered Britain at this time? Baptismal registers indicate that there was a small indigenous black population, including men such as Thomas Birch Freeman, son of a black father and a white mother, born in Hampshire and subsequently the premier Wesleyan missionary in West Africa, and William Cuffay, born in Chatham and in 1849 transported to Tasmania for his Chartist activities. Intermarriage may have reduced the more visible black presence in Britain, but as the country’s maritime trade increased and London in particular became a commercial crossroads of an expanding empire, so the number of black people coming to Britain probably grew. Many were undoubtedly itinerant, as was part of the black population of the seafaring parishes of east London, Liverpool, and Bristol. However, there were also black settlers, along with children and students

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coming from Africa and the Caribbean colonies for education. The size of Britain’s black population in the mid-nineteenth century is unknown, but it may have been in the vicinity of 10,000 people. Part of that population seems to have been fairly mobile. In the major ports, most notably London, Liverpool, and Bristol, black seamen formed part of a growing cosmopolitan population. New black communities also developed in Bute Town, Cardiff, in the late nineteenth century, and in South Shields, on the northeast coast, by the early years of the twentieth century. The black population was composed not only of laborers and artisans, but from the 1830s onward of black preachers and speakers, both men and women, who toured British towns, often to denounce American slavery and racism. For example, the African American Methodist, Zilpha Elaw, preached widely in Britain in the 1840s, as in later decades did better-known figures, such as William and Ellen Craft, Frederick Douglass, and Ida B. Wells. In addition, a steady stream of black entertainers came to Britain, where they appeared on public platforms throughout the country. Ira Aldridge, the African American actor, is perhaps the bestknown, but there were also Zulu dancing troupes, Zulu choirs, and the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Some of these overlap with black people who were skilled tradespeople and professionals, a frequently ignored section of Britain’s black population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A steady stream of men, and some women, from the African and Caribbean colonies entered Britain to study in schools, universities, and hospitals. Some remained, or maintained a base in Britain, to practice as doctors, lawyers, dentists, journalists, and www.abc-clio.com

clergymen. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the distinguished black composer, was the son of a West African doctor who worked in Britain. Although the black population of Britain in 1911 has been estimated at 10,000, the actual figure is not known, as the census did not ask questions about race or color. As in earlier generations, the concentration of black communities was in the major port cities, although black people were to be found in almost every town and county. Racial discrimination had increased in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was fueled by “scientific” theories of race developed at mid-century; by popular responses to the Indian Rebellion (1857–1858) and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865); by a growing public arrogance associated with the conquest and possession of overseas empire, fanned by popular mass literature; and by the belief, associated with eugenics, that miscegenation led to racial degeneration. Black people visiting and living in Britain encountered overt and covert forms of racial discrimination when they sought accommodations, employment, insurance, and interracial marriage. Black Britons were not permitted to become officers in the armed forces, and black nurses who had been offered places in hospitals were rejected when their color became known to matrons. In 1919 serious racial violence aimed at black people occurred in several cities, mainly Liverpool. Racial discrimination increased during World War I as black people tried to enlist while others came to Britain for war work. Trade unions were much more likely than professional associations to reject applicants on grounds of color. The PanAfrican Conference, held in London in

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1900, was one attempt to promote the interests and welfare of black people and to criticize imperialism. Other small political groups followed, organized by black professionals and students: the African Progress Union, the West African Students’ Union, the League of Coloured Peoples, the International Africa Service Bureau, and the Pan-African Federation. There were also black-owned newspapers and magazines: the African Times and Orient Review, African Telegraph, WASU, The Keys, and The Black Man. From the 1920s through the 1940s, these small and often financially weak political groups with their often irregular publications campaigned against the “color bar,” opposed racism and colonialism, and demanded legislation to guarantee equal civil rights for black people. The work of lobbying against racism increased during World War II as black workers and soldiers from the empire and black GIs from the United States entered Britain. Racial tensions increased, often heightened by the imported Jim Crow rules of the U.S. military and the prejudices of its white personnel. When the Fifth PanAfrican Congress met in Manchester in August 1945, the British race relations were still uneasy and there was no strong, active political group to represent the interests of black people. This was particularly unfortunate as black immigration, mainly from the Caribbean, increased in response to Britain’s postwar labor shortage. This new and significant movement of immigration was marked by the arrival of the Empire Windrush, carrying nearly 500 Jamaican immigrants, in June 1948. In the next decade over 150,000 black immigrants, most from the Caribbean, entered Britain in search of work. They were joined by many thousands of people from the Indian www.abc-clio.com

subcontinent. Britain was becoming a multiracial society, although new immigrants tended to be concentrated in the older, inner areas of the large cities. Entry to Britain was unrestricted for Commonwealth citizens. Black immigrants brought skill and enterprise, new cultures with popular music and dance, different foods, and charismatic Christian worship in new black churches. Continuing immigration inevitably led to some communal tension, which increased when economic recession brought fiercer competition for scarce housing and jobs. A number of politicians exploited racial tensions and helped give voice to growing demands that black immigration into Britain be controlled. In August and September 1958, serious race riots broke out in the Nottingham and Notting Hill areas of London. This discouraged the government from pushing ahead with legislation to curb immigration, as ministers did not wish to be seen as being swayed by mob violence. However, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, passed in 1962, attempted to regulate the flow of non-European immigrants. Further legislation followed in 1968 and 1971, tightening the rules of entry. This legislation encouraged black immigrants to stay in Britain and also to bring their dependents into the country before the measures took effect. Thus, ironically, the Act of 1962 helped increase Britain’s black population and ensure that the country would be a multiracial society. Legislation of the 1960s and 1970s curtailed voluntary immigration of workers from the Caribbean and South Asia. It did not, however, end black immigration to Britain. In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, a steady flow of black immigrants, mainly from Africa, continued.

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Refugees from famine, war, and economic hardship were admitted into the country, many coming from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and the Congo, countries that had not been part of the former empire. The immigrants included many professionally trained people who have greatly benefited the British economy. One result is that there is a growing black middle class in Britain. Black men and women have become school principals, chief constables, doctors, business executives, members of Parliament, cabinet ministers, trade union leaders, bishops, lawyers, and awardwinning novelists. However, this should not mask the fact that problems remain: racism lurks in important institutions, particularly among the police; communal tensions are provoked by racist political groups; and many young black men are alienated from a society that appears to have failed them. David Killingray See also: Diaspora; Morant Bay Rebellion; Notting Hill Carnival in London

References Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1984. Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. Black England: Life before Emancipation. London: John Murray, 1995. Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. Black Victorians/ Black Victoriana. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Green, Jeffrey. Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain, 1901–1914. London: Frank Cass, 1998. Gundara, Jagdish S, and Ian Duffield, ed. Essays on the History of Blacks in Britain. Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1992. Ramdin, Ron. Reimaging Britain: 500 Years of Black and Asian History. London: Pluto Press, 1999. Shyllon, Folarin. Black Slaves in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.

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Shyllon, Folarin. Black People in Britain, 1555–1833. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Walvin, James. Black and White: The Negro in English Society, 1555–1945. London: Allen Lane, 1971.

BRITISH EMPIRE The British Empire fundamentally shaped political structures, national boundaries, and civil conflicts across the continents of Africa and the Americas. Once a minor Roman colony, Britain formed an empire that, at its most expansive, encompassed more than one-fifth of the globe; the diverse population of its imperial subjects exceeded 400 million.

The Expansion of Britain’s Overseas Empire Under Tudor rule (1485–1603), Britain began to explore and settle outside of Europe and the British Isles as a result of its improved seafaring capabilities. The merchant marine system not only strengthened English shipbuilding and seafaring but also established important mercantile institutions, such as the Massachusetts Bay Company and the British East India Company. The well-financed Royal Navy became centrally organized and rose as Europe’s foremost naval force after defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588. With superior seafaring capabilities, British interest in exploration grew. In 1578, while circumnavigating the globe, Sir Francis Drake landed in northern California and claimed it for the English crown, naming it Nova Albion. Drake’s claim was not, however, followed by settlement. In 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert formally declared Newfoundland an English

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colony and, five years later, Sir Walter Raleigh organized the first colony in Virginia at Roanoke Island. These early attempts at settlement, however, lacked full metropolitan support. Both the settlements in Newfoundland and Roanoke were shortly abandoned as a result of food shortages, difficult marine navigation, and conflict with indigenous American peoples. Despite initial setbacks, the Virginia Company, chartered in 1606, became the first successful enterprise. Its settlement at Jamestown in the colony of Virginia became the first permanent overseas settlement and it received sustained metropolitan support due to the commercial success of tobacco. By the mid-eighteenth century, the population of the mainland American colonies exceeded 1.25 million, not including nearly 350,000 African slaves or former slaves. The economic relationship between Britain and its American colonies was governed by a series of Trade and Navigation Acts. These acts, which helped to support chartered monopoly companies by restricting trade to British ships, required that all goods imported by the colonies be channeled through England. All exported goods to foreign markets were also tightly regulated, and colonies typically specialized in a single export, such as tobacco in Virginia and sugar in the West Indies. With a shortage of labor in the colonies, African slaves became increasingly important to the export of raw goods, especially labor-intensive crops like sugar. Additional acts, such as the Wool, Iron, and Hat Acts, protected imperial markets for domestic industries by restricting the colonial manufacture of certain domestic goods. This economic system came to be known as mercantilism. Colonies were both suppliers of raw goods www.abc-clio.com

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and exclusive markets for British manufactured products. The Americas soon became a crucial site of Anglo-French conflict, which escalated into the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Although Britain emerged victorious, its relationship with the mainland American colonies was inevitably altered. During the conflict, colonists shirked metropolitan regulations—often, for example, smuggling molasses from the French West Indies. While Britain attempted to reassert its imperial power, colonists continued to maintain and extend their new sense of selfgovernance. In fact, with the rival French removed from North America, mainland British colonists were less dependent on their home government for protection. Moreover, during the war Britain’s national debt had doubled. Rather than bolstering the economy, its new monopoly in the Americas forced Britain to maintain a significant military presence in Quebec, where 100,000 French colonists and more than 250,000 Native Americans were now under British imperial rule. In 1763 Native American resistance erupted in a massive rebellion, known as Pontiac’s conspiracy, which spread through the upper Ohio Valley. As a result of heavy debt and increased military presence, new duties were placed on a wide range of products imported by the colonies, such as foreign molasses, newspapers, and tea. After defeating France, Britain acquired the majority of North American colonial territory. Its new mainland acquisitions extended north to Quebec, west to the Mississippi, and south to Florida. In the Caribbean, British territory included Jamaica, the Bahama Islands, the Leeward Islands, and the newly acquired Windward Islands. This height of expansiveness

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marked the peak of the early British Empire, which would be fundamentally altered as a result of the rebellion of most of the mainland American colonies in 1776. The loss of thirteen mainland American colonies, however, did not prove disastrous for the British Empire. In fact, no longer responsible for defending the colonies, Britain soon found trade profitable in the absence of direct political control. The empire’s reliance on mercantilism gave way to laissez-faire capitalism. With advanced industry at home and the foremost naval fleet, Britain strategically expanded its economic and political influence through an informal empire based on liberal free trade. As a result of resistance to further colonization in the Americas by former colonies such as Argentina and the United States, Britain’s new policy of informal empire became particularly effective. By helping to enforce this resistance with its Royal Navy, Britain effectively prevented other European powers from establishing formal rule or economic advantage. During this period, Britain also outlawed the slave trade (1807) and pressured other nations to do the same. Nevertheless, slavery was not officially abolished in British colonies until 1834, with a subsequent six-year term of apprenticeship. Despite its new reliance on trade, Britain continued to acquire territories. New colonies were founded in the Pacific. Following the abolition of slavery, Britain formally established the colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa as a settlement for freed slaves. Moreover, the defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815 left Britain the strongest colonial power, with newly acquired French colonies, including Trinidad, Malta, Gibraltar, and the Cape of Good Hope. www.abc-clio.com

British New Imperialism and the Colonization of Africa Although the British Empire came to rely on economic influence, it pursued an even more aggressive competition for overseas territories between the 1870s and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Historians refer to this period as British New Imperialism. The emergence of European doctrines of racial superiority, which often denied the capability of nonwhite peoples for self-governance, also contributed to this renewed interest in direct imperial control. Largely unoccupied by European powers until the late nineteenth century, Africa became the primary target of this “new” imperialism. As of 1875, significant European holdings in Africa were limited to French Algeria and Britain’s Cape Colony. By 1914, however, only the kingdom of Ethiopia and Liberia, a settlement of former American slaves, remained outside formal European control. Fearing a threat to its economic dominance, Britain contended for its share of African territories. In 1875 the British government bought Egyptian khedive Isma’ı¯l’s shares in the Suez Canal to secure control of the waterway, an important trade route between Britain and India. Egypt was heavily indebted to European powers as a result of building the Suez Canal, which had been financed by a combination of French and Egyptian interests, and dual financial pressure by France and Britain shifted to outright British occupation in 1882. When France, Belgium, and Portugal held disputing claims on the lower Congo River, European powers met to formalize the orderly partition of Africa in 1884–1885 at the Berlin West Africa Conference. Britain’s military occupation of Egypt also led to an interest in controlling the Nile

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Valley. As a result, in 1896–1898 British and Egyptian troops conquered neighboring Sudan, a former colony of Egypt. Britain’s decision to divide the Sudan into two separately controlled colonies exemplified the British strategy of “divide and rule.” By manipulating and intensifying already-existing conflict between ethnic, religious, and racial communities, British strategy attempted to prevent subjugated populations from uniting against them. In the 1840s a British colony, Natal, was established on the southern borders of the Zulu kingdom. By the 1870s Britain had become interested in uniting the various British colonies, Boer republics, and independent African groups for the sake of sustained economic development. The economically stable Zulu kingdom, however, posed a threat to this policy. As a result, the British high commissioner in South Africa, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, provoked a war against the Zulu king, Cetshwayo, believing the Zulu army to be desperately outmatched by British imperial forces. On the contrary, when the war began in 1879, the British experienced their greatest defeat in colonial history. The success against the British, however, exhausted the Zulu army, and British reinforcements soon flooded into southern Africa. After a series of campaigns, British troops eventually advanced to the Zulu capital, Ulundi, burning it to the ground. Rather than annex the kingdom of Zululand, the British divided it into thirteen smaller realms—a divisive strategy that resulted in a decade of civil war among the Zulu. Though Britain consolidated its South African colonies following the Anglo-Zulu war, its imperial control also faced a persistent threat from the Boers, a British term for the Dutch farmers in southern Africa www.abc-clio.com

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who fiercely resisted subordination to Britain. The Boers rebelled against British rule in 1880 and declared the Transvaal independent. In the ensuing conflict, known as the First Boer War, or Transvaal War, a series of defeats forced the British to sign a truce recognizing the self-governance of a Boer republic of the Transvaal. Later, mounting conflict over the Boers’ overtly racist treatment of black Africans and British interest in the Transvaal, a chief supplier of gold, led to the South African War of 1899–1902, also known as the Second Boer War. After defeating the Boers, Britain united its Cape Colony and Natal Colony with the former Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal. In 1910 these former colonies and republics became the Union of South Africa, a self-governing dominion. Despite its policy of free trade, Britain emerged in 1914 as holding the most extensive overseas empire. It included not only the subcontinent of India, but also a substantial share of African territory that far exceeded the holdings of other European powers.

From Empire to Commonwealth Following World War I the British Empire acquired former German and Ottoman territories in what would become its final major expansion. As the British Empire incorporated new territories, the heavy costs of war, economic decline, and growing nationalist movements undermined Britain’s capacity to maintain its sprawling empire. Although it brutally repressed nationalist resistance in Ireland, India, and the Middle East, Britain also expanded the autonomy of white-settler Dominions such as Canada and South Africa. In fact, although

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Dominions had no voice in declaring war, each enjoyed international recognition when, as separate signatories of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), they entered the League of Nations. Conferences of British and colonial prime ministers had occurred periodically since 1887. In an important set of Imperial Conferences in the late 1920s, multiple Canadian challenges to imperial authority led the way to full Dominion independence. The Balfour Declaration in 1926 and the Statute of Westminster in 1931 formally established the full independence of Dominions. Each became autonomous, free from British interference, independent in international relations, and officially equal in status to Britain. Its imperial power permanently weakened, the British Empire was transformed into a Commonwealth, a voluntary association between Britain and its former colonies. In the 1930s widespread Caribbean unrest, including the 1938 labor rebellion in Jamaica, led the British government to appoint the West India Royal Commission to recommend constitutional reform. After World War II, Britain attempted to repeat the dominion model in decolonizing the Caribbean. However, following the failed attempt to establish a West Indian Federation (1958–1962), former colonies separated into independent nations after Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago refused to accept the proposed distribution of powers. In 1959 Britain conceded full Jamaican independence, and self-governance was gradually extended to other former Caribbean colonies. Though several colonies, such as Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, maintained their formal allegiance to the British monarch, they soon revised their status to become republics. www.abc-clio.com

Britain also attempted to establish a dominion model in decolonizing Africa, but it, too, was unsuccessful. Britain maintained its influence in Egypt through treaty and partial occupation for more than thirty years after Egypt’s formal independence (1922). In 1956, however, Egypt severed all constitutional links to Britain. Ghana, the first former colony declared a dominion in 1957, soon demanded recognition as a republic. Other African nations followed a similar pattern throughout the 1960s: Nigeria, Tanganyika, Uganda, Kenya, and Malawi. In fact, only Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Mauritius retained their dominion status for more than three years. Brandon Jernigan

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See also: Abolitionism, British; Berlin West Africa Conference; Jamaica; Kenya; Malawi; Nigeria; Trinidad and Tobago; Uganda References Hargreaves, John D. Decolonization in Africa. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 1996. Hart, Richard. From Occupation to Independence: A Short History of the Peoples of the English-Speaking Caribbean Region. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1998. Hornsby, Stephen J. British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2005. Johnson, Robert. British Imperialism. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Louis, William Roger, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire. 5 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998–1999. Miers, Suzanne, and Martin Klein, eds. Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999. Morgan, Philip D., and Sean Hawkins, eds. Black Experience and the Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Moyles, R. G., and Doug Owram. Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of Canada, 1880–1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Smith, Simon C. British Imperialism, 1750–1970. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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BROOKS, GWENDOLYN 205 Sued-Badillo, Jalil, Pieter C. Emmer, Bridget Brereton, and B. W. Higman, eds. General History of the Caribbean. 6 vols. London: Macmillan, 1997–1999. Wesseling, H. L. Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa, 1880–1914. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.

BROOKS, GWENDOLYN (1917–2000) Born on June 7, 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks, a black poet, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950—the first African American to win a Pulitzer in any category. She went on to receive countless awards and honors during her lifetime. One of her many posthumous honors was the renaming of the Illinois State Library as the Gwendolyn Brooks State Library on June 6, 2003. A published poet at the age of thirteen, Gwendolyn Brooks would publish numerous works including two autobiographies, a single novel, and volumes of poetry such as A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), The Bean Eaters (1960), In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1971), The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves (1974), Beckonings (1975), Primer for Blacks (1980), To Disembark (1981), Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1988), Children Coming Home (1991), and her final volume of poetry, published posthumously, In Montgomery (2003). Gwendolyn Brooks’s mother, Keziah Wims Brooks, influenced Brooks’s life and works. Gwendolyn Brooks revealed this influence through autobiography, novel, and poetry. She made operative her mother’s refrain, “Brighten your corner where you are,” when she spoke to the universal, through the particular, from her corner on the South Side of Chicago. Brooks proclaimed in her first autobiography, Report www.abc-clio.com

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks holding a copy of her book, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945. Brooks was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize. (Library of Congress)

From Part One (1972) and in other works, that she speaks to all black people as she pointedly articulates in her call. Even prior to this clarion call, the centrality of the black subject and the assumption of a black audience prevailed. Africanisms permeate the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, whether she crafted these works prior to the Fisk University Black Writers’ Conference in 1967 or subsequent to the conference. In the late 1960s there was a redirection of Brooks’s voice to her people. This redirection manifested itself in major decisions that marked lifetime and life-altering changes, such as the move from whiteowned Harper and Row to black-owned Broadside Press. Redirection of her voice

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resounded further when Brooks confessed a disregard for the white audience response and critical reception of her works. Brooks’s inscription of meaningful, pronounced Africanisms in the black experience is not coincidental but conscious. For instance, the poem “To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals” (1980) continues the concern and dialogue about black hair, for it is really about image and competing definitions of beauty. Brooks celebrates the the natural hair that stands the test of time. In Gwendolyn Brooks’s only novel, Maud Martha (1953), the author crafts a coming-of-age story about an intelligent young black woman who develops a keen awareness of life in Chicago as she moves from childhood to adulthood while reflecting on sibling, marital, and familial relationships at each level of her development. Brooks consistently makes of vital importance all facets of black life, depicts black people as subjects, and captures the events of the past, the concerns of the present, and the promise of the future as she harnesses the interconnectedness of life and the unity of all worlds—the living, dead, and unborn. Jacqueline Bryant See also: Haley, Alex; Literature, African American References Bennett, Lerone, Jr. “The Soul of Gwendolyn Brooks.” In Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Haki R. Madhubuti. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987. Bryant, Jacqueline, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha: A Critical Collection. Chicago: Third World Press, 2002. Joyce, Joyce Ann. Warriors, Conjurers, and Priests: Defining African-centered Literary Criticism. Chicago: Third World Press, 1994. Madhubuti, Haki R., ed. Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987.

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Wright, Stephen Caldwell. On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

BROUWER, LEO (1939–) Born Juan Leovigildo Brouwer Mesquida in Havana, Cuba, Leo Brouwer is a Cuban composer, conductor, and pedagogue whose work reflects an African musical heritage. The breadth of his repertoire includes solo performances, chamber music, symphonies, concertos, and film scores; he is also highly regarded as a composer for the classical guitar. Brouwer is one of the first truly international composers in postrevolutionary Cuba. Music was a part of Brouwer’s heritage and a constant in his life. His artist mother taught him melodies from an early age. After his parents’ divorce, Brouwer was raised by his maternal grandmother, through whom he came into contact with his great uncle, Ernesto Lecuona (a famous Cuban composer, arranger, and band leader), who noticed Brouwer’s aptitude for music. At the age of twelve he was introduced to the guitar through his father and immediately showed prodigious talent. Brouwer went on to study with Cuba’s great composer and virtuoso guitarist, Isaac Nicola, and made his professional debut at age sixteen for the Musical Youth Organization of Cuba. His career as virtuoso guitarist ended when a car accident in the early 1970s damaged his hand; from then onward he concentrated on composing. Although Brouwer briefly studied in the United States—he attended the Julliard School of Music and the Hartt College of Music—it was in Cuba where his interest in composition developed, both on his own and with various teachers, from the time he

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was introduced to the guitar. He was mainly a composition autodidact. His oeuvre is generally divided into three periods. The first (1955–1964) was seen as “nationalistic,” the second (1964–1974) as avant-garde, and the third (1974–2002) as hyper-romantic. Brouwer entered a fourth stage of melismatic minimalism after returning to Cuba in 2002–2003 after many years of work in Europe. One continuous thread throughout his entire work is the abiding influence of African Yoruba rhythmic cells. Brouwer’s ability to combine the classical tradition with the popular is a stylistic feature of the Afro-Cuban tradition. This inheritance, originating in the slave trade, fused African rhythms with European musical forms into a unique sound that is distinctly Cuban. Brouwer, however, has transformed it with his study of the avant-garde and its aleatoric compositional techniques. Brouwer was one of the founding members and the eventual director of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos. In the 1960s this collective reinscribed the trovador tradition into the Nueva Trova, which formed part of a Latin American protest song movement reaching out to the United States and Europe. It was a conscious effort to minimize the demarcation line between performer and audience so prevalent in classical music. Brouwer is renowned for his conducting and has led some of the world’s greatest orchestras. He founded Orquesta de Córdoba in Spain in 1992 and remained its artistic director until 2001. He also wrote the scores for films such as La Ultima Cena (1976) and Like Water for Chocolate (1993). His pieces are played internationally in “classical” recitals, exams, and conservatories. www.abc-clio.com

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They contain the transcultural heritage of Cuba, classical music infused with the idioms taken from Cuba’s history, a unique blend of African and European influences. Rhayn Jooste References Brouwer, Leo. La Musica, Lo Cubano y La Innovacion Havana, Cuba: Letras Cubanos, 1989. Brouwer, Leo. Gajes del Oficio. Havana, Cuba: Letras Cubanos, 2004. Hernández, Isabelle. Leo Brouwer. Havana: Editora Musical de Cuba, 2000. Moore, Robin. “Music in Socialist Cuba.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. Vol. 6. London: Macmillan, 2001. Sublette, Ned. Cuba and Its Music, from the First Drums to the Mambo. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004.

BROWN,WILLIAM (1783–1816?) William Brown was a black female sailor of the early nineteenth century. Suzanne Stark’s groundbreaking study, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail (1996), points to the extraordinary fact that several remarkable women passed as male sailors in the British Royal Navy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Perhaps the most striking example cited by Stark is a black woman, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, who went under the assumed name William Brown—her given name is unknown. Little is known about William Brown, save what is written in the records of the Royal Navy. They indicate that she was “a smart, well-formed figure, about five feet four inches in height, possessed of considerable strength and great activity” (Stark, p. 87). The Annual Register confirms that William sailed aboard English warships from 1804 to 1816, rising

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to the distinguished post of captain of the foretop. The best sailors were made “captains” of various parts of the ship; the best captain was the captain of the foretop, the topmost section of the forwardmost mast on the ship. Her duties required great physical strength and courage, as she was required to ascend the mast high above the deck to handle sails, even in the worst weather. Her position also required the strongest of leadership skills, as she was required to inspire and organize a team of men as they handled the sails. Overturning every conceivable racial and gender assumption of her day, William had so earned the respect and admiration of her fellow sailors that, after she was found to be a woman, she was eventually allowed to rejoin her old crew. In June 1816 William joined a new ship, the Bombay, and at that point she disappeared from public record. Matthew D. Brown See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Sailors Reference Stark, Suzanne J. Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996.

BRUSSELS ACT The Brussels General Act of July 2, 1890, made official the terms settled upon during the Brussels Convention, which was attended by representatives of the European colonial powers. The convention’s goals were twofold. First, the imperial powers wished to ban the slave trade. While slavery and slave trafficking had been banned entirely in the New World by 1888, Arab traders continued to maintain a vigorous trade along the Indian Ocean’s coastline.

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Second, the act prohibited the sale of firearms to Africans. This act came only five years after the Berlin Conference, during which the British, French, Germans, Belgians, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and several others established the boundaries of their territorial possessions in Africa. After that the imperialist powers found themselves in armed conflict with Africans who struggled to maintain their autonomy. White settlers in South Africa were among the many groups who had sought to prevent arms from falling into Africans’ hands, as the latter had been acquiring weapons from traders in return for slaves and concessions. Eventually, the British and Boer authorities came to recognize that this served to perpetuate the slave trade and pose an increased military challenge. With the Brussels Act, previous regulatory efforts were strengthened and Europeans were provided with an advantage in their efforts to enforce colonial rule and quell opposition from both Africans and Arab traders. Arms sales were restricted in the area known as the “slave trade zone,” the sale of high-precision weapons was limited to a few individuals, and government armies remained able to purchase arms. These stipulations reinforced the technological superiority that the Europeans held over native African armies and kept the most advanced weapons in the hands of European powers. Although the act was not always fully enforced, the concerted efforts made to disarm Africans became an important factor in the consolidation of European rule, especially in the southern part of the continent. Carmen Lenore Wright

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See also: Berlin West Africa Conference; Colonialism; Slavery (History)

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BUNCHE, RALPH 209 References Boahen, A. Adu. General History of Africa. Vol. 7, Africa under Colonial Domination 1880–1935. Abridged ed. Berkeley: University of California Press/UNESCO, 1990. Meirs, Sue. “Notes on the Arms Trade and Government Policy in Southern Africa between 1870 and 1890.” Journal of African History 4 (1971), 571–577.

BUNCHE, RALPH (1904–1971) Ralph Bunche was the first African American diplomat to advise a U.S. presidential administration. Although he is bestknown for brokering an Arab-Israeli truce in 1949, his work on Africa was critical to shaping U.S. foreign policy and United Nations (UN) policies toward African decolonization. At the 1945 conference held in San Francisco, during which the foundations for the UN were laid, Bunche helped draft those sections of the UN charter concerned with the future of regions still under colonial rule. His expertise on Africa led him, as the U.S. undersecretary to the UN, to be appointed to head the Trusteeship Division, the committee responsible for aiding regions transitioning to self-governance and independence. Bunche began his career as a scholar studying anthropology and colonialism throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In 1936 he published a brief work, A World View of the Race, arguing that race and racialized ways of thinking were becoming a dominant means of organizing social relations and relations of inequality on a global basis. Already active in civil rights work, Bunche’s public service shifted direction with the onset of World War II. During the war Bunche served as the head of the Africa

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United Nations diplomat Ralph Bunche speaks with Dr. Kwame N’krumah, prime minister of Ghana, at a reception given for N’krumah by the Harlem Lawyers’ Association at the Harlem Armory in 1958. (Library of Congress)

division of the Office of Strategic Services of the United States, the nation’s first centralized agency dedicated to strategic intelligence gathering. His service led him further into diplomatic and public life. For his work at the UN, Bunche was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. He was the first person of African descent to receive that award. Bunche subsequently continued his international work. In 1954 he was appointed undersecretary-general of the UN. In 1956, after the Suez Canal crisis, Bunche returned to the problem of peace in the Middle East as the director of peacekeeping operations. These would occupy him for the next decade, including supervising operations in Congo (later Zaire) in 1960.

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As a public figure, Bunche argued for the importance of self-governance for people still under colonial rule, believing that self-governance was a critical feature of future international stability and peace. He further insisted that self-governance was a basic human right. These were arguments that carried weight in the context of the search for international stability after World War II. At the same time, he was a controversial figure, precisely because of his accomplishments and visibility. During the cold war he was often presented by the U.S. government to the larger world as a sign of national racial progress, despite the government’s continued support of segregation and black disenfranchisement. Bunche himself fought strenuously against racism and for civil rights in the United States. Drawing upon his global perspective, Bunche’s intellectual contributions to the American Civil Rights Movement were considerable. At times, he viewed civil rights organizations in the United States as insufficiently attentive to the poverty that came as a consequence of racial inequality. Bunche argued strongly for viewing the black struggle in the United States as part of the larger global struggle of colonial peoples for democracy, self-determination, and human rights. Richard Juang See also: Civil Rights Movement; Decolonization, African; Peacekeeping and Military Interventions; United Nations

References Holloway, John Scott. Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Urquhart, Brian. Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.

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BURIAL GROUND (NEW YORK CITY), AFRICAN In 1991, during construction of a new federal building in lower Manhattan in New York City, the remains of a large African American burial ground were uncovered. Eventually, the remains of 419 bodies were removed from what is now the largest extant African American colonial burial ground in the United States. This rediscovery of a burial ground in the heart of the modern city highlighted the welldocumented but hitherto largely ignored history of slavery and free black presence in the northern United States. African Americans had been buried at the site from at least the early eighteenth century, and they included conspirators from the 1712 New York slave revolt. It is thought that around 20,000 African Americans were buried there during the colonial period and into the early nineteenth century. The burial ground was kept outside the city limits of the time and was restricted to African Americans. New York mayor David Dinkins and U.S. representative Augustus Savage of Illinois halted construction work during 1991 and 1992 so that proper archaeological excavation could take place, and researchers at Howard University were invited to undertake the painstaking work of removing and examining the human remains. This examination gave rise to new evidence about African origins and the transition from Africa to America. The site offers evidence for the continuation of African customs and beliefs. New Yorkers were determined that the site itself would become a permanent memorial to those Africans who helped to build the city but are ignored in almost all histories. Thus, various artworks and

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coffins from Ghana in a service replete with African ceremonial. Guest of honor Maya Angelou spoke to the thousands present to pay tribute to their African ancestors. In February 2006, after vigorous lobbying, the African Burial Ground was officially designated a national monument. Alan Rice See also: Burial, African Practices in the Americas; Museums and Transatlantic Slavery Reference La Roche, Cheryl J., and Michael L. Blakey. “Seizing Intellectual Power: The Dialogue at the New York Burial Ground.” Historical Archaeology 31, no. 3 (1997): 84–106.

BURIAL, AFRICAN PRACTICES IN THE AMERICAS Pallbearers in Baltimore, Maryland, carry a handcarved mahogany coffin containing human remains from an African burial ground discovered in downtown Manhattan in 1991. This coffin and three others are on a ceremonial procession back to New York for reburial. The remains of more than 400 free blacks and slaves that had been studied at Howard University since being uncovered during construction of a federal building, are scheduled to be reburied near New York’s City Hall. (AP/Wide World Photos)

memorials were commissioned to stand in the building on the site and in an Interpretative Center alongside it. These include the work Africa Rising (1998), by Barbara Chase-Riboud, in the lobby of the federal building, and a work commissioned in 2005, titled Ancestral Libation Chamber, by Rodney Leon. Commemorating African contributions to the United States, Leon’s work will include a memorial wall, pillars to mark the burial ground’s entrance, and a map of the cemetery itself. In October 2003 the remains of the bodies were re-interred in hand-carved www.abc-clio.com

African burial practices in the Americas include traditions and practices honoring the dead through retained and adapted cultural forms between Africa and the Americas. The retentions and transformations of African burial practices in the Americas provide the greatest amount of evidence about how the African past has influenced ethnic identity formations of African people in the New World. The most salient characteristic of this influence involves the so-called ancestors, that is, the “living dead.” Africanist anthropologists, ethnographers, and historians agree that traditional African cosmology concerning death incorporated a continuum between the natural and spiritual worlds. African ontology, a holistic understanding of existence based on Africans’ belief in this continuum of experiences, provided practical reinforcement. As a result, the continuum between life and death in African societies was most immediate and relevant in their funeral rituals.

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Africans’ relationships with the deceased symbolized the significance of the continuum. Dead people had power either to interfere maliciously or to intervene benevolently in earthly matters. Therefore, comforting the living during their bereavement was somewhat secondary to honoring the departed, because satisfied souls would find no reason to be malevolent toward survivors. Consequently, proper respect to the deceased shaped some behaviors of the living. Acceptable burials meant large attendance, food offerings, performance of appropriate dirges, interring personal objects belonging to the deceased, and elaborate funeral processionals. These funerary behaviors secured this connection between the living and the dead, exhibiting African practicality within spirituality. In fact, homage to their deceased represented the most common manifestation of how the sacred and secular coexisted within African burial practices. Misunderstood by early European observers from the fifteenth century as ancestor worship, the reverence assigned to deceased family or clan members had to do with an adulation of the deceased via an acceptance of their newly acquired power as otherworldly beings. Involuntary migration across the Atlantic World and chattel slavery in the Americas did not destroy the continuation of African cosmological orientations manifested in burial practices, especially the centrality of respect for the departed through funerary displays. The “first burials” among Africa’s dispersed people were aboard slave ships. Suicide, slave revolts, despondency, and disease made death at sea common occurrences for human cargo. The “watery grave” of the Atlantic Ocean, or Middle Passage, was also a metaphorical conduit away from horrific peril. Water, in some www.abc-clio.com

African societies, signifies the divide between life and death. For example, as soon as funerary rites had been concluded, a departed soul began its journey across the river that marked the boundaries of life and death. The Ga and Lodagaa peoples of Ghana and the Bakongo from Angola, in particular, represented death as the voyage of a soul who had crossed a river, believing the end of human life was a voyage through the waters of death that separated the unseen world of the living from the world of the departed. Therefore, dying at sea could have been seen as a pilgrimage or departure to another existence as well as an escape from a horrific experience; hence, while those who survived the Middle Passage had crossed over into bondage, those who died had joined their ancestors, going back to a spiritual, African existence. Slave cemeteries eventually replaced the aquatic tombs that the initial, dispersed Africans had created. Whether enslaved Africans died on islands such as Barbados, Antigua, or the Bahamas or on plantations in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, enslaved people retained their humanity and customs by culturally responding to human death. Traveler accounts, memoirs, and interviews with freedpersons all confirm that across both the antebellum South and the islands of the Americas, enslaved people insisted on observing their customary funerary rites. In fact, few slaveholders made the mistake of denying their human property the options of paying proper attention to their dead. Furthermore, urban archaeological finds in major U.S. cities such as New York and Dallas, as well as studies in folk beliefs about death, have all confirmed taboos concerning proper burial among West Indians and southern blacks, particularly in

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the cultures of the Sea Islands. For example, Africans from the continent and Americanborn Africans believed that grave dirt was also a common element in magic, healing, and witchcraft. The dirt from a grave was believed to be so powerful that taboos and superstitions regarding its usage abounded, dictating the very steps of those in the funeral processions as well as the movements of grave diggers and other mourners. Evidence of similarities between Africans on the continent and their descendants dispersed across the Atlantic can still be seen when modern visitors frequent slave cemeteries. Specifically, enslaved people, like their African predecessors, also customarily interred personal items with the deceased. People believed that the deceased could become a restless spirit who resented the possibility of other people coveting their possessions and, therefore, returned to the world of the living to access and use his or her own belongings. As a result, some dispersed Africans adhered to a cultural practice of burying personal items as an obligation in the best interest of the family. Similarly, utilitarian grave decorations from St. Louis, Missouri, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Jacksonville, Florida, and throughout the Caribbean prove that Africans across the Atlantic World placed at grave sites functional paraphernalia like bottles, tea and flower pots, broken dishes, tools, cigar boxes, lamps, weapons, and even gold. Such items reflect Africans’ traditional practicality regarding the continuum between life and death. In addition to the influence of the departed on interment and grave decorations, mourning rituals and funeral displays of Africans in the Atlantic Diaspora also reference the African past. The actual funeral services for an enslaved person, however, www.abc-clio.com

did not have to follow immediately after their death or burial. Time off work had to be provided by slaveholders to attend slave funerals because forced labor dictated the events of dispersed Africans’ lives. Consequently, enslaved people commonly held night funerals during the antebellum period. These gatherings were traditionally attended by large numbers of people regardless of relation or local residence, and two burial practices legitimized the slave community’s last rites: the presence of a slave preacher who would offer a flattering eulogy and the participation of lamenting slave women. African women in certain Akan societies and enslaved women of the antebellum South both demonstrated intense emotive displays. The funeral dirges of the Akan women in Ghana serve as sufficient comparisons to the mourning exhibitions of grieving enslaved women. In Africa, such a showing of grief would be an appropriate and expected behavior; also, these expressions of bereavement also could be cited as a refutation against possible accusations of witchcraft or wrongdoing in the death, especially the death of a husband. Across the Atlantic, such female funeral displays confirmed the worth of the deceased and conferred upon the community the permission to acknowledge the significance of its personal loss regardless of the slaves’ supposedly powerless positions. A dead slave had neither productive nor reproductive benefit for slaveholders. Before slavery was abolished throughout the New World, these burial practices had already assisted in the formation of a distinct diaspora, the African Atlantic. The growing number of burial societies and mutual aid associations on behalf of bereaved families during the postslavery period prove that funeral rites were

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considered essential characteristics of freedom. In the United States and Brazil, especially, African American and Afro-Brazilian communities institutionalized traditional burial practices after emancipation by organizing different types of benevolent groups. Even the poorest community member could join a benevolent society, especially those mutual aid organizations sponsored by local churches. Benevolent societies had memberships that included undertakers. The “society undertaker” provided professional death care for those individuals, families, and groups who joined burial associations. African American morticians, or society undertakers, were paid in cash from the dues and membership fees of society members, making death-care providers the wealthiest and most socially mobile members of the African American community. Benevolent societies, consequently, represented an embryonic equivalent of modern-day insurance companies. In fact, African-influenced burial practices should be cited as the root of the African American insurance and funeral industries. LaTrese Evette Adkins References Creel, Margaret Washington. “A Peculiar People:” Slave Religion and CommunityCulture among the Gullah. New York: New York University Press, 1988. Godboldte, Catherine I. “Ancient African Traditional Funeral Ceremonies and the Funeral Ceremony of the Historic African American Church.” PhD dissertation, Temple University, 1995. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. 2nd ed. Oxford: Heinemann, 1989. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Wright, Robert Hughes, and Wilber B. Hughes III. Lay Down Body: Living History in African American Cemeteries. Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press, 1996.

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BURKINA FASO Previously known as Upper Volta, Burkina Faso is a West African nation with a population of over 13 million, as of 2007, drawn from more than fifty ethnic groups and largely living in urban areas. It is just south of the Sahara Desert, with only 13 percent of the land being arable. Formerly a part of French West Africa, the province of Upper Volta was created in 1919. From 1932 until 1947 it was abolished, forming the southeastern section of French Sudan. It gained its independence as the Republic of Upper Volta on August 4, 1960, and was renamed the People’s Republic of Burkina, or Burkina Faso, on August 4, 1984. Although largely dominated by France, U.S. missionaries were active in the area in the early twentieth century. The White Fathers of Africa sent missionaries to Upper Volta from 1900; the Foreign Missions Department of the Assemblies of God from 1921; the Christian and Missionary Alliance from 1923; the Sudan Interior Mission from 1930; the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade from 1939; and the Africa InterMennonite Mission (formerly the Congo Inland Mission) from 1978. Being a landlocked country, with little in the way of natural resources—in fact, it is one of the poorest countries in the world—most of the connections between Burkina Faso and the Americas have been in terms of relations with the United States, with U.S. scholars studying aspects of the country. The nation’s isolation has created much interest in the country among U.S. ethnographers. Some other American countries, such as Canada and Jamaica, have shown interest in Burkina Faso, mostly its music. Canadian artist Pauline Julien, from Quebec, spent five months in Burkina Faso in 1993, and musicians from Burkina Faso

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have toured several countries in North and South America and the Caribbean. When Upper Volta became independent in 1960, the United States sent its first ambassador, Ralph Borden Reams. He was posted to Ouagadougou, the capital, from 1960 until 1961. The next ambassador, Thomas Stuart Estes, was there from 1961 until 1966 and later was co-author of The Department of State (New York, 1976). Elliott Skinner, born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, was the third ambassador. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943, and as an anthropologist he did research in West Africa during the 1950s. He earned his doctorate in 1955 and then became a visiting professor at the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Advancing to associate professor in 1963, Skinner was only the second African American to attain a tenured position in any Ivy League university. His book, The Mossi of Upper Volta: The Political Development of a Sudanese People, was published by Stanford University in 1964, and two years later Skinner was nominated by President Lyndon Johnson as ambassador to Upper Volta, a position he held until 1969. President Sangoulé Lamizana made him grand commander of the Upper Volta National Order. After his term, Skinner returned to academia as professor of anthropology at Columbia University. He wrote African Urban Life: The Transformation of Ouagadougou (1974) and The Mossi of Upper Volta: Chiefs, Politicians, and Soldiers (1989). Another U.S. scholar who did research on Upper Volta in the 1950s was Peter B. Hammond of California, who conducted research in Upper Volta in 1954 until 1956, subsequently becoming assistant professor of anthropology at the University www.abc-clio.com

of Pittsburgh and then at Indiana University. In 1983 Captain Thomas Sankara came to power in Burkina Faso. His four years in power witnessed government austerity drives, a massive increase in health care, and the ejection of members of the U.S. Peace Corps. The U.S. ambassador from 1987 to 1990, David H. Shinn, was the author of the Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia (2004). In 1990 an international observer team went to Ouagadougou in response to the nation’s political problems; the Canadian contingent was led by Yvon C. Tarte. Several U.S. institutions hold substantial collections of artifacts from Upper Volta, especially the Detroit Institute of Arts. In addition, much research into Burkina Faso has been undertaken by Canadian and U.S. academics, especially in the realms of health and agriculture. The outputs include Richard Maclure’s work on rural programs at Stanford University and Joanny Zongo’s work on the Sorghum Shoot Fly in Burkina Faso at McGill University. Other North Americans connected with Burkina Faso include Charles F. Ames from Harvard University, who worked with Foster Parents Plan International in Ouagadougou; Joseph Bonenfant from Quebec, Canada, who taught at the University of Ouagadougou from 1977 to 1979; and Canadian doctor Chunilal Roy, who was the Canadian honorary consul in Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso is probably bestknown through the music group Farafina, which has toured much of the Americas. Justin Corfield See also: French Empire Reference Skinner, Elliott. African Urban Life: The Transformation of Ouagadougou. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.

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BURUNDI This small landlocked country in central Africa has a population of 6,231,000 (2004), three-quarters of whom live in urban areas. Most of the country is high plateau grassland, and the area that became Burundi was originally a part of German East Africa. After World War I the territory called Ruanda-Urundi (including modernday Rwanda and Burundi) was annexed by Belgium, which ruled it under a League of Nations mandate and later as a United Nations Trusteeship. It gained its independence as the Kingdom of Burundi on July 1, 1962, becoming the Republic of Burundi on November 28, 1966. When the British invaded German East Africa in 1914, they were aided by French, Belgian, and Portuguese contingents. However, most of the fighting was carried out by the British and colonial soldiers. These included several men connected with Argentina, including Claude Henry Forster and Richard Hewitt Talbot. The former contracted fever, dying in France, and the latter, who was awarded the Military Cross, returned to Buenos Aires at the end of the war and died in October 1919, only a few days after disembarking. Other Britons from Argentina who served there included W. L. Jordon and Jack Browne, who were, respectively, captain and sergeant in the East African Expeditionary Force, and B. V. Douglas, who worked in the British Transport Service. There has been very little contact between Burundi and the Americas, except for the United States. From there some missionaries, under the auspices of the Free Methodist Church of North America, came to Burundi to work in 1935. Alan P. Merriam, an ethnomusicologist from Northwestern University and later the www.abc-clio.com

University of Indiana, studied Burundi’s music during the late 1950s. At this time the United States also became an importer of Burundi coffee, and later it imported Burundian postage stamps. It has also provided financial aid and training. One of the main researchers in Burundi under the Belgians was Melchior Mukuri, who completed a doctoral thesis on Burundi at Université Laval in Canada. When Burundi held elections in 1961, just prior to gaining its independence, one of the UN observers was the Canadian lawyer Martial Asselin, who was lieutenant governor of Quebec in 1990–1996. The United States recognized Burundi upon its independence. Donald Albert Dumont was U.S. minister in 1962–1963 and then ambassador until 1966. He was replaced by George W. Renchard, who was ambassador until 1969. Thomas P. Melady succeeded Renchard as U.S. ambassador. Melady would later write Burundi: The Tragic Years (1974). With his wife, he later co-authored Idi Amin: Hitler in Africa (1977). Throughout the 1960s there was substantial conflict and civil war between Hutus and Tutsis, Burundi’s two major ethnic groups. In 1966, King Ntare V would be deposed, the culmination of years of strife in which thousands died. Between 1966 and 1972, Burundi was a republic with a degree of stability. However, in 1972, the year Melady left Burundi, the country was rocked by a massive Hutu revolt. The resulting repression was followed by the death of about 100,000 Hutu, causing U.S. senators Edward Kennedy and John Tunney to call for an international team to act regarding the “situation” in Burundi. When trouble broke out again in 1995, after genocidal events in neighboring

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Rwanda, U.S. president Bill Clinton urged Burundi to “say no to violence and extremism.” Later the same year, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter served as a mediator between Hutu and Tutsi factions in Burundi and Rwanda. Since then the situation in the country has been much more settled and tourists are returning to Burundi and neighboring Rwanda to see the mountain gorillas. Since the last years

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of the twentieth century, Burundi has established significant trade relations with the People’s Republic of China, causing the United States some concern. Justin Corfield See also: British Empire; Central African Republic; French Empire Reference Eggers, Ellen K. Historical Dictionary of Burundi. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997.

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C CABRAL,AMILCAR (1924–1973) A Marxist revolutionary and national liberationist, Amilcar Cabral was born in Bafata, Portuguese Guinea, and raised in Cape Verde. His father, Juvenal Cabral, an elementary school teacher, was a noted political activist who dedicated himself to improving the living conditions of farmers and civil servants in the region. Growing up under Portuguese colonialism during the era of Portugal’s fascist dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, Cabral experienced firsthand the exploitation and oppression, including mass starvation, suffered by the poor and working classes of Cape Verde. Cabral began his political activity during high school, taking on the assumed name Labrac. In 1945 Cabral journeyed to Lisbon to attend the Agronomy Institute on a scholarship. During this period he actively engaged in democratic struggles and participated in antifascist student organizations. Cabral also formed student organizations devoted to African liberation from the colonial powers. Cabral returned to Guinea and Cape Verde in the early 1950s and took up employment as an agronomist. His work took him to villages throughout the country, and

based on his observation of extreme poverty and exploitation and his involvement with the diverse communities he visited, Cabral began to formulate an analysis of local social conditions and appropriate strategies for liberation from the colonial regime. Cabral played a central part in the formation of the Partido Africano de Indepencia de Guine e Capo Verde (PAIGC; African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) in 1956. The PAIGC would become the primary force of national liberation struggles against the Portuguese. In 1963 the PAIGC launched an all-out campaign of armed struggle against the colonial regime. Within two years it had liberated large areas of land from the Portuguese and brought the areas under the leadership of the PAIGC. In 1972 Cabral initiated a National People’s Assembly, based on a popular vote for representatives of the liberated territories, in preparation for national independence. In January 1973, only months before the national liberation struggle claimed victory, Cabral was assassinated by a former colleague operating with the assistance of Portuguese agents who had infiltrated the PAIGC. Cabral’s writings on armed struggle and his theories on the value of national

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culture as an essential element in resistance to foreign domination have influenced revolutionaries worldwide. His work was taken up by armed struggle movements in the United States, notably the Black Liberation Army, as well as by socialist movements in Grenada and Guyana. Jeff Shantz References Chabal, Patrick. Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Chailand, Gerard. Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in “Portuguese” Guinea. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969. Davidson, Basil. No Fist is Big Enough to Hide the Sky: The Liberation of Guine and Cape Verde: Aspects of an African Revolution. London: Zed Books, 1981. McCullough, Jock. In the Twilight of Revolution: The Political Theory of Amilcar Cabral. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

CABRAL, CRISTINA RODRÍGUEZ (1959–) Cristina Rodríguez Cabral is a black female Uruguayan author. The granddaughter of Elemo Cabral, one of the lead editors of Nuestra Raza (Our race), the longestrunning black periodical in Uruguay’s history, Cristina Cabral comes from a family rooted in the civil rights movement and the black literary tradition of her country. Hailed as one of the most talented writers since those contributing to Nuestra Raza (1917–1948), she is the first published black woman writer after Virginia Brindis de Salas to continue the legacy of Uruguay’s black literary tradition. In the fifteen years that span her career, Cabral’s work includes nine books of poetry, three essays, and one travel journal. As of 2007, she is completing the manuscript, www.abc-clio.com

“Otro exilio” (Another exile), a volume of poetry. Although Cristina Cabral completed most of her work, which consists mostly of love poems and poems of introspection, in Uruguay, her ideas shifted when she moved to Brazil in 1988 and the United States in 1997. Influenced by the religious practices of Afro-Brazilians and the Afrocentric culture and philosophy she found in the United States, her poetry became more radical. Over the course of her travels, the subject matter of her poetry shifted to the racism, oppression, social injustice, and racial and gender disparities Afro-Uruguayans face. The complex experiences she faced in the United States dictated the voice of her newer poetry. Cabral questions and compares the similarities and differences between her two worlds, Uruguay and the United States. Her collection, Memoria y Resistencia (1998; Memory and Resistance), written in the United States, illustrates her struggle to define herself as an outspoken black woman warrior between two contradictory worlds. Historically, Cristina Rodríguez Cabral has broken ground in the educational arena, wherein she is among a handful of black Uruguayan college graduates. After moving to the United States, she completed a master’s degree in teaching English as a second language at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1999. Since then, Cabral has lived in Columbia, Missouri, where she is completing a docoral program at the University of Missouri. She is completing her doctoral thesis on the novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella, known as the “Dean of AfroHispanic literature.” She will be the first Uruguayan black woman to hold a doctorate degree. Caroll Mills Young

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CALABAR References Britos Serrat, Alberto. Antología de los poetas negros uruguayos. Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones Mundo Afro, 1990. Lewis, Marvin A. Afro-Uruguayan Literature: Post-Colonial Perspectivas. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003. Young, Caroll Mills. “Crossing Borders/Crossing Boundaries: Cristina Cabral’s Memoria y Resistencia.” In Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra Hispanic Writers, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Press, 2003.

CALABAR Calabar is a city of present-day Nigeria that was a transatlantic slave port. A city in the far southeast of Nigeria, it is situated on the Cross River, eight miles north of the Atlantic Ocean. Calabar was a transatlantic slave port throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and later a palm oil trading port. Mangrove swamps link the creeks to the southwest, while to the east the city is bounded by the Qua River. The climate is equatorial with heavy rainfall between May and October and a dry season between November and April. The city is surrounded by bush and forested areas, where small cultivators produce palm oil, cassava, yams, and bananas. The city is a conurbation of several “towns” (obio) and has a population of around 500,000. Creek Town (Obio Oku) is the oldest settlement in Calabar, founded by migrants from the hinterland in approximately the fourteenth century. The Efik, Qua, and Efut people all established fishing communities, followed by further settlements down river at Old Town (Obutong), Duke Town (Atakpa), and Henshaw Town (Nsidung). These settlements later became known collectively as Old Calabar to distinguish the city from New Kalabar, a port www.abc-clio.com

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to the west of Bonny on the Niger River. The Old Calabar “towns” were involved in the transatlantic slave trade by the eighteenth century, and between 1720 and 1830 one million slaves left from Calabar, most on British vessels. Each town (obio) was headed by a king (obong) who controlled a trading monopoly over the supply of slaves captured in the interior. In the ‘“trust trade” system, European traders advanced goods to Efik middlemen, who supplied slaves from inland. European traders were forbidden to settle ashore or own land in the city, so they traded from ships moored in the Calabar River. Detailed accounts of the Calabar slave trade exist in the form of the letters, bookkeeping records, and diaries of European and Efik traders, including the description by the French trader Barbot of a visit in 1689 and the diary of the Efik trader Antera Duke, written between 1785 and 1788. During the nineteenth century the slave trade declined. Calabar became a center for the export of palm oil to industrial Britain, where it was used to process detergents. Under the political control of Great Duke Ephraim from Duke Town, palm oil production increased between 1814 and 1834. The rulers of the Efik towns founded plantations for the cultivation of palm oil around the city in Okoyong and Akpabuyo. Plantation work was done by people who had been acquired by Efik traders as slaves before the transatlantic slave trade ended. Great Duke Ephraim forged close links with European traders such as the British trader Sir John Tobin, later the mayor of Liverpool. The trust trade system had increased the power of the kings as mediators and European traders were required to pay each

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Efik king “comey” duty to trade in his territory. By the 1840s several powerful Efik rulers had emerged, including King Eyo Honesty II in Creek Town and King Eyamba V in Duke Town, and by the 1860s, some former slaves within Efik towns were also prominent palm oil traders. The Ekpe secret society became a powerful source of authority used to resolve trade disputes, with Efik rulers, former slaves, and European traders all being members. In 1841 King Eyo Honesty II and King Eyamba sent a letter to Queen Victoria, via a Liverpool-based palm oil trader, asking about new agricultural techniques, new European weaponry, and the Bible. A response came from the United Secession Church (USC), a Scottish Presbyterian denomination active in the campaign to abolish slavery. The USC considered that a West African mission could assist in the replacement of the slave trade with legitimate trade and sent seven missionaries to Calabar from its Jamaica mission in 1846. The missionaries were the first Europeans permitted to settle ashore in Calabar, and they were allocated land by Eyamba V in Duke Town and by King Eyo Honesty II in Creek Town. The first conversion did not come until in 1853, when Esien Esien Ukpabio became the first of many teachers from Calabar to start mission schools throughout the Cross River region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Efik rulers were reluctant to convert; King Eyo Honesty II translated for the mission but never became a Christian, arguing that his patronage of the mission was his contribution to the church and that he did not consider conversion necessary. From 1861, when the British consul established a headquarters in Calabar, the www.abc-clio.com

city became a center of colonial administration. Trade treaties were signed between the consul and Efik traders, drawing the Calabar region into the 1885 Oil Rivers Protectorate. In 1899 the charter of the Royal Niger Company was withdrawn, and the administration and regulation of trade was passed to the colonial government. In 1900 Calabar became the seat of colonial government for the new Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. Calabar also became a center of protest against colonial taxation by women market traders in 1925, and then again in 1929, when the Women’s War spread through large parts of Calabar Province. In the run up to independence in 1960, Calabar was part of the Eastern Region when the three-region federal state was established in 1947. Calabar was also part of the region that declared independence as Biafra in 1967, the city being recaptured by federal forces in the autumn of 1967. Calabar remained a busy port up until the decline of the palm oil export trade in the 1960s. With the expansion of road and rail networks throughout eastern Nigeria and the development of the oil industry, Port Harcourt replaced Calabar as the main southeastern port. Today Calabar is the state capital of Cross River State. The city’s economy rests upon its role as an administrative center and as a regional marketplace for the predominantly agricultural economy of Cross River State. Calabar is an important historic center for Presbyterianism in Nigeria, and it is also home to several international religious organizations, including the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star and many new Pentecostal ministries. Philippa Hall

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CALYPSO References Eyo, Ekpo, ed. The Story of Old Calabar. Lagos, Nigeria: National Commission for Museums and Monuments, 1986. Hackett, Rosalind. Religion in Calabar: The Religious Life and History of a Nigerian Town. New York: Monton de Gruyter, 1989. Hackett, Rosalind. “Charismatic/Pentecostal Appropriation of Media Technologies in Nigeria and Ghana.” Journal of Religion in Africa 28, no. 3 (1998): 258–277. Marshall-Fratani, Ruth. “Mediating the Local and the Global in Nigerian Pentecostalism.” Journal of Religion in Africa 38, no. 3 (1998): 278–313. Mbon, Friday. “The Quest for Identity in African Religious Movements.” In New Religious Movements and Society, edited by G. Ludwar Ene. Bayreuth, Germany: African Studies Series, 1991.

CALYPSO The calypso is a popular and sometimes satirical song in rhymed verse dealing with topical social and political subjects, most associated with Trinidad. It was traditionally performed extempore and is usually played in 2/4 or 4/4 time. It is often, though not necessarily, associated with the steel pan on which it is played, especially around Carnival time. Calypsonians use the song as a vent for political and social grievances, employing satire to this effect. The calypso shapes and reflects social opinion and is therefore often considered the voice of the people. Because it expresses, defines, and mobilizes political consciousness, calypso may have an overt or subtle influence on politics and so has an important role in society. In its function as social complaint, the calypso resembles the American blues and the contemporary Jamaican blues. In fact, calypso was born out of an act of self-preservation in the face of the dehumanizing conditions www.abc-clio.com

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of slavery in the tradition of the African American folksong. It may, however, also be used as an invitation to revelry. There have been many suggestions by researchers as to the origin of the words “calypso” and “kaiso” (another name given to the song). Some suggest that it might have come from the Carib word for a joyous song, “carieto,” that might have developed into “cariso”; from the French patois derivation “carrousseaux” or “caillisseaux” from “carrousse,” French for carousal; from “caliso,” a Spanish word used for a St. Lucian song; or from “careso,” a song in the Virgin Islands. The most popular view, however, is that it may be a derivative of the West African Hausa word, “kaito,” a cry of approval. Researchers, including the renowned calypsonian, Attila the Hun, agree that this word may have developed into “kaiso” and then further evolved into “calypso.” Another calypsonian, The Roaring Lion, proposes that the calypso is a derivative of the French ballade of the thirteenth century and was infused with various rhythms in the West Indies to arrive at its form today. Although this view is not widely accepted, Frederick Gordon Rohlehr, an eminent scholar in the field of calypso, also compares the art form in its “vague cosmopolitanism and richly incongruous parentage” with the history of Trinidad, in which the island passed from one European nation to another. He agrees that different groups in Trinidad claim to have influenced the music form and that its origins are therefore unclear. He argues, for example, that different Creole rhythms, including the Castillian in its Creole Trinidadian form and the Habañera, may also be responsible for the form of calypso.

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Calypso has, however, been linked to the kalinda, to which stick-fighters chanted and fought. The chantwell, or lead singers, of the stick-fighting groups functioned as social commentator and haranguer and so may be considered very early calypsonians. The chantwells, however, were thought to possess supernatural powers, and so their pronouncements of the injury the opponent would receive were taken seriously. The songs, usually sung extempore, therefore became statements of prowess, strength, manhood, and identity. The stickfights represented a ritualized violence and were an expression of the sexual energy of a frustrated people. It was in this context that the calypso developed. The chantwells’ songs became a sort of calypso war as each tried to outdo the other, and it is from this tradition that the “picong” (from the French “piquant,” meaning stinging or biting) and the “grand charge” (empty and melodramatic boasting and threatening) associated with calypso developed. Because of its connection with stick-fighting, calypso was originally associated with a particular section of the lower classes called the “jamette group.” “Jamette” was the French patois word for “diametre,” French for “diameter,” and referred to the group that fell below the diameter of social decency. The calypso was therefore a music developed by outcasts challenging their position and asserting their identity. However, after emancipation, the development of the calypso became closely aligned to the development of Carnival that had previously been a festival for the white Creole upper classes during slavery but had now changed to a celebration observed largely by underprivileged blacks. Calypso is an oral art form and often employs the dialect of the people. It is www.abc-clio.com

therefore performance-centered, with the audience playing an important part. Showmanship is therefore an important part of the calypsonians’ performance and is reflected in their characteristic gaudy dress in the latest fashions or in costumes depicting the theme of their song. The calypsonians also often choose sobriquets to reflect their invincibility, frequently choosing names of famous warriors or other names suggesting invincibility and combat such as Duke of Wellington, Lord Executor, Atilla the Hun, and the Roaring Lion. Others use the titles “Lord” or “Mighty,” as in Mighty Spoiler, Lord Kitchener, and Mighty Sparrow, to suggest grandeur. The calypso has traditionally been considered a male-dominated arena, although some research has shown that women have sung calypsos since the nineteenth century, and there has been mention of at least two female chantwells. Two other known calypsonians singing around the time of World War II were Lady Iere and Lady Thelma. After that, there were very few female calypsonians until the 1960s, when Calypso Rose began singing and was later joined by other female artistes. The emergence of tents that organize and manage the performances have been a significant development in the calypso arena. In the early days after emancipation, the masqueraders and the calypsonians would gather in a barrack yard tent to practice and to showcase their talents in the weeks before Carnival. These humble yard tents, however, have since developed into the sophisticated and well-organized tents of today. The tents are also linked to the various calypso competitions that developed out of this tradition. The two most important competitions are the Calypso Monarch, held on Dimanche Gras night,

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or Big Sunday, that precedes the revelry on Carnival Monday morning, and the Road March. While the Calypso Monarch is a formal competition, the Road March is decided on the basis of popularity, that is, the most played song by the Carnival bands on Carnival Monday and Tuesday. It tends to be more of a party song suited to “jumping up” on Carnival Day. Gisele Ramphaul References Best, Curwen. Barbadian Popular Music and the Politics of Caribbean Culture. Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books, 1999. Elder, J. D. The Calypso and Its Morphology. Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Tobago: National Cultural Council, 1973. The Roaring Lion (Rafael de Leon). Calypso from France to Trinidad: 800 Years of History. San Juan, Trinidad: General Printers of San Juan, 1987. Rohlehr, Gordon. Calypso and Society in PreIndependence Trinidad. Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago: Gordon Rohlehr, 1990. Warner, Keith Q. The Trinidad Calypso: A Study of the Calypso as Oral Literature. London: Heinemann, 1982.

CAMEROON Cameroon is an African nation with an important regional, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, colonial, and independence history relating to Africa and the Americas. Although technically a Central African country, Cameroon is a bridge zone between Central and West Africa because it possesses physical and cultural features of both regions. In fact, Cameroon is so richly varied in its physical and cultural features that it is commonly referred to as “Mini Africa” or the “Crossroads of Africa.” The capital of Cameroon is Yaoundé; the largest city is Douala. www.abc-clio.com

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Slightly bigger than the American state of California, Cameroon boasts five distinct geographical regions: the Coastal Lowlands, the Southern Plateau, the Central or Adamawa Plateau, the Western Highlands, and the Northern Lowlands. These five geographical regions encompass three climate zones: the tropical zone in the south, the savannah zone in the center, and the semi-arid zone in the north. Each of these three climate zones sustains a different agriculture. The primary crops of each region include: bananas, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, tobacco, and timber in the tropical zone; cotton, rice, and maize in the savannah zone; and cotton, maize, and millet in the semi-arid zone. Cameroon is also home to Mount Cameroon (13,428 feet), which is an active lava volcano and West Africa’s tallest mountain. The history of the region that is now Cameroon extends far beyond any written record. Indeed, archaeological evidence indicates that the region has been inhabited by humans for 30,000 years. Archaeological evidence also suggests that a large civilization thrived near the shores of Lake Chad in northern Cameroon around 500 BCE. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, numerous farming societies occupied the region. These societies were connected through an extensive trade network in which cowry shells and bikie (small metal rods) were used as forms of currency. The region’s first European encounter occurred in 1472 with the arrival of Portuguese explorers. Upon discovering a wealth of shrimp in the region’s estuaries, these Portuguese explorers named the area Rio dos Camaros, or River of Shrimp, a name that later gave rise to the contemporary name, Cameroon. By the sixteenth century the Portuguese, Dutch, French,

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British, and Spanish were involved in a large-scale slave trade, whereby inhabitants of Cameroon were systematically captured, transported across the Atlantic Ocean in the hulls of ships, and sold in the New World as slaves. With the abolition of the slave trade in the early 1800s, the British and Germans diverted their attention to the development of trade in commodities such as ivory and rubber. Although Cameroon’s earliest interactions with European powers began in the late fifteenth century, it was not until 1884, when the Duala kings signed a treaty with Germany, that the colonial era in Cameroon officially began. Despite Cameroonian resistance, Germany remained the colonial power until World War I (1914–1918), when it was defeated by the Allied Powers (including, among others, Britain, France, Italy, and the United States). In 1919 the League of Nations produced a mandate that divided Cameroon between Great Britain and France. France received the larger eastern half. In addition to supervising the continued exploitation of Cameroon’s resources, colonial administrators in French and British Cameroon built infrastructure (roads and bridges) and implemented land regulations, tax and inheritance laws, crop marketing systems, marriage reform, and Westernized educational systems. The end of World War II saw the birth of several Cameroonian political parties and a demand for national independence. On January 1, 1960, the French government granted independence to French Cameroon, with Ahmadou Adhidjo, the founder and leader of the Union Camerounaise (UC), as its first president. In 1961, with the help of the United Nations, www.abc-clio.com

British Cameroon organized a referendum in which the northern half voted to join Nigeria and the southern half voted to join Cameroon. Soon afterward, Cameroon became a federal republic with ten provinces, two prime ministers, and one president. In 1972 the creation of a national constitution replaced the federal republic with a united republic. Ten years later Adhidjo, citing health problems, resigned from his post and handed the presidency to his prime minister, Paul Biya. Biya created his own political party, the Rassemblement démocratique du people camerounais (RDPC; Democratic rally of the Cameroon people), and offered single party rule as a solution to the country’s divisive regional and ethnic differences. In 1991 Biya was pressured to authorize a constitutional amendment that established a multiparty system and, in 1992, the nation held its first multiparty elections. In 2007, after three presidential elections (all of which have been criticized for being rigged), Paul Biya continues to hold the Cameroonian presidency. Cameroon’s primary exports include petroleum, agricultural products (cocoa, coffee, and tobacco), and timber. With its rich oil resources and prime agricultural conditions, Cameroon was one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most prosperous countries from the 1960s to the early 1980s. However, the fall of cash-crop prices in the early 1980s triggered an economic crisis from which Cameroon has yet to fully recover. In the late 1980s Cameroon turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for help. In response, the IMF and the World Bank implemented a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). Although designed to stimulate long-term development, the immediate measures called for by the SAP— currency devaluation, increases in food

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prices and interest rates, decreases in wages and hiring rates, trade liberalization, removal of input subsidies, and decreases in budget deficits—created further economic hardships for Cameroonians. With a population of 16 million, Cameroon boasts as many as 250 ethnic groups, each with its own language, spiritual practices, and sociopolitical structures. The majority ethnic groups of each region included the Tikar, Bamoun, and Bamileke in the west; the Fulbe, Massa, and Muktale in the north; the Douala, Bakweri, and Isubu in the south; and the Makakozine in the east. While Cameroon’s official languages are French and English, most Cameroonians, regardless of ethnicity, speak two or three indigenous languages. In 2005 the distribution of religion among Cameroonians was as follows: 40 percent indigenous religions, 40 percent Christianity, and 20 percent Islam. Although the state wields great political influence in Cameroon, traditional political structures, such as the chiefdom, still play an important role. For example, among the chiefdoms of the Bamileke, the chief, or fon, mediates local disputes and oversees the general wellbeing of the chiefdom. The fon’s staterelated responsibilities include the signing of birth, marriage, and death certificates and the supervision of tax collection. Given its great linguistic and cultural diversity, it is not surprising that Cameroon is rich in music and dance. Two of the most popular music styles are the Makossa and the Bi-Kutsi. Both music styles are accompanied by a specific dance of the same name. The Makossa was made popular by Cameroonian musicians Petit Pays and Manu Dibango, and the Bi-Kutsi was made popular by Cameroonian musicians Les Têtes Brulées and Roger Bekono. www.abc-clio.com

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Cameroon’s contribution to the literary world is significant. Among Cameroon’s most famous writers are Mongo Beti and Calixthe Beyala. Mongo Beti (1932–2001) was a novelist and essayist who spent fortytwo years of exile in Rouen, France. A tireless advocate for human rights and environmental protection, Beti’s works include Ville Cruelle (1954), Remember Ruben (1974), and L’histoire du fou (1994). Calixthe Beyala (1964–) wrote her first novel, C’est le soleil qui m’a brulée (It is the Sun Which Has Burnt Me) (1987) at the age of twenty-three. Since then, she has published fourteen novels, all of which examine the experience of women in West Africa and France. Beyala resides in Paris with her husband and two children. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, people of all nationalities are making new homes in countries other than those of their birth. Cameroonians are no exception. Indeed, Cameroonians of all ages and occupations live everywhere from Paris, France, to Toronto, Canada, to Washington, D.C. With 17,000 Cameroonian residents, France has the largest Cameroonian population outside of Cameroon. Cameroon’s influence in France is notable. A walk through the Chateau Rouge quarter in Paris’ eighteenth arrondissement (district) reveals numerous Cameroonian restaurants, boutiques, and markets. The Cameroonian community in France is distinguished by the fact that, among all other African communities in France, it has the greatest number of students seeking higher education. Abigail Dumes See also: Agriculture; Coffee; Colonialism; Decolonization, African; Diaspora; Exploration and Explorers, Africa; Fulani; International Monetary Fund; Religion (Africa); Slavery (History); World Bank

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228 CANADA (AFRICADIAN CULTURE) References Barley, Nigel. The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut. London: British Museum Publications, 1983. Bocquené, Henri. Memoirs of a Mbororo: The Life of Ndudi Umaru, Fulani Nomad of Cameroon. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Delancey, Mark W. Cameroon: Dependence and Independence. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989. Fowler, Ian, and David Zeitlyn, eds. African Crossroads: Intersections between History and Anthropology in Cameroon. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996. Konigs, Piet, and Francis B. Nyamnjoh. Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation. Boston: Brill Books, 2003.

CANADA (AFRICADIAN CULTURE) When George Elliott Clarke’s two-volume anthology, Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing, was published in 1991, he suggested the existence of a unique, ethnoregionally defined Atlantic Canadian diasporic culture of African descent: Africadian culture. The anthology traced this claim to 1785 and, by covering two centuries, suggested a continuity of textualization. It claimed this continuity as ethnic coherence under a heading that, as Clarke admitted, was his own coinage: “Africadian.” The term is witty as well as ironic. A compound neologism, “Africadian” combines the African background with the Mi’kmaq Indians’ word for “land,” which the early French colonizers took over to name the colony L’Acadie in the sixteenth century. Both constitutive parts denote territory rather than race, pointing to the fact that Africadian culture has a distinct land base. The survivors and refugees of the War of Independence www.abc-clio.com

(1776–1783) and the War of 1812 (ending in 1815) who cast their lot with the British rather than stay in the United States settled in free communities, where they were joined by escapees on the Underground Railroad. In view of the rather small body of texts collected in the anthology dating to before 1900, the claim to an ethnoregional cultural identity is not easily supported diachronically as long as only literature is concerned. Many of the extant texts are sermons, autobiographical sketches, and minutes of Baptist meetings. However, together with texts from oral traditions (orature) they establish the basis, which Clarke has described as “sermon, song, and story,” on which the existence of Africadian culture since its early days, and Africadian literature as a predominantly post–World War II phenomenon, was founded and continues to prosper. While the constituent parts are similar to the tradition found in African American communities in the United States, it needs to be noted that their diasporic situation, and the abolition of slavery in British North America before it was abolished in the United States, provided a considerable difference in cultural context—for example, anthropologist Arthur H. Fauset noted during a research trip in Nova Scotia that many Africadians had never heard of the Brer Rabbit tales popularized in the United States by white writers like Joel Chandler Harris. The adherence to and practice of Baptist beliefs, and the blending of the inherited cultures of the Africas and Americas with British North American, German, Acadian French, and Mi’kmaq Indian elements, resulted in a unique cultural formation. The event that contributed substantially to the construction of a historical and

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political identity out of the roughly twodozen settlements throughout the province was ironically one of destruction: one of the largest African settlements in the province was Africville, a densely populated but impoverished settlement at the north end of the Narrows, where the channel between Halifax and Dartmouth opens into the Bedford Basin. Dating back to the early 1800s and badly damaged in the terrible Halifax explosion of 1917, Africville had suffered a long history of neglect. This changed in the late 1950s, when Halifax city officials decided on improving the living conditions of Africville’s inhabitants. They condemned and subsequently razed Africville. The inhabitants were moved to new housing projects with better sanitation and living conditions. Ironically, the cultural identity of the obliterated settlement soon started to manifest itself anew in creative formats. The destruction of Africville, including the Campbell Road Church, bulldozed under the cover of night to prevent protests, resulted in a retroactive wave of identification with Africville as an imagined cultural and spiritual center. Young Africadians who had been children at the time of the resettlement, or who like George Elliott Clarke did not even have personal firsthand experience of living in Africville, were the first generation that received an education and training in the liberal arts, which enabled them to voice an artistic expression of their cultural identity that became heard not only within but also and increasingly outside their community. The marginalization of Nova Scotia within Canada, and the double marginalization of Africadians in the Maritimes, ensured a growing audience and interpretive community after the 1980s, in keeping with the increasing www.abc-clio.com

self-confidence of Canadian writing on the whole. Since the publication of Fire on the Water, Clarke’s lobbying and the superior quality of many of the Africadian literary and other artistic creations have directed considerable reader response as well as a certain amount of critical attention to this unique ethnoregional formation. Earlytwentieth-century figures like the opera singer Portia White and the African United Baptist Association moderator Dr. Pearleen Oliver have attained the status of cultural icons for the community, and new authors, playwrights, and artists are inscribing themselves into the Maritime Canadian cultural fabric, aided by the fact that a number of writers collected already in volume 2 of Fire on the Water are really multitalents, like actors Walter Borden and Frederick Ward, filmmaker Sylvia Hamilton, and singers Delvina Bernard and Raymond L. Parker. The members of the female quartet Four the Moment are highly successful singers of a unique blend of modern artistic song, spirituals, blues, and Nova Scotian folk tunes. Among the themes central to contemporary Africadian literature, Africville is gradually being superseded by a more global outlook for cultural orientation. However, the central function of Africville as a sociohistorical point of integration should not be underestimated. Interestingly enough, most Africadian authors writing on Africville took an ambivalent stance. In George Elliott Clarke’s poem, “Campbell Road Church” (1983), Africville is introduced as a “beautiful Canaan of stained glass and faith,” but the lurking nostalgia is immediately subverted in the next lines: “made shacktown of shattered glass and shame, / rats rustling like a mayor’s robe.” Rats also play

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an instrumental role in George Boyd’s terrifying teleplay Consecrated Ground (1999). David Woods’s poem “Africville: A Requiem” recounts the impossibilities of adjustment after the relocation, notably for older people. The closest one gets to straight nostalgia is the recreated walk through the settlement in Charles R. Saunders’s 1989 story, “A Visit to Africville, Summer 1959.” Africa and the relation to Africa as a focal moment of identity creation features more prominently in the poems of Maxine Tynes than in the work of other Africadian poets and writers. A Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, teacher, she has to date published four volumes of poetry, all of superior quality. Feminist and African themes dominate her volume, Borrowed Beauty (1987); in The Door of My Heart (1993), Tynes explores the poetic power of her polio disability in hauntingly beautiful images, drawn from experience in good humor and self-irony. Irony and a subtle sense of humor are also a trademark of George Elliott Clarke’s poetry and prose. To this mélange he adds a fascinating mixture of a traditional tone, showing awareness of both oral forms and African American literary models, and a “high” tone, informed by Clarke’s extremely wide learnedness and appreciation of world literature from the classics through the Italian and French Renaissance to the British and American modernists. Before Fire on the Water he had already published a highly acclaimed volume of poetry, Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983), which already showed distinct traces of this form. The next volume, Whylah Falls (1990),was simply a masterpiece. It has since been turned into a CBC radio drama and provided the basis for a stage www.abc-clio.com

play in 1997. The opera libretto Beatrice Chancy (1999) playfully reenacts the classical theme of The Cenci (a verse drama by Shelley and given several operatic treatments), while Québécité: A Jazz Libretto in Three Cantos (2003) ventures into operatic jazz. Blue (2001) introduced a much sadder tone and pessimistic viewpoint in his poetry, and in the novel George and Rue (2005), Clarke followed the story of two of his cousins who were tried for murder in rural New Brunswick in 1950. In 2001 Clarke won the prestigious Governor General’s Award for poetry (for The Execution Poems [2000]). Other Africadian writers like Maxine Tynes, Faith Nolan, and Sylvia Hamilton have also received stipends, prizes, and public acclaim. With their success, and with the resulting self-confidence, Africadia has come to serve, twenty years after its “invention” by George Elliott Clarke, as a common denominator for the cultural selfexpression of Maritime people of African descent: a clandestine group within the Canadian multicultural patchwork with an ethnoregional identity that is both unique and productive. Wolfgang Hochbruck

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See also: Birchtown; Nova Scotia, African American Diaspora in; Nova Scotia, Black Refugees in References Clarke, George Elliott, ed. Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing. 2 vols. Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield Press, 1991. Dalhousie Review 77, no. 2 (1997). Special Issue: Africadian Literature. Davidson, Arnold E. “Whylah Falls: The Africadian Poetry of George Elliott Clarke.” In Down East: Critical Essays on Contemporary Maritime Canadian Literature, edited by Wolfgang Hochbruck and James O. Taylor. Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. 1996.

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CANDOMBLÉ Candomblé is a Brazilian syncretic religion of West African origins. The emergence of the religious practices of Candomblé in the New World coincided with the relocation of Yoruba, Ewe, and Bantu peoples, who were taken from their African homelands, enslaved, and transported to Brazil by ship. (This began as early as the sixteenth century and continued into the late nineteenth century, when slavery was abolished in Brazil.) Candomblé became a particularly African form of cultural and spiritual resistance to slavery and served as an affirmation and unification of its members’ distinct cultural identities. Under slavery, practitioners of Candomblé succeeded in identifying the Catholic iconography of the saints with their own gods and therefore could remain faithful to their own religious principles while appearing to be true Catholic converts. Followers of present-day Candomblé believe in a pantheon of gods or spirits, often called orixás, in accordance with Yoruba tradition. Ultimately, Candomblé acknowledges a strong relationship between human beings and nature, and the orixás function as mediators who intervene in everyday life in order to improve human experience, both physically and spiritually. Their religious rites and ceremonies take place in terreiros and are officiated by spiritual guides, both male (pai de santo or babalorixá) and female (mãe de santo or ialorixá), literally father or mother of the saints. Most notably, it is women, rather than men, who have traditionally held the more significant leadership roles in Candomblé. Professed believers, known as filhos and filhas de santo, or sons and daughters of the saints, are often initiated into a lifelong relationship with certain orixás, to whom www.abc-clio.com

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they pay tribute through ceremonial dances throughout the calendar year. During Candomblé ceremonies, it is believed that orixás manifest themselves by possessing or mounting the bodies of the filhos and filhas de santo, and these manifestations are later interpreted by the pai de santo or mãe de santo. Some of the most celebrated orixás are Iemanjá (goddess of the sea), Xangô (god of lightning and thunder), Ogun (god of war), and Iansã (goddess of the souls of the dead). Each orixá has his or her own particular cries, sacred offerings, holy objects, preferred colors and special attire. Nicole L. Sparling See also: Brazilian Culture; Orisha; Religion (Africa); Voodoo; Yoruba References Curto, José C., and Renée Soulodre-La France, eds. Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005. Greenfield, Sidney M., and André Droogers. Reinventing Religions: Syncretism and Transformation in Africa and the Americas. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Pierson, Donald. O Candomblé da Baía. Curitiba, Brazil: Editora Guaíra Limitada, 1942.

CAPE COAST CASTLE Cape Coast Castle was the center of the gold and transatlantic slave trade in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. As European trade along the Gold Coast intensified in the seventeenth century, Cape Coast Castle emerged as one of the most important trade enclaves of the region. After changing hands several times, the castle became the administrative center of England’s African trade and in the nineteenth century played a role in the creation of England’s Gold Coast colony.

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Two views of the Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast, West Africa. Originally built in 1653 for the Swedish Africa Company for trade in timber and gold, the Castle was later used in the transatlantic slave trade. (Library of Congress)

When the Portuguese first arrived on the Gold Coast during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, they called the area Cabo Corso, meaning “short cape.” The English later changed it to Cape Coast. Cabo Corso was a short distance from the first Portuguese trade enclave on the Gold Coast, Elmina, established to serve as a base to acquire gold. In 1655 at Cabo Corso, the Swedes built their fort, Carolusburg, which changed hands numerous times before the English finally gained control of it in 1664. The English captured Cape Coast Castle to establish a coastal presence not only for gold but for the growing slave trade. After its creation, the Royal African Company decided to make the castle its coastal administrative center and quickly began work to rebuild, expand, and strengthen the original Swedish structure. as with all of the other www.abc-clio.com

European trade enclaves being created along the Gold Coast, the English did not possess enough power to take the land from the local peoples and were therefore, until the imperialism of the late nineteenth century, tenants. This meant that the English made regular ground rent payments for the land upon which the castle stood, along with numerous customs payments. As the English gained control of and started to rebuild the castle, they concurrently began to develop a relationship with the local Fetu peoples. Cape Coast Castle stood upon a rock jutting out into the water, and it was this rock that housed the local Fetu god Tabarah and his wife, Neyeir. After the Fante brought the Fetu into the Fante confederation, the English relied upon the Fetu to maintain their economic relationship with the Fante. When the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa replaced the

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Royal African Company in 1750, it found the castle to be in a decrepit state and engaged in a long and expensive period of rebuilding and expanding it. They had, by the end of the slave trade, turned it into one of the best built and strongest structures on the coast. After a series of riots at Cape Coast at the turn into the nineteenth century, Cape Coast Castle served as a new administrative center for the development of England’s Gold Coast colony. Ty M. Reese See also: Company of Merchants Trading to Africa; Fetu of Cape Coast; Royal African Company; Slavery (History) References Daaku, Kwame Yeboa. Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Davies, K.G. The Royal African Company. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Lawrence, A. W. Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964.

CAPE VERDE A group of fifteen small islands, the Republic of Cape Verde is a former Portuguese colony with a population of approximately 482,000. Colonized in 1495, it was one of the first Portuguese colonies in Africa. As with many African island nations, its historical role as a transit point for transoceanic trade was considerable. Indeed, most of the land is not arable and the nation suffers regularly from droughts; consequently, the economic fortunes of the islands are closely tied to maritime trade. Close to the West African coast, Cape Verde has had strong historical ties both westward to the Americas and eastward to the African continent. By the sixteenth www.abc-clio.com

century the islands were among the major transit points for the transatlantic slave trade conducted by European nations. The African coast east of Cape Verde soon became known as the Slave Coast. Cape Verde prospered as a place where ships could be easily resupplied as they crossed the Atlantic. By the early eighteenth century, American ships involved in the slave trade and in whaling were also arriving in Cape Verde. Even after the end of the slave trade, Cape Verde would keep its role as a port for transatlantic shipping. Additionally, after the end of slavery, many Cape Verdeans emigrated to Portugal, the United States, and South America. In the United States, many settled in the New England port cities of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. More generally, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen what could be called a Cape Verdean diaspora as people sought better economic opportunities abroad. Now more Cape Verdeans and their descendants live abroad than live on the islands themselves. Money returned from individuals and families abroad make up a considerable amount of the nation’s income. The New England communities of Cape Verdeans still thrive today. Indeed, the significant Cape Verdean presence in New England has led Cape Verde to maintain a consulate in Boston, Massachusetts, as well as an embassy in Washington, D.C. With its longstanding colonial history, it is not surprising that Cape Verde, despite its small size, would also give birth to a leading anticolonial figure, Amlicar Cabral, and be a significant participant in anticolonial struggle in the years after World War II. Born in Cape Verde, Cabral was a founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde

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(PAIGC) (Partido Africano de Indepencia de Guinea e Capo Verde). By 1960 the PAIGC would be active in the war for liberation against the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau. This war occurred in the context both of Guinea-Bissau’s fight for independence and the cold war conflict between the United States and Soviet Union; PAIGC forces were supplied by Soviet-allied nations. Cape Verde’s post–cold war history has been peaceful. Since 1992, Cape Verde has been a multiparty democracy. Its stability has enhanced its relations with the United States, and in 2006, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military forces conducted their first training operations in Africa on Cape Verde’s island of São Vincente. Richard Juang See also: Africa, West; Cabral, Amilcar; Immigration, United States; Portuguese Empire References Halter, Marilyn. Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1965. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Lobban, Richard A. Cape Verde: Crioulo Colony to Independent Nation. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998.

CARIBBEAN ARTISTS MOVEMENT The Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) (1966–1972) was a British-centered arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, seeking a new aesthetic that reflected the rich cultural heritage of the West Indies. CAM grew out of the cultural dynamic of West Indians exiled in London during the 1960s and the early 1970s. The organization found inspiration in the Harlem Renaissance movement www.abc-clio.com

of the 1920s in the United States in that it brought together visual artists, performers, and critics seeking a new aesthetic for Caribbean arts that would reflect the rich cultural heritage of the West Indies. Its founders contended that the musical elements in calypso and ska corresponded to a jazz aesthetic in the Caribbean novel. CAM existed officially for only six years, from 1966 to 1972, but it advanced Caribbean and black British writing, art, criticism, and publishing in a dynamic and far-reaching way. CAM provided a public space, through open meetings and conferences, to debate the role of the arts in the context of an emerging “postcolonial” identity. Jamaican cultural critic Stuart Hall explained to a CAM meeting in 1968 that “The task of any intellectual and any writer in relation to the next generation of West Indians in Britain is to help them see, speak, understand and name the process that they are going through” (Jaggi, 2000, p. 8). CAM’s activities were extended through its members’ travels back and forth between Britain and the Caribbean. CAM’s journal Savacou, edited by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, provided a necessary platform for creative writing and cultural criticism, dedicating whole issues to new experimentation in form, such as the issue titled “New Poets from Jamaica—An Anthology” in 1979–1980. The founding members of the organization were Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose, and Andrew Salkey in 1966. Many well-known figures were associated with the movement, including C. L. R. James, Stuart Hall, Wilson Harris, Ronald Moody, Aubrey Williams, Kenneth Ramchand, Gordon Rohlehr, Louis James, Ivan Van Sertima, James Berry, Donald Hinds, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Christopher Laird,

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and Errol Lloyd. By the time CAM members came together in London, the Caribbean arts were established through a substantial quantity of fiction, poetry, plays, and art exhibitions in Britain. In spite of a growing market, the production of new material was not matched by the critical attention that it deserved. Anne Walmsley was an original member, and she was able to use her insider knowledge and contacts later to research and publish the history of the movement in The Caribbean Artists Movement (1992). There she addressed the movement’s absence from cultural histories of the period in Britain and in the Caribbean. She explained the conditions that prompted CAM’s formation and charts the development of the movement through its subsequent public readings, critical debates, exhibitions, conferences, and publications. A number of women artists, writers, and performers (for example, Althea McNish, Merle Hodge, and Marina Maxwell) as well as wives and partners of CAM activists contributed to the organization’s success, although the list of key members as they appear in the blurb of Walmsley’s book would suggest that CAM was an exclusively male club. CAM also circulated and publicly debated the scholarship of Lucille Mathurin-Mair and Elsa Goveia. CAM’s undoubted achievement lies in its nurturing of talented new Caribbean writers, artists, critics, and historians and in circulating, through its journal Savacou, debates on work that would otherwise have been produced in a critical void. CAM inspired the next generation of black British artists, including Linton Kwesi Johnson and Fred D’Aguiar. It ensured that Caribbean literature, history, and culture would be taught on the Caribbean Examination www.abc-clio.com

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Council’s (CXC) school curricula. The movement also strongly influenced the formation of the specialist publishing houses New Beacon Books and Bogle-L’Ouverture. The organization found it difficult to maintain London as its activity base with a membership scattered throughout the Caribbean, Britain, Europe, and North America. In 1972 official activities declined, although unofficial networks continued to be effective, operating through members like Andrew Salkey, who maintained an address book of the most significant Caribbean artists throughout the world. Sandra Courtman See also: Brathwaite, Kamau; Caribbean Literature; D’Aguiar, Fred; James, Cyril Lionel Robert; Johnson, Linton Kwesi References Francis, Donette. “Cosmopolitan Patriots: West Indian Intellectuals between Home and Metropole.” PhD dissertation, New York University, 2001. Jaggi, Maya Jaggi. “Stuart Hall: Prophet at the Margins.” Guardian, July 8, 2000. Patterson, Nerys. “Letter: The English Cradle of Caribbean Artists.” The Independent, November 16, 1993. Walmsley, Anne. The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972. London: New Beacon Books, 1992. Walmsley, Anne. “A Sense of Community: Kamau Brathwaite and the Caribbean Artists Movement.” In The Art of Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Stewart Brown. Bridgend, UK: Seren, 1995.

CARIBBEAN COMMUNITY AND COMMON MARKET Established in 1973, the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) is an international trade group representing Caribbean nations that promotes economic development and social

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welfare. CARICOM was established by the Treaty of Chaguaramas, which came into effect on August 1, 1973. CARICOM was the culmination of fifteen years of lobbying for regional integration, coming in wake of the failure of the West Indies Federation (1958–1962) and the establishment of the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA) in 1965. CARICOM has fifteen full members: Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Suriname, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad, and Tobago. Associate members include the British Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda. CARICOM aims at helping members achieve economic and social integration. Some of its objectives include improving standards of living and work by developments in health, education, transportation, and telecommunications. It also seeks to expand trade and boost international competitiveness by leveling the global playing field for member states. CARICOM has created several institutions designed to carry out these objectives. These include the Conference of Heads of Government and the Community of Council Ministers. The Conference is the main arm of CARICOM and the final authority for important matters. Its decisions are generally taken unanimously. The Council is the second-highest organization of CARICOM and is responsible for formulating policies concerning cooperation in areas such as education, health, labor, and foreign policies. The Conference and the Council are assisted by the Council for Trade and www.abc-clio.com

Economic Development, the Council for Foreign and Community Relations, the Council for Human and Social Development, and the Council for Finance and Planning. Other major bodies of CARICOM are the Legal Affairs Committee, the Budget Committee, and the Committee of Central Bank Governors. Institutions under the auspices of CARICOM include the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency, Caribbean Meteorological Institute, Caribbean Environment Health Institute, Caribbean Agriculture Research and Development Institute, and Assembly of Caribbean Community Parliamentarians. Associate institutes of CARICOM include the Caribbean Development Bank, University of Guyana, University of the West Indies, Caribbean Law Institute, and Secretariat of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. Though CARICOM has advocated a regional vision, the export economies of its members still depend heavily on nonmember countries. Nevertheless, CARICOM has made major strides toward attaining its objectives. The development of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), for example, was designed to represent a single economic space where people, goods, services, and capital move freely and so enable members to lobby collectively on the international stage. The Treaty of Chaguaramas was revised in 2001 to facilitate this; the revision included the establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) to settle disputes relating to the CSME and serve as an appellate court for member states that have severed ties with the Privy Council in the United Kingdom. Though the Caribbean is multicultural and multiethnic, the majority of its people are of African descent, and thus African

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cultural retentions are found in all aspects of Caribbean society. In recognition of its cultural and historical ties with Africa, CARICOM has sought cooperation with African nations. Members of CARICOM were very vocal in their opposition to apartheid in South Africa and the latter’s occupation of Namibia. After apartheid fell and Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, CARICOM agreed on a regional mission to provide technical assistance and explore trade and investment relations with South Africa. Other efforts toward cooperation with South Africa have included launching the African Caribbean Business Development Bureau in 1998 to strengthen business ties between the two regions and various meetings between members of CARICOM and of the South African government, notably, Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki. Not only has CARICOM been forging links with South Africa, but also with other African nations. Members of CARICOM work with Africa as the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) Group of States to lobby the European Union (EU) in matters often relating to trade. Such relations are governed by the ACP-EU Conventions, that is, the four Lomé conventions and their successor, the ACP-EU Partnership Agreement, commonly referred to as the Contonou Agreement, signed in 2000. The ACP can be formally traced to the Georgetown Agreement, ratified in Guyana in 1975. The ACP states enjoy preferential treatment in the EU market for export products including sugar, rice, bananas, and groundnuts and receive aid in certain key areas of the environment, society, and economy. Other notable achievements of CARICOM include the establishment in 1994 of the Association of Caribbean www.abc-clio.com

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States and the Caribbean Forum of African, Caribbean, and Pacific States, which provide major linkages. At the global level, CARICOM strengthened its negotiating base, and in 1997, the Regional Negotiating Machinery was established to coordinate its external negotiations. Nicole Plummer See also: Barbados; Cuba; Jamaica; Mandela, Nelson; South Africa, History and Politics; West Indies Federation References Caribbean Community. Basic Facts on CARICOM. Georgetown, Guyana: Caribbean Community Secretariat, 1983. Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat. http://www.caricom.org. CARICOM Secretariat. CARICOM: Our Caribbean Community: An Introduction. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004. Pollard, Duke E., ed. The CARICOM System: Basic Instruments. Kingston, Jamaica: Caribbean Law Publishing, 2003.

CARIBBEAN LITERATURE Caribbean literature includes Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Dutchlanguage literature of the Caribbean, addresses cultural and historical influences, and fosters arts movements. The literature of the Caribbean reflects the complexities of the geography and history of the region. In its strictest sense, the Caribbean comprises those islands located in the Caribbean Sea. The languages spoken on each island reflect the history of colonization and enslavement, and former colonial languages often exist side by side with local creoles. The bulk of published literature has been in English, French, Spanish, and Dutch, although concerted efforts toward the development of literary creoles has

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fueled some artistic movements, and several significant works exist in Haitian creole and Papamientu (a Dutch creole). Before the end of the fifteenth century, the Caribbean islands were inhabited by Native Americans, primarily Arawak, Taino, and Carib. The rapid influx of European invaders in the early sixteenth century led to their extermination. In order to replace the labor force and exploit the islands for sugar, coffee, and other cultivation, the Europeans captured African men, women, and children who were brought to the Caribbean as slaves. Slavery was practiced into the nineteenth century, and in this period there was very little literary output. The earliest literature was for the most part written by Europeans and their descendants and included historical logs. Mid- to late-nineteenth-century authors included the influential essays of the Cuban, José Martí, who championed a vision of a united Americas free of interference from United States and European expansionism into Latin America. By the mid- to late- nineteenth century Caribbean literature took the form of letters, the occasional journal; and, in the French-speaking islands, a form of exoticist sentimental writing called doudouisme. In the twentieth century, Caribbean literature has flowered prodigiously and has expanded and developed its definition by addressing the question of which languages and cultures of the Caribbean can articulate the themes and forms of its literature. One of its central concerns is the relationship between orality (primarily storytelling, which is an important part of folk heritage, as well as such musical forms as calypso) and writing. Other themes that pervade the literature are coming to terms with history and memory (particularly in light of the legacies of www.abc-clio.com

colonization and slavery), urbanization, relations between local and global politics, and the desire to record the spoken language of localized communities, be they Arawak, Haitian Creole, or Papamientu.

Anglophone Among the generation of Caribbeans writing in English who came to prominence between the 1930s and the 1950s, the first to make a statement about the group’s collective characteristics was George Lamming, a poet and broadcast journalist, in his book The Pleasures of Exile (1960). He noted the influence of a Trinidadian audience in encouraging already-established writers like Edgar Mittelholzer, Ernest Carr, Lafcadio Hearne, and Samuel Selvon (all of whom wrote primarily fiction). He also pointed to the common experience of this generation of writers, who had all chosen to leave the Caribbean for significant periods of time, most of them to reside in Britain. The historian and author C. L. R. James (best-known for his influential study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938) and his writings on cricket as a cultural phenomenon in the West Indies) and V. S. Naipaul (who would go on to become a Nobel Prize winner) were among these. Another important figure in early Anglophone Caribbean writing was Jean Rhys, whose novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) offered a different, West Indian perspective of the events in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Among the best-known poets are Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Walcott, of St. Lucia, who has also been a prolific playwright and prose writer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 following the appearance of

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his epic poem Omeros in 1990. Brathwaite, born in 1930 in Barbados, spent time in Ghana in 1955–1962. He advocated the use of “nation-language,” which he described as an authentic linguistic expression of Caribbean cultures. Later generations of writers include several key female figures who have led the way in thinking about gender equality in the context of the Caribbean. Paule Marshall and Michelle Cliff have explored psychological dimensions of women’s experience, while Merle Hodge and Erna Brodber have been more concerned with cultural and linguistic questions. The region is also rich in theatrical traditions, especially on the island of Jamaica. One innovative group is the Sistren Theater Collective, which features collective writing by a theater group comprised of working-class women. Travel writing also continues to be an important genre. Here, Caryl Phillips is recognized as a leading figure.

Francophone The poet Saint-John Perse is sometimes regarded as the father of modern French Caribbean poetry. Born on the island of Guadeloupe to French colonial parents, he spent his youth in the Caribbean before emigrating to France and then traveled for much of his life. His adoption of ancient Greek forms influenced later poets who saw parallels between the Greek and Caribbean archipelagoes; however, his ancestry and emigration from the Caribbean make him a controversial father figure. Other key writers in the early development of Francophone literature include Suzanne Lacascade, whose novel, Claire solange: Âme africaine, appeared in 1920, and René Maran, who became the first black person to win France’s literary prize, the Goncourt, for his www.abc-clio.com

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1921 novel, Batouala. Both novels explored (if obliquely) the relationship between Caribbean and African identities, a theme that became more prominent in the next generation of writers. In the 1930s the Martiniquan, Aimé Césaire, and the French Guyanese, Léon Damas, joined with a fellow student at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the Senegalese Leopold Sedar Senghor, to establish a journal, L’Étudiant noir (The black student), which became the foundation for a movement known as Négritude. Négritude was a literary movement that sought to reclaim black cultures and reveal their inherent and historical creative potential. Négritude would develop differently in its African and Caribbean contexts. Aimé Césaire, René Ménil, Suzanne Césaire, and several others formed the Revue tropique, which appeared between 1941 and 1945. Aimé Césaire’s best-known work, Notebook of a Return to the Native Country (1939) first drew the attention of the surrealist poet, André Breton, in 1941, and led to an association between the surrealist movement and some Négritude writers. Another key early figure was the Haitian novelist, Jacques Roumain, who not only helped introduce Communism to Haiti but also, with his novel Masters of the Dew (completed in 1944; published in 1947), inaugurated a tradition of socialist realist fiction that portrayed the experiences of peasants. Later Haitian novelists of note include Marie Chauvet, René Depestre, and Edwidge Danticat, who writes in English and is part of the Caribbean diaspora in the United States. The continued political status of Guadeloupe and Martinique as overseas departments of France has made for a complex understanding of identity on

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those islands. The first writer to try to theorize the implications of this ambiguous status is Edouard Glissant, whose essays in Caribbean Discourse (1981) complement a prolific career as a poet, novelist, playwright, and teacher. His notion of antillanite sought to characterize the essential identity of the French Caribbean. Other writers, such as Maryse Condé and Simone Schwartz-Bart, have taken a more ethnographic approach, valorizing the particular linguistic traits of the region, and have developed the art of storytelling as well. A more recent literary movement, the creolistes, led by Raphael Confiant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Jean Bernabé, have made this approach even more pointed by seeking to change the use of the French language to reflect creole modes of thought.

Hispanophone As mentioned above, the earliest key figure in modern Cuban letters was José Martí. Another important figure is Roberto Fernandez Retamar, whose essay on the Shakespearean character, Caliban, as a potential emblematic figure for the Americas has been highly influential. Among the poets, Nicolás Guillén, who advocated the negrismo movement in tandem with the Harlem Renaissance and the French Négritude movement, also did much to shape Caribbean poetic approaches to sound and to articulate a relationship with Africa. In addition to significant ethnomusicological work in Cuba, Guillén’s contemporary, Alejo Carpentier, wrote several novels, among them, Lost Footsteps (1953) and Concierto Barroco (1974). Cuba continues to sustain a robust literary life with such authors as Nancy Morejón, Severo Sarduy, and Pedro Juan Guttiérez. www.abc-clio.com

Puerto Rican literature also reflects the complexities of the island’s history, and particularly the impact of urbanization on successive generations. The seminal dramatic work is René Marqués’s La Carreta (1953) which tells the story of a peasant family faced with land dispossession. Poetry has flourished both on the island and among diasporic communities, particularly in the enclaves of New York-based descendants of Puerto Ricans, and has fostered the rise of performance poetry through the Nuyorican Poets Café. Well-known Boriqueño poets include Rosario Ferré, Edwin Torres, and Julia de Burgos. There are also important novelists, including Mayra Santos Febre and Luis Rafael Sánchez. Dominican writers include the young fiction writer, Rita Indiana Hernandez. Two diasporic Dominican authors writing in English are Junot Díaz and Julia Alvarez.

Dutch Caribbean literature in Dutch has garnered increasing critical attention in recent years. The first Dutch Caribbean novel was My Black Sister, by Cola Debrot (1935), while Frank Martinus Arion is the first author to have his works translated into English. Tsitsi Jaji

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See also: Brathwaite, Kamau; Caribbean Artists Movement; Cliff, Michelle; Condé, Maryse; Creole/Criollo; James, Cyril Lionel Robert; Johnson, Linton Kwesi; Marshall, Paule; Martí, José; Négritude; Walcott, Derek References Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Translated by J. Maraniss. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

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CARNIVAL, LATIN AMERICAN Glissant, Edouard. Le discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. London; New York: Allison and Busby, 1960. Richardson, Michael, ed. Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Translated by Krzystztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. New York: Verso, 1996. Van Neck-Yoder, Hilda. “Introduction: Special Issue on Caribbean Literature from Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and the Netherlands.” Callaloo 21, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 441–446.

CARNIVAL, LATIN AMERICAN Carnival has been celebrated throughout Latin America since colonial times. The best-known places for Carnival celebration are Bolivia, the Caribbean, Cuba, and Colombia. Some of these different types of Carnival syncretize different cultural traditions: European, African, and Amerindian. One of the most traditional Carnival sites in Latin America is the city of Oruro, in central Bolivia. It has its origin in the Andine invocations to Pachamama, the Mother Earth, to the Tío Supay, the Devil, and to the Virgen de la Candelária, or Virgen del Socavon, the saint patroness of the local miners. The Oruro Carnival is celebrated on the Saturday before Ash Wednesday, when more than forty groups wearing lavishly colorful traditional costumes and masks perform for the audience different styles of dances and music over a five-kilometer-long (3.1-mile-long) course. The best-known of these dances is La Diablada, which represents the fight between good and evil as personified by the Archangel Gabriel and the Devil, respectively. The dance of the Caporales has its origin in Afro-Bolivian traditions and makes fun of the black overseer of slaves of www.abc-clio.com

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the Yunas. The dance called El Tinku represents the encounter between fighters. The Morenada is a music and dance style from the fringes of the Bolivian Andes that possesses both African and native elements. The black and white mask of the Morenada dancer represents the ethnic hybridity of the Bolivian people. Tobas is the dance style of an ethnic group from the mouth of the River Pilcomayo, and it represents its warring attitude in the defense of ancestral traditions. The whole celebration takes around eighteen hours. Carnival in Colombia has existed since the eighteenth century. Although of European origin, it has incorporated African and Amerindian elements. Carnival was censored by the Colombian authorities in the main cities of the country—Bogotá, Cartagena, and Popayan—until the turn into the twentieth-first century. It has been celebrated in Barranquilla, in northern Colombia, and Pasto, in the south. The Carnival of Barranquilla, by far the most traditional of Colombia, takes place in the four days before Lent. Traditional dance styles are performed during the Barranquilla Carnival, such as Cumbia and Garabato, and on Saturday the Orchestra Festival presents Caribbean and Latin bands. In Trinidad, the Carnival season lasts for a month before Ash Wednesday. The official music style of the celebration is the calypso, and there are competitions of steelpan orchestras and huge parades, with revelers wearing elaborate costumes. African culture has a huge influence in Cuban Carnival due to the intense slave traffic in the nineteenth century. Because the African Diaspora in Cuba is somewhat recent, the different ethnic groups were able to maintain their cultural traditions in

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the mutual aid and social clubs of free and slave blacks known as cabildos. Later the cabildos became responsible for organizing the religious celebrations that are the origin of Cuban Carnival. Cuban Carnival does not always coincide with the period that precedes Lent. However, in Havana, where it used to be celebrated in June or July, it is now marked in February. Roberto Ferreira da Rocha See also: Brazilian Carnival; Calypso; Cuban Music, African Influence in References Candela, Mariano. Carnaval de Barranquilla: Patrimonio oral e intangible de la humanidad. Bogota, Colombia: Amalfi Editores, 2004 Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar. Madrid: Cátedra, 2002. Noted inventor George Washington Carver at the Tuskegee Institute, Alabama in 1942. (Library of Congress)

CARVER, GEORGE WASHINGTON (1864–1943) George Washington Carver was an African American inventor, researcher, agronomist, and educator. He was born in southwest Missouri (near present-day Diamond) in 1864 to a slave named Mary and was raised by Moses and Susan Carver. As a child, he won recognition from family and community as a “plant doctor.” In his teens, Carver attended school and worked in various parts of Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, and Iowa. In September 1890 Carver began studying art at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, and in 1891 he moved to the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Ames, where he earned a BS in 1894 and an MS in 1896, both in agriculture. In the fall of 1896, Carver moved to Alabama to teach and conduct research at the Tuskegee Institute, where he would spend the rest of his www.abc-clio.com

professional life. His diverse experimental interests involved finding uses for plant materials, from industrial applications such as paint to domestic applications like creating an affordable and balanced diet. This led him to study vegetables, including the cow pea, the sweet potato, and the peanut, with which he is most identified. Between his classes at Tuskegee and his many public lectures across the country, Carver taught and inspired generations of students and came to embody black scientific achievement and uplift. Until his death in 1943, Carver spent his career studying nature with the goal of harnessing it for the good of humankind, starting with the “man furthest down.” Alex Feerst

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See also: Agriculture; Tuskegee Institute

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CASAS, BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS References Kremer, Gary R. George Washington Carver in His Own Words. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. McMurry, Linda O. George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

CASAS, BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS (1484–1566) Bartolomé De Las Casas, bishop of Chiapas, is regarded as the most influential figure of the movement for the protection and freedom of the Indians in the early years of the Spanish colonization of America. He is also remembered for his role in the development of the by then nascent export of African slaves to the colonies. Born in Seville, Spain, in 1484, Bartolomé De Las Casas was the only male son of a lower-class baker. Following his father’s example— Pedro De Las Casas had joined Columbus’s crew on his second voyage to the Indies— Bartolomé enlisted in Governor Nicolás de Ovando’s expedition in 1502. Excited by the possibility of riches and social promotion, the young De Las Casas, during his first years in the colonies, behaved in the manner of any other Spanish colonist. He worked in the gold mines of Haina and Cibao in Santo Domingo and even participated as a soldier in de Ovando’s campaigns against the natives in Haiti and Santo Domingo, although he did not mention it later in his writings. In 1505 De Las Casas obtained his first encomienda (the encomienda was the equivalent in the Indies to an old Spanish feudal institution of patronage, a form of personal domination of the natives) in Santo Domingo, and in 1514 he was rewarded with another one in Cuba by Diego Velázquez, on whose expedition De Las Casas had taken part as a missionary. www.abc-clio.com

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Months later, in May 1514, he was to renounce his encomienda and liberate the Indians under his jurisdiction, influenced by the Dominicans’ sermons against both that institution and the conquest itself. The ire of the Spanish colonists was raised by De Las Casas’s announcement of the illicitness of the institution and of the atrocious nature of the Spaniards’ deeds. The priest traveled to Spain in 1515, where he stayed for five years and where he would return several times during his life, trying to persuade the crown and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the need to put an end to the encomiendas in America and thus save the decimated Indians from exploitation and genocide. His influence upon Charles V was so great that he almost persuaded the monarch to return the kingdoms of Peru to what De Las Casas consideredtheir legitimate lords, the Incas. In order to save the native population of the New World, De Las Casas proposed that, instead of using Indians, colonists could employ the labor of African slaves. Ancient philosophical and theological traditions supported this idea, based on the fallacy that slavery was the natural condition of black Africans. It is now widely known that De Las Casas inadvertently provided an ethical excuse for the massive development of this dreadful trade in the American colonies. The influence of the Dominican on later Spanish pro-slavery currents of thought was such that three centuries later, his arguments were used to oppose the abolition of slave trade by the delegates who were drawing up Spanish Constitution of 1812. A document was received by the delegates from antiabolitionist colonists in Havana which said that they were not to blame for the exploitation of African slaves, which, they claimed, would never

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have happened except for De Las Casa’s proposal to save the Indians by importing African labor. De Las Casas felt utter remorse years after proposing his “providential” plan, his main act of repentance being the recording of the tragic situation of thousands of enslaved African men and women in his writings. That was all he could do, however, since by the 1530s, the traffic of black Africans to the American colonies was an essential part of the colonial enterprise. Critics have tended to emphasize over the centuries what they have regarded the paternalistic–indigenist posture of De Las Casas. During the twentieth century, however, some have highlighted the Dominican’s interest in the cultural heritage of the American peoples subjugated by the Spaniards, which in his opinion was comparable to those of the Greeks and Romans, and what has come to be called his teoría de la restauración, according to which it was necessary to restore the defeated Indian lords to their previous status. De Las Casas left a significant legacy. Both the adoption of the New Laws in 1542, designed to protect the Indians, and his A Short Account on the Destruction of the Indies (1552), the work that inspired the Spanish Black Legend and influenced Montaigne’s theories of indigenous New World culture and its relation to Old World culture. These stand out as the major contributions of De Las Casas’s fairly intricate, and always contradictory, work. Virginia Fernández Canedo See also: Colonialism; Spanish Empire References Alcina Franch, José. “El Indianismo de Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas.” In Indianismo e Indigenismo en América, edited by José Alcina Franch. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1990.

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Bataillon, Marcel. Estudios sobre Bartolomé de Las Casas. Translated by J. Coderch and J. A. Martínez Schrem. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1976. Borges, Pedro. Quién era Bartolomé De Las Casas. Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 1990.

CASTAS PAINTINGS Castas paintings depicted and classified the different class, ethnic, and racial mixtures in colonial Mexico, particularly those of African lineage. Referring to Spanish America, and particularly Mexico, in the late 1700s, Margarita Orellana affirms, “It was in this society, where almost everyone mixed with everyone else, in a New Spain whose novelty was precisely this mixture, that castas paintings arose” (1990, p. 85). Primarily a late-eighteenth-century phenomenon, the materialization of the castas paintings can be attributed to the preoccupation and anxiety of the predominant white ruling class, which, influenced by the classificatory and categorically defined Age of Enlightenment, attempt to control and regulate the then-emerging intermediate racial entities resulting from widespread miscegenation. Orellana points out that the exoticism and festive spirit which characterized the literary Other during the previous century was replaced by science and rationalism in painting. Edward J. Sullivan explains the anatomy of a typical castas painting: “Castas were always created in a series. Each picture usually contains a couple and at least one child. At times more than one child and even other figures may be illustrated. At the bottom or top of the picture there is an inscription that explains the racial mix shown” (1990, p. 86). Orellana adds, “There is no hint of social conflict between castes in this painting. It simply provides

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Castas painting were used to identify classes of people based on specific racial or ethnic heritages. (Schalkwijk/Art Resource, NY)

a catalogue of what New Spain has to offer: castes, fruit, ways of dress, etc.” (p. 85). This ordering of races extended from the realm of the social functions they performed to the dress codes they were forced to espouse. For example, while Spanish, Indian, and Mestizo men were allowed to practice the skill of weaving, blacks were prohibited from pursuing the trade. Similarly, Thomas Gage, a seventeenth-century Dominican friar, describes the curious relationship between women of African descent and the clothes they donned: “The dress and accessories of the negras and mulatas is so scandalous, and their behavior and attitude so intoxicating, that there are many Spaniards, even those from the upper class, who leave their wives to be with them” (Castelló Yturbide, 1990, p. 54). The caste system was a way to bring order www.abc-clio.com

to this hybrid New World and probably signified a welcome implementation for the Spaniards who resided there and were accustomed to their hierarchically designed Iberian society, which already had a longstanding tradition regarding the issue of blood purity. Some fifty-three different castas are identified by Nicholas León, many of which stand out for their pejorative associations or prejudicial implications. Of those fifty-three, approximately thirty, more than half, refer to racial mixtures that include sanguineal ties to African peoples: Albarasado, Albino, Barzino, Cambujo, Campa mulato, Cuarterón, Cuarterón de mulata, Cuarterón de Chino, Chino, Genízaro, Galfarro, Gente blanca, Gíbaro, Grifo, Jarocho, Lobo, Morisco, Mulato, Mulato obscuro, No te entiendo, Puchuela de negro, Quinterón, Requinterón de mulata, Saltatras, Saltatras cuarterón, Saltatras quinterón, Tente en el aire, Tercerón, Zambo, and Zambo prieto. Many of these words are untranslatable but several, including Saltatrás (jump back) and Lobo (wolf ), reveal the discriminatory bearing on a person’s racial composition the farther away their particular mixture was from “pure” castes. While the paintings were considered by many as aesthetically inferior precisely because of their unorthodox subject matter (the principal supporters of art—the Church and the State—. . . tended to patronize those artists who were able to create images similar or at least reminiscent of works by the great masters), this opinion has gradually shifted (Sullivan, 1990, p. 86). As their cultural value is now more recognized and appreciated, the castas paintings are seen as being ocular artifacts that depict a society in only the way a brush

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upon canvas can: “These visual descriptions of more or less swarthy races that mingle to produce other castes, in pictures that are frequently as beautiful as they are intriguing, provide endless material for the historian” (Orellana, 1990, p. 84). Moreover, they reveal as much about the Spanish and Creole mindset as they do about the people they depict. In the summer of 2004, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held the first ever major exhibition of these castas paintings. Titled “Inventing Race through Art,” it showcased the intersection of race, class, and gender for twenty-first century spectators. The majority of the castas paintings were exported to Spain where, purchased as souvenirs, they were considered novelties for their ability to convey class, race, and social structures. Artists associated with their production include José de Paéz, Miguel Cabrera, Vicente Albán, and José Joaquin Magón. Magali Carrera’s book Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (2003) attributes the end of their production to the emerging spirit of independence and an incipient Mexican national identity. Bonnie L. Gasior See also: Mexico; Mexico (Afro-Mexican Identity) References Carrera, Magali. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Castelló Yturbide, Teresa. “Modes of Dress among the Mestizo Castes.” Artes de Mexico: La Pintura de Castas 8 (1990): 87–88. León, Nicolás. Las castas del México colonial o Nueva España: Noticias etno-antropológicas. Mexico City: Talleres gráficos del Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía, 1924.

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Orellana, Margarita. “The Fever of the Image in Castas Painting.” Artes de Mexico: La Pintura de Castas 8 (1990): 84–85. Sullivan, Edward J. “A Visual Phenomenon of the Americas.” Artes de Mexico: La Pintura de Castas 8 (1990): 85–86.

CASTRO RUZ, FIDEL (1926–) Fidel Castro is a Cuban revolutionary and prime minister and president of Cuba who is known for his Marxist and revolutionary involvement in African and Caribbean nations. He is the longest-serving leader of any country in the world. Fidel Castro was born in Biran, Cuba, on August 13, 1926, one of nine children. His family was successful in business. After Fidel attended public schools with less than stellar results, his father, Angel Castro, felt that Fidel needed a more disciplined environment. He was sent to private Catholic schools in Santiago and Havana and in 1944 was presented with the best athlete award in school. In 1945 Castro began his studies in law at the University of Havana. While he was a student at the university, his already-existing political aspirations became more defined, and he became a member of the Ortodoxo Party in 1947, a nationalist and reformist party formed in response to governmental corruption. Castro also became a member of the Caribbean League, made up of political exiles who resided in Cuba. The Caribbean League’s plan was to overthrow Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, an effort that proved unsuccessful. When Castro started practicing law, he became aware of the economic and social inequality of Cuba’s social classes. Castro’s social consciousness was raised in part when he began to read José Martí. Immersing himself in all of Martí’s writings, he

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Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1961, reading a newspaper. In 1959, Castro led the revolution that overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista. (Library of Congress)

came to understand the latter’s thinking and strategies. After Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 coup, Castro created the 26th of July Movement to overthrow him. In 1953 an attack to depose Batista and his government failed miserably, and Castro and his brother Raul were imprisoned. At the trial, Castro defended his reasoning for the attack with his now famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech. It was at this trial that Castro and the others were sentenced to fifteen years in prison. However, Castro and his brother were given amnesty by Batista in 1955. At this time Castro, his brother, and others headed to Mexico to train for yet another revolution. Here, in Mexico, Castro was introduced to another revolutionary, Che Guevera, who, like Castro, www.abc-clio.com

believed that social injustice and governmental oppression must not be tolerated. Together, they set out to dismantle Batista’s dictatorship. The new revolution evolved in the Sierra Maestra mountains and produced the Sierra Manifesto. It was with the implementation of this manifesto that Batista’s dictatorship was slowly dismantled. Castro’s determination to overthrow Batista was fulfilled in December 1958, when Che Guevera’s forces attacked Santa Clara. Castro’s rebel army rode into Havana in January 1959, sending the United States–backed dictator into exile. Arriving in the capital with its tanks, the rebel army was enthusiastically welcomed. When Castro took over as leader and began to make his celebratory speech, a white

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dove landed on his shoulder, which in the audience’s mind signified the coming of peace. His recognition of social inequality was the catalyst for Castro’s resentment of the upper classes and of Americans with businesses in Cuba. He despised the Cuban leaders of the time who, he felt, were merely puppets of the U.S. government. A failed invasion in 1961 of Southwest Cuba planned by the United States using Cuban exiles, known as the Bay of Pigs, further worsened Cuban-American relations. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 resulted in an agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States: Khrushchev would remove his missiles if the United States would never attack Cuba. Despite this guarantee, Castro’s anger at being a pawn in a game played by other countries led him to reinforce his solidarity with revolutionaries in the developing world. Castro felt that his mutual alliance with the Soviet Union would make his country stronger. When Cuba began suffering economically, Russia stepped in to offer financial support. Russia’s subsidies of Cuba were also a political gesture that helped Cuba regain some economic stability and allowed Castro the opportunity to show the United States that his friendship with the USSR would allow him to remain free of U.S. interference. Castro sought additional support by courting the favor of third world countries, mainly Africa, focusing on Ghana, Algeria, and Angola. His visits to third world countries won him allies as he pointed out the racism in capitalist countries, especially the United States. Castro denounced a situation in which some countries went without the basic essentials while other countries squandered their resources. The third www.abc-clio.com

world nations admired Castro’s audacity and tenacity in fighting the rich countries. Castro implored the people in the third world to use their inner strength to face adversity and survive without help from the wealthier countries. After 1975 Castro launched Operation Carlota, sending Cuban troops to Angola to defend the Marxist government against an insurrection backed by South African troops. Once the soldiers were in place, he sent relief supplies to the Angolans with the message that he was offering safety and security to the oppressed. Castro’s reasoning for protecting and defending third world countries was his identification with Afro-Cubans and their origins as slaves. In addition, Operation Carlota helped confirm Castro as a leader in the eyes of Cuba and African nations such as Angola. When Somalia and Ethiopia became entangled in a war in 1978, Castro sent troops to defend Ethiopia. Castro’s influence was rapidly gaining strength and he became the leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. The more involved Castro became with Africa and other third world countries, the more disdain the United States and other developed countries showed toward Cuba. In Cuba, however, AfroCubans have been great supporters of Castro because they identified with his championing of the Cuban culture and admired his Marxist advocacy of total equality for everyone. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba again faced an uncertain economic future, and Castro had to rely on foreign currencies including the U.S. dollar. Cuba has recovered from the worst deprivations of what Castro called the “special period” that followed the Soviet Union’s demise. Still, in the first

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decade of the twenty-first century, Cuba is an impoverished nation. It is also a nation lacking in human rights and free elections. Opposition to him, however, remains weak. At the same time, Castro has created a society where professionals such as doctors, military officers, and government officials have been able to advance without discrimination on the basis of racial identity or class background. For black Cubans, who make up 70 percent of the population, racial discrimination has declined sharply, although it still exists in various forms. Castro has also taken pride in strengthening the country’s educational and medical systems. Karen E. Holleran See also: Cuba; Voice of America References Castro, Fidel. CHE: A Memoir by Fidel Castro. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1994. Cawthorne, Nigel. “Fidel Castro.” In Tyrants: History’s 100 Most Evil Despots & Dictators. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005. Coltman, Leycester. The Real Fidel Castro. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Fernandez, Alina. Castro’s Daughter: An Exile’s Memoir of Cuba. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997. Fontova, Humberto E. Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2005. Latell, Brian. After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro’s Regime and Cuba’s Next Leader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Montaner, Carlos Alberto. Cuba, Castro and the Caribbeans: The Cuban Revolution and the Crisis in Western Conscience. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1985. Oppenheimer, Andres. Castro’s Final Hour: The Secret Story behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba. New York: Touchstone, 1992. Quirk, Robert E. Fidel Castro. New York: Norton, 1993. Skierka, Volker. Fidel Castro: A Biography. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004.

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Sweig, Julia E. Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Szulc, Tad. Fidel: A Critical Portrait. New York: Perennial, 1986.

CATHOLICISM Catholics have represented a significant population in Africa since the first century CE, and Catholicism has a significant historical and contemporary presence in the Americas. As Philip Jenkins thoroughly documents in his book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (2002), the Christian faith rose in the Middle East and developed predominantly in Africa and the Middle East until about 1400, when Europe and Europeanized North America became the hearts of world Christianity. Ironically, many Eurocentric historians have erroneously considered Christianity a religion rooted in the West. Some postcolonialists and other postmodernists have also made the mistake of associating Christianity exclusively with Western colonialism and imperialism. Alongside Syria, Mesopotamia, and other Near Eastern countries, Africa was an abundant missionary field in the first century CE. A number of Christian communities and learning centers were located in Egypt and North Africa in the first and second centuries; many works of Christian fine art, music, and literature also originated in these areas. Christian monasticism, which for Westerners immediately recalls medieval Europe, originated in Egypt, where St. Anthony the Abbot and others established communities for hermits in the deserts in the third and fourth centuries. North Africa was the home to renowned Church fathers and founders of

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Christian Latin literature. Carthage—in present-day Tunisia—was the birthplace of Tertullian (c. 160–220), one of the earliest Christian apologists; St. Cyprian (190–258), Tertullian’s disciple and bishop; and St. Augustine (354–430), a doctor of the church and author of the Catholic masterpieces Confessions and The City of God. The continent of Africa has also produced such black Catholic saints as St. Benedict the Moor (1524–1589) and St. Martin de Porres (1579–1639). The population of Catholic Africans has steadily grown. In the 1200s, considered the zenith of medieval Christian civilization in Europe, Africa had the largest Christian population in the world. In 1914 Africa had seven million baptized Catholics and an additional million catechumens; these numbers had doubled by 1938. As of 1955, Roman Catholicism claimed to have sixteen million believers in Africa; today, there are 120 million African Catholics, and the number is projected to increase to 230 million by 2025. The leading churches in Africa today include the Catholic, Anglican, and Methodist. Despite much publicity about the recent ascendancy of Independent congregations, Africa remains a predominantly Roman Catholic and Anglican continent. Indeed, Africa’s Roman Catholic population outnumbers that of Independents by more than three to one. Compared to its Protestant counterpart, the Catholic population among African Americans is still modest; as of 2006, the total number was estimated at approximately three million. However, there were black Catholic communities even before the American Revolution in the United States—mostly in Baltimore. Later, black Catholic communities were established in such places as Charleston and www.abc-clio.com

New Orleans. In 1886 the first African American Catholic newspaper appeared, and Augustus Tolton became the first African American to be ordained a Catholic priest. Currently active black Catholic organizations include the Mother Theresa Maxis Duchemin, the National Black Catholic Evangelization Forum/Project Reach Out, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and the Society of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart. Xavier University of Louisiana is the only Catholic and historically black institution of higher learning in the United States. Catholicism arrived in Latin America with the Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the sixteenth century. Although millions of Catholics have converted to evangelical and Pentecostal denominations since the 1980s, Catholicism remains the predominant religion on the continent. Currently there are a total of 424 million Catholics— approximately 42 percent of the world’s Catholic population—in Latin America; 105.9 millions of this figure are of African descent. Latin American countries with the largest numbers of black Catholics include Brazil (65 million), Colombia (20 million), and Mexico (12 million). The Caribbean is the home of 18 million Catholics of African descent; the Dominican Republic accounts for 8 million black Catholics, Haiti 6 million, and Cuba 4 million, respectively. Catholicism plays a significant social and political role in Latin American life. Liberation theology—a school of left-wing theology emphasizing political, economic, racial, and social justice—arose in Latin America in the 1960s. Among its leading exponents were Gustavo Gutierrez (Peru), Leonardo Boff (Brazil), and Juan Luis Segundo (Uruguay), who considered Jesus mainly a liberator of the oppressed.

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Although liberation theology has been condemned by the Vatican since the 1980s as a Marxist-inspired ideology incompatible with orthodox Catholicism, its global influence has been significant; many theologians in the third world have developed their own versions of liberation theology. John J. Han See also: Bakhita, Josephine, Saint; Brazilian Culture; Chikaba; Christianity (African American); Colombia; Mexico; Religion (Africa) References Gillis, Chester. Roman Catholicism in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Hastings, Adrian, ed. A World History of Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000. Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995. Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Sanneh, Lamin. Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel beyond the West. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003.

CEDDO Ceddo is an Afro-British collective for film and television production addressing minority issues and people. Channel 4 of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) went on the air in 1982, with the mission of representing groups who had not been represented on the main BBC channels and of commissioning British films addressing minority issues. One of the means to address these goals was the creation and partial funding of several Afro-British collectives, including the Ceddo Film and Video Workshop. Several founders of Ceddo were already experienced in television production, including Menelik Shabazz, Milton Bryan, and Imruh Bakari Caesar, a fact www.abc-clio.com

that distinguished Ceddo from some of the other collectives formed at the same time. Ceddo’s first film produced for Channel 4, The People’s Account (1985), was not shown on British television due to objections from the Independent Broadcasting Authority over descriptions of the police as racist. Ceddo produced a number of documentaries, including Glenn Ujebe Masokoane’s We Are the Elephant (1987), which depicted the struggle against apartheid in South Africa; Valerie Thomas’s The Flame of the Soul (1990), about sickle cell anemia; and John Akomfrah’s Blue Notes and Exiled Voices, about protest music. Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986) combined documentary film shot during the riots of 1985 with newsreel and archival material to present a view of the causes of racial unrest in Great Britain. Menlik Shabazz, a founding member of Ceddo, also founded Black Filmmaker Magazine and the Black Filmmaker Magazine International Film Festival in 1998; the latter is presented annually and showcases African-themed films from all over the world. Sarah Boslaugh See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent References Lay, Samantha. British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit-grit. London: Wallflower, 2002. Ogidi, Ann. “Ceddo.” http://www .screenonline.org.uk/people/id/569785.

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC The landlocked Central African Republic, just south of the equator, has an estimated population of 4,369,038 as of July 2007. Sixty-four percent of the land is forested, and much of the rest is savannah. It was

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originally a French colony administered as the colony of Ubangi-Shari. The first governor of Ubangi-Shari and Chad (the two colonies were joined together administratively from 1906 until 1920) was Émile Merwart, who later moved to the West Indies as governor of Guadeloupe in 1913–1917. One of the most well-known French officials in Ubangi-Shari was also connected with the Caribbean. René Maran’s family was from the West Indies, Maran’s father moving to Africa to serve in the colonial administration. René Maran wrote a novel Batouala (1921), partly about a chief, which was advertised as “a novel about negroes, seen from inside, written by a negro,” and was a best-seller, winning the Prix Goncourt in the same year it was published. It was the inspiration for French writer André Gide, who subsequently wrote Journey to the Congo (1927). Maran himself was sacked from the colonial government, returning to France in 1925 and writing against the French colonial system. At around the same time, U.S. missionaries became active in Ubangi-Shari, with the Baptist Mid-Missions sending in missionaries from 1920, the National Brethren of Fellowship Churches from 1921, Africa Inland Mission from 1924, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church from 1930. From early on Westerners were interested in Ubangi-Shari’s mineral deposits, including diamonds, with the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Commercial Museum of Philadelphia having significant collections of early specimens. This interest increased in 1950 after two French companies started mining diamonds in the country, subcontracting their work to deliver diamonds to the U.S. government. The country gained its independence from France on August 13, 1960, and David www.abc-clio.com

Dacko became the first president of the Central African Republic. The United States opened an embassy in Bangui, the nation’s capital and one of only two cities in the country. W. Wendell Blancké was its first ambassador. He had served in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during World War II and after his time in West Africa became U.S. consul general in Mexico. Canada’s ambassadors to Cameroon were also accredited to the Central African Republic. In 1962 G. Mennen Williams, the U.S. assistant secretary of state, visited Bangui. John H. Burns was U.S. ambassador from 1961 until 1963. In 1966 Dacko’s cousin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, took over in a military coup d’état. Bokassa had been the head of the armed forces, having served with the French in Vietnam. His government was at first extremely idiosyncratic, and accusations of insanity were later leveled against him in U.S. and Canadian newspapers. This occurred mainly after December 1977, when he crowned himself as the emperor of the Central African Empire, spending lavishly on his coronation. In spite of invitations to, among others, President Jimmy Carter of the United States, President Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, and President Ernesto Geisel of Brazil, no foreign leader turned up at the enthronement, which was said to have cost U.S.$20 million. The aim, Bokassa said, was to ensure that everybody in the world would know about the country, and to that extent he achieved his aim. However, very soon afterwards Bokassa was to gain much bad publicity following the arrest of two U.S. correspondents, one working for the Associated Press and the other with the Washington Post. The Associated Press had reported that Bokassa occasionally “served up” regime critics and political opponents at state banquets, and

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that diners at the coronation banquet may have unknowingly eaten human flesh. Relations were strained and the U.S. ambassador, Anthony Cecil Eden Quainton told Bokassa that given the money spent on the coronation, his government would cancel foreign aid to the country, although it would honor its pledges of $800,000 in 1977 and $475,000 in 1978. Relations were normalized in 1978 but became strained again in early 1979 when demonstrations by school children against the Bokassa regime were ruthlessly suppressed. On September 9, 1979, the United States suspended all aid to Bokassa. Twelve days later, in another coup d’état, David Dacko returned to power and Bokassa fled into exile. Two years later Arthur H. Woodruff became U.S. ambassador to the country, and relations were normalized. The Central African Republic’s air force has used Lockheed 60 utility transport aircraft made in Georgia in the United States. Not many researchers have entered the republic, especially aside from Americans and the French, although Mexico’s Centro de Estudios de Asia y Africa at El Colegio de México has generated some serious studies of the country. Justin Corfield References Kalck, Pierre. Historical Dictionary of the Central African Republic. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. Titley, Brian. Dark Age: The Political Dynasty of Emperor Bokassa. Montreal, QC: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997.

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through wars of national liberation and revolutionary political movements, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States was tasked with observing and influencing those developing regions of the world with the stated goal of furthering U.S. national interests. Among the CIA’s priorities was promoting outcomes in times of political turmoil that would favor the United States over the Soviet Union during the cold war. President Harry S. Truman created the CIA and the office of the director of Central Intelligence when he signed the National Security Act in 1947. The most fundamental task of the CIA during much of the cold war was to keep a vigilant eye on the Soviet Union’s local activities as well as in other countries around the world. Much of U.S. cold war policy was formed around the idea of containing and rolling back the spread of Communism throughout the world. Thus, wars of national liberation and political upheavals in which far-left parties or groups rose to power or threatened to take control of governments became a primary focus for policy makers in Washington. They believed that wherever socialist or Communist movements were gaining strength, the Soviet Union was principally involved. Thus, many of the revolutionary movements in the developing world, including Latin America and Africa, were the subject of intense CIA observation and activity. Political movements of interest to the CIA in Latin America were located in Guatemala, Cuba, and Chile, among other countries. In 1954 Operation Success (also known as Operation PBPSUCCESS) in Guatemala was a highly covert operation conducted by the CIA aimed at overthrowing the populist Jacobo Arbenz, who had been democratically elected in 1950. The

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operation, which was successful, consisted of forming and training a rebel liberation army in Nicaragua as well as conducting a propaganda campaign with the hope of weakening the Arbenz government prior to the liberation army’s invasion. Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba in 1959 led the United States, through the CIA, to make attempts to remove the Communist leader from power. The first attempt, codenamed Operation Pluto, was similar to the Guatemala plan in that it involved training a liberation army made up of Cuban exiles. This army would serve as an invasion force and land on the beaches of Cuba, fighting its way to Havana to liberate the Caribbean nation. The result is known today as the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 in which the invaders were routed. The CIA did not stop trying to oust Castro. After the Bay of Pigs disaster, the CIA engaged in another covert operation, code-named Operation Mongoose. This prolonged operation included assassination attempts, in some cases with exploding cigars; sabotaging shipments of sugar from Cuba and shipments of machinery to Cuba; and commando raids on railroads, factories, and oil and sugar refineries. The goal of this operation was to incite a successful revolt against the Communist regime, which never occurred. In Chile, the election of Salvador Allende to the presidency in 1970 posed problems for Washington. President Richard Nixon as well as many others in Washington felt that Allende was a radical Marxist and would become another Castro. Thus, Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, approved a plan, called Track II, to oust Allende from power. The operation involved infiltrating the Chilean military and encouraging soldiers www.abc-clio.com

to overthrow the Allende government. Not all of the military forces went along with the plan. However, after Allende loyalist General Carlos Prats resigned in 1973, General Augusto Pinochet became the leader of the coup attempt, and it was subsequently successful in wrestling power from President Allende in 1973. In Africa, movements for national independence began to take shape as nations sought to rid themselves of their colonial powers. Wars of national liberation were of interest to the United States as well as the Soviet Union as each vied for dominance in the developing world. Thus, the CIA was very active in Africa, particularly in the former Belgian Congo and Angola. In 1960 the Congo gained its independence from Belgium with a government headed by the militant nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Fear of his ties with the Soviet Union prompted the CIA to begin operations within the Congo aimed at overthrowing the government and assassinating top officials. General Mobutu Sese Seko helped launch a coup d’état in 1965 and named himself president. Thus, the new role of the CIA in Zaire, as Mobutu renamed the Congo, was to aid the new ruler in fending off Lumumbist rebels who were being backed by the Soviet Union and China. As nationalism began to take hold in Angola around the same time, Portugal, Angola’s colonial overseer, struck down every uprising. The United States was caught in a balancing act, encouraging independence movements in Angola and persuading Portugal to speed the transition of the African country toward independence; but it was not willing to risk giving up strategic air bases that were located in the Azores, a Portuguese territory. CIA activity

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was more covert than in the case of Zaire and included mostly the provision of money and arms to pro-Western nationalist groups in Angola. Secrecy was necessary so as to not alert Portugal. When the newly independent nation broke into civil war in 1975, the United States continued to back the pro-Western forces fighting against the Soviet-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The MPLA, backed not only by the Soviet Union but also by Cuba, increased its military capability to the extent that South Africa, aided by the United States and the CIA, was secretly enlisted to help fend off the Soviet-backed group. Remarkably, the MPLA was a formidable opponent and was able to defeat many attempts to crush it. Angola remained in a state of civil war for sixteen years. Both Angola and Zaire witnessed covert operations by the CIA that consisted of propaganda, manipulation of labor unions, assassination attempts, and sales of arms and other military equipment. Many of these operations mirrored in many ways operations that took place in Guatemala and Chile. Mark Freeman See also: Cold War; Congolese Independence; Decolonization, African; Socialism References Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. The CIA and American Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Kelly, Sean. America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire. Washington, DC: American University Press, 1993. Prados, John. Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II through the Persian Gulf. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. Reebel, Patrick A. The CIA: Current Issues and Background. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2003.

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Weissman, Stephen. “The CIA and U.S. Policy in Zaire and Angola.” In Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa, edited by Ellen Ray, William Schaap, Karl Van Meter, and Louis Wolf. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1979.

CÉSAIRE,AIMÉ (1913–) Aimé Césaire was a major Martinican poet, dramatist, and politician and key theorist of Négritude. His writing posits the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean, mediated by Europe. As a leading theorist of Négritude, and co-founder in 1947 and publisher of the Paris-based journal of African and Caribbean affairs, Présence Africaine, Césaire’s credentials as an Atlantic figure are impeccable. (He was also Frantz Fanon’s schoolteacher for a time). Négritude was a political and cultural movement and theory of black solidarity and antiracism, first developed in the 1930s and 1940s, that attempted to unite all black peoples in the world subjugated by European colonialism and Western racism. But it insisted on the centrality of Africa in determining black pride. Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and expressed often via poetry, it was known for its lack of a coherent and agreed definition. It is, however, a crucial component in the black Atlantic World, given the diasporic communities created by the slave trade. Indeed, Césaire was quick to acknowledge his double, Atlanticist, heritage: “I am,” he declared in 1975, “at the juncture of two traditions: American by geography, African by history” (Ngal, 1994, p. 13). Césaire underlines the paradox of being from Africa and yet not from Africa when he states that it is “part of my internal geography.” Négritude’s poetic manifesto is undoubtedly Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au

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pays natal (1939; Notebook of a return to the homeland). Having met Césaire in 1942, the French surrealist André Breton described this epic poem as “the greatest lyric monument of our time.” Mixing Caribbean, African, and European poetic traditions into a multivoiced and troubling narrative, the Cahier is a now a classic of Francophone Caribbean literature, still taught across the Atlantic in Africa. Inspiration for the poem was his return to Martinique in 1935 to find a downtrodden people who, by discovering their African roots and history of slave revolts, are shown to stand up and demand dignity and freedom. Césaire’s Atlantic is conceived as resolutely triangular. Educated in France in the 1930s and a member of France’s parliament (elected in 1945 to represent Martinique in the new Constituent Assembly in Paris), in the same decade he also cofounded the Parisian journal L’Etudiant noir (The black student). As a student in France’s elite educational system, he assimilated the greats of French literature— Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé. His 1950 speech, “Discours sur le colonialisme,” was an indictment of European colonialism and a Communist tirade against American imperialism. (He later left the Communist Party over the 1956 invasion of Hungary). His main focus is, nevertheless, Africa and the Caribbean and the history of the antislavery movement. Having immortalized the Haitian antislavery leader Toussaint Louverture in the Cahier, describing the cell in which Napoléon had imprisoned Toussaint near the Swiss border (that is, as Napoléon said, as far away from the Atlantic as possible), Césaire wrote a biography of the Haitian revolutionary in 1961. In the aftermath of African independence he wrote a series of plays, the most famous www.abc-clio.com

of which—Une saison au Congo (1967; A season in the Congo)—deals with the rebel Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, assassinated in 1961 by the CIA and Belgian intelligence after he was delivered to them by a certain Colonel Mobutu, the maverick who became the longtime brutal leader of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). In his play Césaire calls this perfidious African character Mokutu. Indeed, though not a regular visitor to Africa, Césaire’s work is saturated with references to it and with its echoes across the Atlantic, in both the Caribbean and France. However, if the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe play out in Césaire’s work a “circuit triangulaire,” to borrow an expression of Martin Munro, it is not a straightforward arrangement. Munro shows how critics tend to see the Caribbean figure Césaire in dialogue with, and in search of, his African roots while underestimating the European dimension. Munro points not only to Césaire’s education and erudition in the European tradition (especially the French tradition), but also to the very mix of European culture at the heart of the meeting between Carib and Arawak indigenous cultures (or what was left of it postColumbus) and African exiled culture. Munro’s citation of rhythms in Césaire’s poetry shows how European religious singing mixed with indigenous and exilic song in a miscegenation of cultural forms that Césaire has embraced. It is all too easy, he suggests, to see rhythm in Césaire’s Cahier as a purely African phenomenon that has simply traveled across the Atlantic. Munro’s emphasis on the “circuit”—on the movement of cultural forms and practices in all directions—requires, then, complex negotiation and navigation. There is perhaps “no return to roots” in Caribbean

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consciousness; put another way, the complex tradition-modernity debate that exists in Africa does not pertain to the other side of the Atlantic; or, rather, perhaps it is all the more complex for the hybrid Caribbean experience. It is here that theories of créolité (creoleness) come into their own. More recently, Césaire’s Africanist approach has been criticized by theorists of créolité such as Confiant in his Aimé Césaire (1993); this coincided with stark criticism of Césaire’s political achievements as deputy mayor of Fort-de-France in Martinique. Though Césaire brought about significant social and environmental improvements, he also helped draft the law in 1946 that “departmentalized” Martinique as part of French territory. This so-called postcolonial arrangement was in fact soon out of step with the newly independent African states, leaving Césaire politically isolated on the other side of the Atlantic and open to challenges from those looking for true independence for the French Caribbean. That said, Césaire has also been considered as both the “antecréole” and the “anti-créole” in that, though never championing (or really ever speaking) creole language, his poetry has been celebrated by those creole theorists wishing to downplay the influence of slavery and Atlantic culture as a precursor to the liberation and flourishing of the creole language as a distinct (if interconnected, or “relational,” to use Edouard Glissant’s word) form of literary and cultural identity. Andrew Stafford References Confiant, Raphaël. Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle. Paris: Stock, 1993. Munro, Martin. Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre. Leeds, UK: MHRA/Maney, 2000.

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Ngal, Georges. Aimé Césaire: Un homme à la recherche d’une patrie. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1994. Rosello, Mireille. “One More Sea to Cross: Exile and Intertextuality in Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.” Yale French Studies 2, no. 83 (1993): 176–195.

CHAD The Republic of Chad has a population of approximately 9,539,000 (2004), drawn from 200 ethnic groups. The French controlled the landlocked area that they called Tchad. From 1906 until 1920 it was administered together with Ubangi-Shari (now the Central African Republic), and in 1920 it became a separate colony within French Equatorial Africa. In 1958 Chad voted in a referendum to be an autonomous state within the French Community. Chad gained its independence two years later. Although Chad was geographically distant from the Americas, there were some connections between it and the Western Hemisphere as early as the 1860s. In 1863 an Austrian archduke, Maximilian, was offered the throne of Mexico and accepted, going to Mexico to become its emperor. Backing him, the French government sent contingents of soldiers, one of which included soldiers recruited from Sudan and Chad. The French later pulled out its soldiers and the regime collapsed, with Maximilian being executed soon afterward. A number of French civil servants in Chad worked in the Caribbean before or after their African service. In 1906, when Chad was joined, administratively, with Ubangi-Shari, the first lieutenant governor was Émile Merwart, who served until 1911. He later moved to the Caribbean as governor of Guadeloupe in 1913–1917.

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From 1910 until 1917 the governor of French Equatorial Africa, which included Chad, was Martial-Henri Merlin, who had previously served in Guadeloupe from 1901–1903. And the French governor of Chad from 1939 until 1941, Adolphe Félix Sylvestre Eboué, had previously been governor of Martinique from 1933 to 1934 and of Guadeloupe in 1936–1939. U.S. missionaries have been working in Chad for many years, the Baptist MidMission from 1925 and the Brethren Church from 1965. After independence, Wilton Wendell Blancké was U.S. ambassador to Congo (Brazzaville) from 1960 to 1963 while also accredited to Chad, and the U.S. Peace Corps was active in Chad from 1966 until 1979. As Chad moved to independence, its most important politician was Gabriel Lisette, the leader of the Progressive Party in Chad. He had originally come from the French West Indies, a fact used against him by his political enemies. Lisette was prime minister of Chad until he was ousted as party leader on March 24, 1959, by N’Garta Tombalbaye, who led the country to independence, which was achieved on August 11, 1960. Tombalbaye became the first president of the country, which he ran until his assassination during a successful military coup d’état in April 1975. The new ruler, Noël Odingar, stood down after two days, and Félix Malloum became president for the next four years. In March 1979 he was overthrown in an insurgency led by Goukouni Oueddei, whose unstable rule lasted until June 1982. Until Goukouni Oueddei took over the presidency, the United States had shown little interest in Chad, but it worried about Oueddei’s close links to Libya. With France anxious not to antagonize Libya’s leader www.abc-clio.com

Muammar al-Qaddafi, the United States organized covert support for rival politician Hissène Habré. Civil war ensued, with the Libyans backing Oueddei and the CIA providing support for Habré, who came to power in 1982 and won some major military victories over the Libyans in 1987. Habré was overthrown, however, in 1990. In 2006 Donald Yamamoto, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, visited Chad in connection with the petroleum pipeline from Cameroon, which moves 170,000 barrels per day for Exxon Mobil and ChevronTexaco. Because of regional instability, wars, and poverty, few tourists have visited the country. Transatlantic aid has come in a variety of forms. Aid workers from the United States and Canada have been active helping Sudanese refugees in Chad. Justin Corfield See also: Humanitarian Assistance References Burr, Millard, and Robert O. Collins. Africa’s Thirty Years War: Libya, Chad, and the Sudan, 1963–1993. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. Decalo, Samuel. Historical Dictionary of Chad. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997. Kirk, R. “The Sudanese in Mexico.” Sudan Notes and Records 24 (1941): 113–140.

CHAMOISEAU, PATRICK (1953–) Martinican novelist, essayist, and theorist of créolité, Patrick Chamoiseau is the firstever winner from the French Caribbean of France’s prestigious Goncourt Prize for literature, with his 1992 novel Texaco. Chamoiseau (or Oiseau de Cham) writes in a French that owes much to his native creole language. He is deeply concerned with history and stories, especially

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in their oral deployment. As one of a set of creole theorists (with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant), he has promoted the distinctiveness of Caribbean culture and literature to the perceived detriment of African influence on the region. The history that his literary work investigates is that of a Caribbean, which has only the faintest vestiges of its African and slavetrade links. However, his most sustained essay on the writing of literature considers the problematic situation of writing in a country under another country’s control. Considering not only the Caribbean, but also Africa, he provides an answer to his own question of how to write in a “dominated country” by deploying his highly creolized French to discuss the issue. The essay is a sustained debate with Edouard Glissant (and involves his other famous compatriot, Aimé Césaire, as well as Haitian creole writer Frankétienne), but it also engages with other (mainly French) poets and writers such as Saint-John Perse, Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, and Victor Segalen. With Raphaël Confiant, he coined the neologism “diversality” to describe creole culture as both specific and universal, with its multiple ethnic determinants. Yet Chamoiseau’s work is deeply Atlantic in its preoccupations. Texaco describes the “drive,” the endless errance (wandering), that Caribbean people, as rootless descendants of slaves, have to confront within their cultural identity. His 1997 novel, L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse—involving Glissant’s choruslike interjections—is a vivid portrayal of an old slave who becomes a Maroon and is saved from a hunting dog by a rock. Indeed in Le Roman Marron, Richard D. E. Burton (1997) has shown how Chamoiseau, more than any other French Caribbean writer, represents and replays the www.abc-clio.com

marooning spirit. His impressive photoessay on “memory-traces,” (1994), alongside photographs by Rodolphe Hammadi of the prison islands off French Guyana (where Henri “Papillon” Charriere was imprisoned), displays a deeply Atlanticist understanding of the region’s past, making links between the (largely white) internees and those blacks who threw themselves into the sea to escape slavery. However, Chamoiseau’s memory-traces—material objects such as rocks, prisons, and the ocean itself— are claimed as elements in a distinct Caribbean identity. It is the tension in his work between refinding a distinctly Caribbean history and acknowledging the (perhaps unquantifiable) slave influences on it, rather than any direct engagement with Africa (or France), that makes Chamoiseau an important Atlanticist writer. Andrew Stafford References Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Raphaël Confiant. Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature: Haïti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane, 1635–1975. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Chancé, Dominique. L’auteur en souffrance: Essai sur la position et la représentation de l’auteur dans le roman antillais contemporain, 1981–1992. Paris: PUF, 2000. Morel, Lise. “In Praise of Creoleness?” In An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing, edited by Sam Haigh. Oxford: Berg, 1999.

CHIKABA (VENERABLE THERESE JULIANA OF SAINT DOMINIC) (1676–1748) Chikaba was a Ghanaian-born woman who became enslaved, but her life differed from the lives of other slaves because she entered a convent, spent fifty-five years as a secondclass nun, and is now in the process of

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being canonized. Her biography, written by her confessor a few years after Chikaba’s death, can be read both as a religious slave narrative, a hagiography, or both. It is believed that Chikaba was born around 1676, in the Elmina area of today’s Ghana, to a respected and wealthy family. She grew up with a father (name unknown) mother (Abar), and three brothers (Juachípiter, Ensú, and Joaquín). Chikaba’s father was a tribal chief. When she was about ten years of age, she was captured by a Spanish slave ship. Following the traditional maritime route, the ship stopped at the isle of São Tomé, where Chikaba was baptized and given a Christian name, Therese. The slave ship resumed the voyage, sailing first toward Lisbon and then Seville. Once in Spain, and following imperial custom, Chikaba was presented to the king, Charles II, who, in turn, offered her as a gift to the marquis and marquise of Mancera, aristocrats who lived in Madrid. Chikaba was a house slave but, we are told, she was treated by the Manceras more as a daughter than as a slave. Accordingly, the Manceras provided Chikaba with an elite education: she was taught how to read and write; she was instructed in the Catholic religion; and she was even allowed to sit at the Manceras’ table for meals. When Chikaba was about twenty-five years of age, she decided to enter the convent. The Manceras’s petition was rejected on several occasions, and Chikaba was rejected in all the convents in Madrid and Avila for the sole reason of being black. It was thanks to the Manceras’s family connections that she was finally accepted at the Convent of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Mary Magdalene, popularly known as the Convent of Penance, in Salamanca, where Chikaba arrived in 1703. Chikaba finally www.abc-clio.com

took her vows on June 29, 1704, receiving the name of Therese Juliana of Saint Dominic. Chikaba’s conventual life was exemplary. Commonly known as “la negrita” (the little black girl), she devoted her life to working for her religious congregation, ignored those who looked at her with scorn or suspicion because of her skin color, and excelled in her piety, charity, and humility. At the convent Chikaba was relegated to doing the household chores (such as cooking, washing, and cleaning) and the sacristy, and she also worked as the doorkeeper. Due to her poor health, she died on December 6, 1748. Her relics are kept at the Dominican Sisters in Salamanca, popularly known as Las Dueñas. The canonization process of Chikaba has already started, and she has recently been named Venerable. If canonized, Chikaba will become, together with St. Josephine Bakhita from Sudan, among the few freed female African slaves who are saints. Chikaba’s story is known thanks to her last confessor, the Reverend P. Juan Carlos Pan y Agua, who wrote Compendio de la vida ejemplar de la Venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo (Compendium of the exemplary life of the venerable Sr. Therese Juliana of Saint Dominic) in 1752. Following the tradition of hagiographies, or the recording of the lives of saints, Pan y Agua’s religious biography emphasizes Chikaba’s precocious wisdom, her long-lived search for God, her noble origin, and her death, which was accompanied and immediately followed by many kinds of supernatural events. Unfortunately, the biography of Chikaba provides very little information on her African childhood. Given the early age at which Chikaba was captured, the names, locations, and vicissitudes associated with her childhood are

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hard to verify. Chikaba’s convent life, however, is documented in detail by Pan y Agua’s work, which offers a day-to-day account of her religious life. Maria Frias See also: Bakhita, Josephine, Saint; Catholicism; Slave Narratives Reference Fra-Molinero, Baltasar. “La primera escritora afrohispánica: Chikaba o Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo.” http://www.bates. edu/bframoli/pagina/chicaba.html.

CHILE Chile has a history of involvement in slavery and the slave trade and has political relations with Africa as well as cultural and artistic connections. Chile is a country located on the western coast of South America. It occupies a narrow region running from north to south, from the Andean region to the southern tip of South America. It is bordered by dry land in the north, by the Antarctic in the south, by the Andean highlands in the east, and by the Pacific Ocean in the west. Chile was a colony of Spain from the time that Diego de Almagro claimed the region for the Spanish crown in 1536 to the time it achieved its independence in 1818. Chile is considered the “whitest” country of Latin America, and the legacy of African slaves in Chilean history and society is not acknowledged. However, this does not mean that there were no Africans in Chile, only that the African presence in the country has faded away through centuries of miscegenation. The first blacks to arrive in Chile came with Diego de Almagro in 1536. The importation of slaves began mostly as a way www.abc-clio.com

to supplement the indigenous labor force. Chile was of minor importance to the Spanish crown because it was a poor colony. The importation of African slaves, then, was not significant nor it was a priority for the crown. Slaves were initially introduced to Chile to provide a workforce for the colony’s mining industry. In fact, in the Spanish colonies of South America, it was only in Chile and Peru that African slaves worked in mines alongside native people. Slave labor in Chile was also used in agriculture and in urban centers as servants, skilled artisans, shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, and so on. Slaves were brought to Chile by two routes, the Pacific and the Atlantic. The Pacific route began in the Atlantic on the coast of Africa, continued to the northern coast of South America (especially Cartagena and Panama), and proceeded overland to the Pacific and then to Chile. The Atlantic route also began on the coast of Africa but took slave ships to Argentina, more particularly to the port of Buenos Aires. From there, slaves were taken on foot across the Pampa region and the Andes to Chile. Both routes were extremely difficult, and the mortality rate could reach as much as 50 percent or even more. The order of the Jesuits was the biggest owner of slaves in Chile, with perhaps as many as 2,000. The Jesuits employed slaves in all kinds of occupations, including agricultural and household work. When the Jesuits were expelled from Chile in 1767, they sold their slaves mostly in Peru. The slave population in Chile was never very large. For instance, it is estimated that the slave population in the late eighteenth century was around 12,000. One interesting aspect of the black population in Chile is

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that the number of blacks declined while the number of mulattos increased throughout the colonial period. For example, in the late sixteenth century there were about 10,000 blacks and no significant number of mulattos. However, by the mid-eighteenth century, there were about 3,000 blacks and almost 20,000 mulattos, and by the early nineteenth century, the numbers were around 1,500 blacks and almost 30,000 mulattos. The proportion of Spaniards to Africans also changed throughout the colonial period in Chile. From the early sixteenth to the early seventeenth century, blacks outnumbered the Spaniards, but between the mid-seventeenth and the early nineteenth century, this picture changed drastically. For instance, in 1570 there were about 7,000 Spaniards in the country and 10,000 blacks. In 1620 there were 15,000 Spaniards and 22,500 blacks. Finally, by the late eighteenth century Spaniards began outnumbering blacks: in 1777 there were around 120,000 Spaniards and around 3,000 blacks and 20,000 mulattos. By 1813 the proportion was around 281,000 Spaniards to around 1,500 blacks and 30,000 mulattos. In 1823 Chile freed all of its slaves, the first Spanish American republic to do so. Even though the African presence in Chile has been lost because of miscegenation, it is still present in the ethnic composition of the country. Africans did not disappear; they mixed with whites and natives, and in this way their legacy still exists. Evidence of their contribution to Chile is found in the country’s official national dance, the cueca, which is believed to have African origins that were mixed with Spanish ones. Still, the African presence in Chile has been ignored by both the authorities and www.abc-clio.com

scholars. In fact, many different governments, and especially the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, have attempted to affirm Chile as a European country. This effort has included making it difficult for Africans to immigrate and ignoring the presence and contributions made by descendants of Africans. As a consequence of the return of democracy, an organization called Oro Negro (“Black Gold”) was formed in 2001 with the specific objective of lobbying for the recognition of the African presence in Chile and the rescue of the nation’s African cultural roots. Rosana Barbosa and Rosa Barbosa Nune See also: Colonialism; Slavery (History) References Dominguez, Jorge I. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. New York: Garland, 1994. Fagerstrom, René Peri. La Raza Negra en Chile: Una presencia Negada. Santiago, Chile: Editora Hilda López Aguilar, 1999. Klein, Herbert. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Mellafe, Rolando. Negro Slavery in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Sater, William F. “The Black Experience in Chile.” In Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America, edited by Robert Brent Toplin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974.

CHRISTIANITY (AFRICAN AMERICAN) African American Christianity has shaped the religious practices and culture of Christianity and has also influenced African American cultural practices and political life. Since the early years of their arrival in the United States, the vast majority of African Americans have participated in some variation of Christianity. Enslaved Africans were denied the right to

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practice their African faiths in America; they were also excluded from Christian worship with white Americans and sometimes forbidden from Christian worship altogether. The roots of the African American Christian tradition are, consequently, a specifically African adaptation to the Christian faith, especially in the minimization of abstract doctrine and the maximization of physical and oral expression. Beliefs similar to Christian doctrine had been common in Africa, including notions of a supreme deity, good and evil spirits, the afterlife, worship services, and water baptism. Antebellum Protestant clerics were divided in their views on black slavery, while after the Civil War most white churches rejected black parishioners. Consequently, after 1865, black people were finally able to worship in a formal setting, and specifically black church communities formed, becoming a foundation of black cultural identity and political culture. In the 1950s and 1960s, many of these churches were at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. The five Christian faiths with the most African American adherents today are, in descending order, the Baptist, Methodist, Holiness-PentecostalApostolic, Catholic, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The church history of these five is rife with conflict over black slavery. For instance, there was a schism between white and black Baptist churches over slavery that has not even now been repaired and which has spawned seven major African American Baptist churches. As a group, African Americans have associated themselves strongly with Christianity in modern times. Alana Trumpy See also: African Methodist Episcopal Church; Diaspora; Pentecostalism

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References Lincoln, C. Eric, and Lawrence Mamiya. The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000 McMickle, Marvin Andrew. An Encyclopaedia of African American Christian Heritage. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2002. Wilmore, Gayraud. Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998.

CHRISTOPHE, HENRI (1767?–1820) After playing a prominent military role in Haiti’s war of independence (1791–1804), Henri Christophe became the president (1807–1811) and king (1811–1820) of Haiti’s North. Christophe was born a slave in Grenada on or around October 6, 1767. After Haitian slaves revolted against their French masters in August 1791, Christophe joined the fighting, becoming one of Toussaint Louverture’s, then JeanJacques Dessalines’s, most famous subordinates. Among his most renowned revolutionary acts was the burning of Cap Haïtien (then known as Cap Français) in February 1802 before the city was taken by Napoléon’s troops. (Christophe later collaborated with, then turned against, the French expeditionary force.) A signer of the January 1804 Haitian Declaration of Independence, Christophe opposed Dessalines’s massacre of the white population in Haiti. He then participated in the 1805 invasion of Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic). Christophe took part in the revolt that overthrew Dessalines on October 17, 1806. Under an agreement with mulatto leader Alexandre Pétion, Christophe was to become president, ruling the country

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jointly with Pétion, the president of the Senate. The relationship between the two quickly degenerated into a civil war. On February 17, 1807, Christophe established a separate state in northern Haiti, with himself as sole president. (Pétion declared himself president of the southern and western part of the country on March 9, 1807.) Though Christophe quickly established complete control over his half of the country, his repeated attempts to oust Pétion proved inconclusive. On March 26, 1811, Christophe proclaimed himself King Henri I of the North. He then proceeded to create a nobility, then to organize a magnificent coronation ceremony held on June 2, 1811. Christophe ruled with an iron hand, creating a 4,000-strong police force known as the Royal Corps of Dahomey. Thieves, stragglers, and idle peasants were severely punished. Even though slavery had been abolished during the War of Independence, Christophe continued Louverture’s and Dessalines’s policy of fermage. Under this policy, peasants were forced to remain as workers on the plantations on which they had once been slaves in exchange for a 25 percent share of the crop and food, clothes, and housing (with the right to tend their own gardens on Saturdays). Christophe’s rule was brutal, but in comparison with Pétion’s South, where a policy of land distribution had led to subsistence farming and plummeting exports of sugar, the North flourished economically. Christophe used some of the proceeds to build magnificent mansions, including Sans Souci palace in Milot, and the nearby citadel of La Ferrière (also known as Citadelle Christophe), a massive, 200-gun fortress surrounded by precipitous cliffs. Left paralyzed by a debilitating stroke on www.abc-clio.com

August 15, 1820, Christophe quickly found himself faced with an armed rebellion. He killed himself (allegedly with a silver bullet) on October 8, 1820. His wife, Marie-Louise Christophe, and their two daughters, Améthyste and Athenaire, fled into exile. Philippe R. Girard See also: Dessalines, Jean Jacq ues; Haiti; Louverture, Toussaint Bréda; Pétion, Alexandre Sabès References Cole, Hubert. Christophe, King of Haiti. New York: Viking Press, 1967. Vandercook, John W. Black Majesty: The Life of Christophe, King of Haiti. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1980.

CITIES According to some common definitions, human settlements may be considered cities when they reach the following conditions: a population of more than 5,000, diversity in jobs and services, a relatively high density of people per square unit of land, and a specialized economy of nonagricultural activities. In many cases, also, cities are more than just a locus of economic activities, and the design of cities in Africa and Latin America have often followed urban planning programs intended to consolidate emerging national identities as well as to establish urban centers as focal points for national development. Historically, the colonial administrations on both continents were highly centralized, and this centralization contributed to the concentration of national and metropolitan power, whether in the hands of colonial administrators or in the hands of local elites. In Latin America as well as in Africa, an historical trend to occupy peripheral land near the coastlines

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was strong, except in the case of urbanization in Colombia and Mexico, where it occurred primarily on the highlands. The growth of cities in Latin America during the nineteenth century reflected the growing economic dependence of less industrialized countries upon industrialized nations. At the turn of the twentieth century, French planning exerted a huge influence in several capital cities of the world. Inspired by Georges-Eugéne Haussmann’s interventions in Paris, planners and politicians undertook the urban renovation of Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Mexico City. These capitals were given monumental architecture, grand boulevards, and symbolic landmarks. However, the fast expansion of cities after World War II exceeded government capacities to extend basic services to the new districts in the outskirts of major urban centers. At the time, government agencies took charge of the construction and administration of basic services, and many municipalities faced financial crises when the accumulated debt escalated, mostly due to inadequate tax-collection systems. With the nascent industrialization of the 1930s and 1940s, urban planners embraced modern ideas from Europe and North America, characterized by industrialized construction methods, large-scale highway construction to connect urban centers, public housing developments built along elite enclaves, and laissez-faire urban policies that produced distinctive spatial patterns of irregular settlements along the urban periphery. The great physical expansion of major cities in Latin America occurred in the 1930s, when Buenos Aires approached 3,000,000 inhabitants, Mexico City had 1,229,576, Sao Paolo was close to 1,000,000, Santiago de Chile had 712,533, and Havana rose to 655,823. www.abc-clio.com

During this time, when Latin America already had twenty-eight cities with more than 100,000 people, that figure was surpassed by only three cities in Africa: Ibadan and Lagos in Nigeria and Omdurman in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Kano and Addis Ababa had around 80,000 inhabitants, while Dakar, Accra, Luanda, and Mombasa rose to 50,000 people. However, substantial urban growth occurred in Africa during the 1950s and 1960s, when cities like Ibadan and Kinshasa reached a million people each. The rapid urban expansion of both Latin American and African cities escalated in the 1960s, when irregular settlements expanded on the urban periphery and slowly but steadily were incorporated into the formal city. The African continent in general, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, are urbanizing fast. Africa has a long tradition of urbanism predating the colonial period. During the colonial era, however, major changes were introduced that led to the rapid expansion of cities. Within urban areas, colonial policy distorted land markets by adopting racially segregated land-use patterns as well as by taking steps to exclude Africans or limit their access to urban land. Nevertheless, the recognition of traditional tenure as a parallel system of accessing land was meant to transfer the control and management of land in these areas to reflect the indigenous social systems. Rapid urbanization in Africa has been associated with the failure of public authorities to provide sufficient land to meet the needs of the burgeoning population. After independence and with the support of the World Bank, a number of countries undertook upgrading projects in the 1960s and 1970s, the purpose of which was to address irregular urban development by

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providing serviced sites for construction as well as improving their general environmental and tenurial conditions in unplanned areas. However, these scattered projects did not have a major impact on the development of irregular areas, in which by the 1980s a large proportion of the urban population in African cities lived. As the World Bank noted in the case of Conakry, Guinea, illegal settlements represented the most frequent form of urban land occupancy and resulted from informal and unregistered financial arrangements with customary occupants. Although in the past, irregular land was stigmatized as constituting neglected, dangerous, and illegal areas of the city, recent evidence suggests a more complex situation, with middle- and highincome households, as well as civil servants and prominent entrepreneurs, showing a sizable presence in these areas. In both Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, high-income households are seen to be developing high-rise or otherwise expensive buildings in irregular areas such as Manzese and Mathare. African cities continue to grow in physical size without expanding the capacity of their limited existing infrastructure and services. This has resulted in poor housing, rundown infrastructure, and environmental decay. In Africa, cities maintain a significant role as centers of economic development, but this has led to the decline of rural regions due to the high migration rates to metropolitan areas. The concentration of facilities and opportunities in a very limited number of cities has given rise to dismayingly sharp differentials in urban and rural incomes and to growing social and geographical inequalities. In both Latin America and Africa, the high concentration of migrants moving away from poor conditions in rural areas www.abc-clio.com

and townships has put unparalleled pressure on urban resources, infrastructures, transportation, and environments. Levels of poverty, unemployment, overcrowding, and informal settlement formation have been exacerbated. This has led to a severe crisis of maintenance and to the deterioration in urban services and quality of life in African and Latin American cities. The rapid growth of cities and the migration of the rural poor has led to housing shortages that have not been dealt with by urban planners. What is often referred to as a vast “informal” sector in African and Latin American cities is in fact a workingclass majority that survives at the level of subsistence. While building the formal city, public officials have always referred to housing construction as their main goal since the number of low-income housing units produced has been the key to their political success. However, public housing usually meets only one-tenth of the social housing demand, which means that the other 90 percent of the population must meet its needs through self-help housing. A strategy widely promoted by international aid organizations, self-help practices were conceived as a substitute for government-sponsored initiatives. The strategy consisted in financing local groups and organizations that spontaneously emerged to deal with miserable urban conditions. The World Bank’s Sites and Services program was inspired by self-help strategies, involving credit and “cost recovery,” or liability, and were aimed at creating an incipient real estate market for the stable-income consumer. However, this approach ultimately could not solve the housing needs of the impoverished majority. Even when selfhelp strategies can serve as a positive instrument of development, a constant among

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the strongest and most influential self-help groups has been the demand for a stronger government role and a more equitable economic and political system. Many housing policies call for the reduction of the government’s share of the housing burden while incorporating the poor in the provision of their own housing. Under this policy of the “enabling approach” to housing, the government concentrates its efforts on those functions that nongovernmental sectors cannot undertake effectively, in particular, security of tenure, infrastructure and public services, community facilities, construction credit, and a viable legislative framework. This strategy, promoted by agencies such as the World Bank, are initiatives intended to mobilize resources from the formal and informal private sector, community-based and nongovernmental organizations, and individual households. However, asking the poor to access housing through the market presents substantial difficulties where unemployment and poverty rates continue to be very high, as in Africa. Alternative strategies may include enabling access to land at costs affordable to the poor, vigorously pursuing job creation through informal-sector programs that can promote income generation, and availing affordable credit to the poor to allow them to improve their housing incrementally. Alfonso Valenzuela-Aguilera See also: Colonialism; Urbanization References Becker, Charles M., Andrew M. Hamer, and Andrew R. Morrison. Beyond Urban Bias in Africa: Urbanization in an Era of Structural Adjustment. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994. Morse, Richard M., and Jorge Hardoy. Rethinking the Latin American City. Washington, DC; Baltimore; and London: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press and The John Hopkins University Press, 1992.

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O’Connor, Anthony. The African City. London: Hutchinson, 1983. Salau, A. T. “Urbanization and Spatial Strategies in West Africa.” In Cities and Development in the Third World, edited by R. B. Potter and A. T. Salau. London: Mansell, 1990. Simon, D. Cities, Capital, and Development: African Cities in the World Economy. London: Belhaven, 1992. Stren, Richard E. African Cities in Crisis: Managing Rapid Growth. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989.

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT The Civil Rights Movement was the struggle to obtain equal rights for African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, challenging racial segregation and disenfranchisement through peaceful means. The movement marked a time in America when the African American struggle for equality was brought to national and international attention. It was built on a long history of struggle for freedom and against oppression. As early as the 1940s, the Congress of Racial Equality was challenging racial segregation through sit-ins and other forms of peaceful protest. A critical turn for the African American community was the Brown v. Board of Education decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, which declared school segregation unconstitutional, effectively overturning Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). This was a crucial victory for the NAACP and lawyer Thurgood Marshall. Brown vs. Board of Education initiated a direct challenge to the “separate but equal” doctrine that had been sanctioned by Plessy vs. Ferguson. Unfortunately, school integration did not come easily, despite the Court’s ruling. In fact, during 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower was forced to send U.S. troops into Little Rock,

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Arkansas, to implement the desegregation of the high school there. Likewise when James Meredith became the first African American to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1962, he was escorted by U.S. marshals. The modern Civil Rights Movement began in 1955 with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Parks was a member of the local chapter of the NAACP. The laws of that time required African Americans to sit at the back of city busses; in fact, a line was painted aboard each bus establishing the segregation of the races. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to give up her seat in the front to a white male. Parks’s arrest led to the Montgomery Boycott, a communitywide boycott of the bus company. The Montgomery Boycott proved instrumental, as it initiated similar movements across the South. The Montgomery Boycott was organized by the Montgomery Improvement Association and its newly elected president, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King was instrumental in bringing national attention to the boycott, and later to the broader movement, by utilizing television to focus national awareness on the struggles of the African American community. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted for one year and came to a close when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public transportation violated the U.S. Constitution. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was instrumental in bringing Dr. King to the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1957 King, along with Charles Steele and Fred Shuttlesworth, established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which took on an organizing role in the movement. King was very much www.abc-clio.com

Dorothy Geraldine Counts walks to enroll at the previously all-white Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 4, 1957. White communities often strongly opposed desegregation, and white youths taunted her on her way to school. (Library of Congress)

influenced by the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi and supported the philosophy of peaceful resistance. This philosophy would be reflected in the marches, sit-ins, and other forms of protest that marked the movement. King preached as well as practiced a nonviolent philosophy. During his tenure as leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King was arrested numerous times. On April 16, 1963, King wrote “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” asserting the moral obligation of individuals to disobey unjust laws. In his most famous address, the “I Have a Dream” speech given on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., King professed his belief in nonviolent resistance and his desire to win racial equality in all aspects of American life. This speech was the highlight of the historical March on Washington, where more than 200,000 people joined

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together to protest the status of African Americans in America. The march was organized by a joint effort of civil rights leaders, leaders of the labor movement, and liberal politicians. The march had six official goals: the establishment of federal work programs; equal employment rights; equal housing rights; voting rights for African Americans; and integrated education, with the overall aim of the passage of civil rights laws. Following the march, Dr. King and other civil rights leaders met with President John F. Kennedy to discuss civil rights legislation. In 1964 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm, Sweden, in recognition for his work in the Civil Rights Movement. King was the third person of African descent to receive the award. While he spoke about and lived a life of nonviolent resistance, Dr. King’s death was marked by violence. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while in Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking city sanitation workers. King’s death came the day after he had given his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Riots broke out across America in the days following King’s death, which brought global attention to the experience of African Americans. Around the world King was recognized for his desire for equality and for his nonviolent pursuit of that dream, and his death, occurring in such a violent manner, helped bring to light the often-ignored discrepancy of life, citizenship, and rights for black people in American society. The world saw a divided image of the United States in which African Americans struggled to gain freedom while members of mainstream society sought to maintain a system of segregation. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education initiated www.abc-clio.com

change across America, and nowhere was this more evident than in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the school board, in support of Brown, voted in 1957 to integrate the school system. Controversy erupted when the governor, Orval Faubus, called on the National Guard to prevent nine students from entering Little Rock’s Central High School. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and issued an order for it to retreat. The “Little Rock Nine,” the African American children who sought to attend the school, were able to enter the building, but from the onset they were subject to physical and verbal abuse from their white peers. Several African American reporters who where there to mark the integration of Central High School were beaten severely by the mob that had gathered around the school in an attempt to keep the students out. By the middle of the first day, the “Little Rock Nine” had to be escorted from the school facility after city officials lost control of the angry mob outside. President Eisenhower then sent in the 101st Airborne Division to escort the Arkansas nine into the school. The troops patrolled outside the school and escorted the “Little Rock Nine” around the school each day. Eventually, the 101st was pulled out and in May of 1957 Ernest Green became the first African American to graduate from Central High School. Green was the only black student in the class of 602 graduates. As in the case of King’s death, much of the news of the Civil Rights Movement that circulated around the world involved violence that beleaguered it. Perhaps one of the most well-remembered moments of the movement occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, in an area known as Dynamite Hill. Churches, a long-established core of

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the African American community, played a significant role during the Civil Rights Movement. They served as meeting places for the African American community, and often marches, sit-ins, and other forms of nonviolent protest were conceived in churches, which were also frequently the starting point of demonstrations. As a center of the African American community and of the movement, churches came to represent a threat to those against integration and equal rights for all Americans. Church burnings thus became a common occurrence throughout the South. The Ku Klux Klan, in particular, was known not only to burn churches but to set crosses afire in front of them as well as the homes of African Americans. On September 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, an explosion occurred at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a central meeting place of civil rights leaders. The bombing resulted in the deaths of four little girls: Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins. This event shocked the African American community in Alabama, in the South, in America, and in many places around the world and highlighted the level of racist violence in the United States. The death of these innocent girls also brought global attention to the Civil Rights Movement. Critics across the globe cast a critical eye on American society, reexamining the nation’s ideology of freedom in light of the actual treatment of African Americans. The death of King and these four little girls, coupled with other significant losses—Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Mississippi in 1955; civil rights leader Medgar Evers, murdered in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963; www.abc-clio.com

civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964; and Malcolm X, shot dead in New York City in 1965—presented an image of American society that was fractured, an impression in contrast to how the United States wanted to be seen. These deaths were unnecessary sacrifices that opened the eyes of Americans and individuals throughout the world to the marginalized status that African Americans continued to hold in American society. These losses challenged the image of America as the core of global freedom. The success of the Civil Rights Movement was due to the efforts of many. In February 1960 the Greensboro Four, four African American students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, initiated a sit-in at a Woolworth’s counter after they were refused service. Throughout the South other youths followed them, gathering at lunch counters to protest the refusal of establishments to desegregate. Individuals who participated in sit-ins were instructed to dress well and sit quietly, following the nonviolent path that King had established for the movement. They left empty seats between them, encouraging white patrons to join them in their struggle. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) played a crucial role in providing leadership, along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded in 1960 at Shaw University. In 1961 CORE began sending student volunteers on bus trips into the South, testing a 1960 U.S. Supreme Court decision that prohibited segregation in interstate travel facilities. These Freedom Riders

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traveled into the Deep South in an attempt to desegregate bus company terminals. The Freedom Riders encountered violence: buses were firebombed and attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Some riders were arrested and subjected to inhumane treatment. The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a group of civil rights organizations that included CORE and SNCC, initiated the registration of black voters during the Freedom Summer, a 1964 campaign that included both black and white college students from the North and South. It was during this campaign that three civil rights activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, bringing both national and international attention to Mississippi. The FBI was brought in to investigate the brutal deaths. The murders were a factor in the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and education. In 1965 SNCC and SCLC began an aggressive voting initiative in Selma, Alabama. On March 7, supporters set out on a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital. Six blocks into the march, at Edmund Pettus Bridge, the demonstrators were attacked by state troopers and local law enforcement. Footage of the peaceful demonstrators being brutalized by law enforcers were seen around the country and the world. President Johnson delivered a televised address to Congress eight days after the march, giving support to the voting rights bill that was before Congress at that time. On August 6, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, suspending poll taxes and literacy and other voter tests as well as www.abc-clio.com

authorizing federal supervision of voter registration. Also active during this time were the NAACP and the Urban League. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund provided the legal personnel for the Civil Rights Movement and played a key role in Brown v. Board of Education. The Fund was instrumental in helping James Meredith become the first African American student to attend the University of Mississippi in 1962. As a consequence of the movement’s successes, blacks began to move into positions of power in the United States. Most noteworthy, on October 2, 1967, Thurgood Marshall, who had been an instrumental figure in the Brown v. the Board of Education case, became the first African American U.S. Supreme Court justice. There are a growing number of African Americans in Congress and the Presidential Cabinet, and Barack Obama is currently the first nationally recognized candidate for the U.S. Presidency. J. A. Brown-Rose See also: King Jr., Martin Luther; Malcolm X References Carson, Clayborne, David J. Garrow, Darlene Clark Hine et al., eds. Eyes on the Prize: Civil Rights Reader—Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954–1990. New York: Penguin Group, 1991. Collier-Thomas, Bettye, and V. P. Franklin. Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Lewis, John, and Michael D’Orso. Walking in the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Parks, Rosa, with James Haskins. Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Penguin Young Readers Group, 1999. McWhorter, Diane. A Dream of Freedom: The Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968. New York: Scholastic, 2004.

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272 CIVIL WAR, AMERICAN Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. New York: Penguin Group, 1987.

CIVIL WAR, AMERICAN The American Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Although complex economic and social forces motivated Southerners to secede and ultimately take up arms, the war was fought over the union of the United States, threatened by the issue of whether or not slavery would continue in the United States. Despite the popular myth that African Americans were simply the subjects of this debate, blacks were involved in and affected by nearly every aspect of the war. At the onset of the conflict, more than 4.5 million people of African descent lived in the United States, and 3.5 million of these men, women, and children lived as slaves in the South. (Blacks comprised nearly one-third of the overall population south of the Mason-Dixon Line.) The Civil War came as the culmination of decades of heated political debate. The 1857 Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, which categorized enslaved African Americans as property and and declared that African Americans had no political rights, followed important laws that shaped the national conversation about slavery. The Compromise of 1850, a series of five laws, allowed the admission of California to the Union as a free state while declaring that future states carved from territory taken in the war with Mexico would be allowed to determine for themselves whether or not slavery would be permitted within their borders The Fugitive Slave Law, a part of the compromise, required www.abc-clio.com

northern states to return runaway slaves. However, many citizens in the North refused to obey, and free blacks and abolitionists began to see war as inevitable. In 1859 antislavery advocate John Brown led a raid on a federal arsenal with the hope of eventually freeing slaves in the South, and in 1861 the Republican Party, which was formed by antislavery activists, gained control of the White House when Abraham Lincoln became president. Before Lincoln was even inaugurated, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and by June 1861, ten other southern states had followed suit. Once the fighting began in April, African Americans heeded Frederick Douglass’s call for “black men just now to take up arms in behalf of their country” (Hargrove, 1988, p. 2). Thousands of African Americans volunteered to join the Union Army; yet Lincoln initially objected to their participation, arguing that the chief goal of the conflict was to reunite the country, rather than abolish the system of slavery. As a result, many Northern blacks contributed to the war effort in nonmilitary capacities by working in hospitals and factories. Others enlisted in the U.S. Navy, which allowed African Americans to serve as sailors. With Northern forces moving deeper into Confederate territory, Union soldiers were approached by hundreds of escaped slaves who sought their protection. Following Lincoln’s official policy, some U.S. generals immediately returned these men and women to their masters. Other generals considered runaway slaves to be contraband and held them in Union camps, where they proved to be an additional source of labor. More rarely, black men were allowed to fight as Union soldiers, and the first all–African American unit of the

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The 4th U.S. Colored Infantry at Fort Lincoln during the Civil War, part of the defenses of Washington, D.C. (Library of Congress)

war was the First South Carolina Volunteer Regiment, recruited by General David Hunter in May 1862. (The U.S. Department of War quickly disbanded this unit and reprimanded Hunter for taking such action.) For those blacks who remained on the plantations, life during the war became increasingly difficult. Like whites in the South, African Americans experienced a scarcity of food, increased sickness, and a lack of access to Northern products. Finances became leaner for their owners, and slaves tended to be bought and sold with greater frequency, as their masters needed money. Furthermore, African Americans were expected to support the Southern economy while their owners went off to fight. Nearly 80 percent of military-age white southern www.abc-clio.com

males participated in the war, and blacks were left to help build fortifications, deliver supplies, serve as blacksmiths and laundresses, and provide medical care for troops. On July 17, 1862, the U.S. Congress had passed two acts that allowed for the enlistment of African Americans in the Union army. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which granted freedom to all slaves in Confederate-held territory. Blacks came to comprise about 10 percent of the overall Union Army, and by August 1863 the army featured fourteen black regiments. Over the course of the next two years, African Americans steadily proved their value to skeptical U.S. commanders. In May 1863 blacks fought valiantly at the

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Battle of Port Hudson in Louisiana, and in July the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts volunteered to lead a charge against Confederates at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Despite their courage and skill as soldiers, African Americans were still considered to be fugitive slaves by opposing Confederate troops, who targeted blacks on the battlefield. In 1864 a force of more than 2,500 Southern men attacked Fort Pillow in Tennessee, which was manned by no more than 600 Union troops. The Confederate soldiers took the fort with little trouble, and of the 292 African American soldiers stationed there, only 62 survived the punishment that Southern soldiers sought to render. Confederates murdered blacks who attempted to surrender, and African American bodies were nailed to logs and lit on fire. By the end of the war, over 179,000 blacks had served in the Union Army and Navy, with 3,000 dying of wounds suffered in battle and 33,000 perishing from disease. With the exception of Sherman’s campaign through Georgia, African American soldiers served in every major battle of the war’s last two years. Still, blacks in the Union Army experienced much discrimination, and it was not until near the end of the Civil War that Congress authorized equal salaries for African American soldiers. As a result of their courage, sixteen black soldiers were ultimately awarded the Medal of Honor, and Martin Delany, a doctor and writer, became the first black field officer when Lincoln commissioned him as a major of infantry in 1865. On January 31, 1865, Congress ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery in the United States and its territories. Although this came as a relief to those who believed that the United States www.abc-clio.com

might revert to its former ways following the war, conditions for African Americans did not radically improve in the South. Many former slaves remained on the land of their previous owners, who became notorious for undercompensating these newly freed men and women. Other blacks relocated to urban areas, where education and work were often more available, or to Northern states, where the lure of starting a new life was attractive. Clark Barwick References Hargrove, Hondon B. Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988. Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Civil War. New York: Da Capo Press, 1989. Ramold, Steven J. Slaves, Sailors, Citizens: African Americans in the Union Navy. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Trudeau, Noah Andre. Like Men of War: Black Troops of the Civil War, 1862–1865. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.

CLEMENTE WALKER, ROBERTO (1934–1972) Roberto Clemente was a Puerto Rican baseball player and humanitarian. As a baseball player, Clemente is considered one of the best right fielders ever to play the game. He was nicknamed “The Great One.” Clemente’s accomplishments include four National League batting championships, twelve Gold Glove Awards, the Most Valuable Player (MVP) award in 1966, and the World Series MVP in 1971. Roberto Clemente was born on August 18, 1934 in Carolina, Puerto Rico, to Don Melchor Clemente and Dona Luisa Clemente. He was the youngest of seven children (six boys and one girl). His sister Rosa called him “Momen,” which was the

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family nickname for Roberto. Americans would nickname him “Bob” or “Bobby,” which he found to be insulting. He wanted everyone to know his name and his heritage. Growing up, Clemente’s love was for baseball. When Roberto was a young boy, he played with the Santurce Crabbers, a Puerto Rican winter league team comprised of Latinos, Negro League, and other Major League players. In 1954 he signed with the minor league Montreal Royals, and later that same year Clyde Sukeforth, a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates, signed him with the Pirates. Clemente’s athletic abilities were his ticket to professional baseball; however, he was subjected to racism his whole life. Not only was racism prevalent in the mainland United States, it existed in Puerto Rico as well; in Montreal it was not as prevalent. One of the problems he faced in the United States was racial segregation, which became a serious problem when the Pirates were in Fort Myers, Florida, for spring training. There, he was labeled a “Puerto Rican hot dog” by the media (Markusen, 2001, p. 38). Clemente resented this label and decided that prejudice toward African Americans and Latinos needed to be addressed and resolved. Clemente had to endure not only racial slights, but cultural differences as well. One major challenge that Clemente had to overcome was his use of the English language. He spoke broken English and some reporters typing up Clemente’s comments would spell them phonetically for the readers. Doing this reflected the public’s stereotypic picture of Latinos as lazy and awkward when it came to speaking the English language. Clemente realized he had been represented by the press as an uneducated Latino, a stereotype to which other ball www.abc-clio.com

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players were subjected. He argued that Latino players were treated harshly and unfairly by umpires and the media. When reporters began attaching the words “Latin American” when identifying Clemente, he expressed disdain for the media. Another instance of discrimination occurred when Clemente and his wife went to a furniture store. When they entered the building, they were told that they had to go to another floor. As soon as Clemente was recognized, the store owner apologized and explained that he reacted the way he did because he thought Clemente might have been one of “those” Puerto Ricans, implying the stereotype of criminality. Because of his experiences, Clemente’s campaign to address and get rid of discrimination was directed not just toward the game of baseball, but to societies as a whole. Clemente was not just a baseball player who helped the Pirates to become a successful ball team; he was also a hero to the people of Puerto Rico. He returned to Puerto Rico every year and taught the children the game of baseball. On December 31, 1972, Roberto Clemente and four other people boarded a plane to offer their assistance to the people of Nicaragua by taking relief supplies to Managua following a devastating earthquake. The plane crashed in the Caribbean Sea and Clemente’s body was never found. On August 8, 1973, Roberto Clemente was the first Hispanic player to be inducted into National Hall of Fame. That year the Roberto Clemente Award was created for athletes who not only excel in baseball, but who donate their time to the betterment of communities. Clemente was an athlete, but first and foremost he was a humanitarian. His dream of having an athlete training facility for

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minorities has become a reality—the Ciudad Deportiva Roberto Clemente (the Roberto Clemente Training Center) located in Carolina, Puerto Rico. San Rico, Puerto Rico, named its coliseum Coliseo Roberto Clemente in honor of the “Great One.” To honor the memory of Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates retired the uniform number 21. Monuments and memorials are found worldwide and include scholarships, schools, streets, bridges, postage stamps, and ballparks in Clemente’s name. Clemente’s legacy embodies the following quote from Clemente himself: “Any time you have the opportunity to accomplish something for somebody who comes behind you and you don’t do it, you are wasting your time on this earth” (Walker 1988, p. 140). Karen E. Holleran References Dunham, Montrew. Roberto Clemente: Young Ball Player. New York: Aladdin Paperback, 1997. Engel, Trudie. We’ll Never Forget You, Roberto Clemente. New York: Scholastic, 1999. Greene, Carol. Roberto Clemente: Baseball Superstar. New York: Scholastic, 1991. Musick, Phil. Who Was Roberto? A Biography of Roberto Clemente. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Walker, Paul Robert. Pride of Puerto Rico: The Life of Roberto Clemente. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1988.

CLIFF, MICHELLE (1940–) Michelle Cliff is a Jamaican American novelist, essayist, and educator. Author of several books, including Free Enterprise (1993), Michelle Cliff ’s creative works discuss the intersection of gender, race, and sexuality. She was born in the Englishcolonized Jamaica on November 2, 1946. Three years later her family moved to a Caribbean neighborhood in New York. At www.abc-clio.com

the age of ten, Cliff returned to Jamaica to attend school. She earned a BA in 1969 and from Wagner College in London. She completed an MPhil in the Italian Renaissance at the Warburg Institute of the University of London in 1974. Cliff worked in teaching and publishing for several years and did not begin writing until she was in her late thirties. She is the author of poetry collections, novels, short stories collections, and academic articles. Cliff has received many awards and fellowships, including National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1982 and 1989, a fellowship from MacDowell College in 1982, and a fellowship from Artists Foundation of Massachusetts in 1984. She was an Eli Kantor Fellow at the artists’ community, Yaddo, in 1984; the Allan K. Smith Professor of English Languages and Literatures at Trinity College from 1993 to 1999; a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in New Zealand; the Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Rosa Parks Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan; a visiting professor at Johannes Gutenberg University; and a visiting writer at the Vermont Studio Center. Being a light-skinned or white creole, a lesbian, and a Jamaican enable Cliff to speak within a transatlantic context on race, gender, class, language, history, and sexuality. Her fictional characters experience external and internalized racism, sexism, and homophobia. Her first two novels, Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987), are considered autobiographical. In Abeng, Clare Savage is the light-skinned daughter of Boy Savage, a light-skinned descendant of a slave owner, and Kitty Savage, a dark-skinned descendant of the Maroons. The novel centers on the process by which Clare comes to terms with the

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implications of skin tone and race in Jamaica’s history of slavery and colonialism. Clare is also the main character in No Telephone to Heaven. After studying in the United States and the United Kingdom, Clare returns to Jamaica. Cliff ’s third novel, Free Enterprise (1993), focuses on the imagined activist Mary Ellen Pleasant. The only historical record of such a person was a note signed by M.E.P. on the dead body of the U.S. abolitionist John Brown. In the novel, Mary Ellen Pleasant and the young Jamaican Annie Christmas join John Brown in the raid on Harpers Ferry. In Free Enterprise Cliff recreates a network of activism and resistance under oppressive English colonialism to explore the gaps in the history of Jamaican people. Cliff ’s other works include the poetry collections Claiming an Identity They Taught me to Despise (1980) and The Land of Look Behind (1985) and the short story collections Bodies of Water (1990) and The Store of a Million Items (1998). The latter was chosen by the Village Voice in New York as one of the best books of 1998. Her story “Transactions” appeared in Best American Short Stories 1997 (1998). Forthcoming by Cliff is a collection of essays called Apocalypso. Cliff currently lives in Hartford, Connecticut, and Santa Cruz, California. Laura Madeline Wiseman See also: Caribbean Literature; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, U.S. References Cliff, Michelle. Bodies of Water. New York: Dutton, 1990. Cliff, Michelle. “History as Fiction, Fiction as History.” Ploughshares 20, nos. 2 and 3 (1994): 196–202. Cliff, Michelle. The Store of a Million Items: Stories. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

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Gifford, William Tell. Narrative and the Nature of Worldview in the Clara Savage Novels of Michelle Cliff. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. MacDonald-Smythe, Antonia. Making Homes in the West/Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Routledge, 2001.

CODE NOIR The Code Noir (black code) is the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French legal code addressing the treatment of slaves that was applied to France’s American colonies. (By extension, many refer to all the laws regulating slavery in the French colonies as Code Noir). The Code Noir was promulgated by French king Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) in March 1685. Its sixty articles established legal precepts on how slaves should be treated. Secretary of the Navy Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), conceived of the Code, which Charles de Courbon and Jean-Baptiste Patoulet wrote. The Code was applicable in France’s American colonies, primarily Saint Domingue (Haiti), along with Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Martin, Sainte-Croix, French Guyana, Quebec, Acadia, and St. Barthelemy. It was extended to the island of Réunion in 1723 and to Louisiana in 1724. France abolished slavery in 1794 (1793 for Haiti), then reestablished it in 1802; the Code was added to Napoléon Bonaparte’s Code Civil in 1803 and remained valid until the slaves’ final emancipation in 1848. The Code Noir contained clauses designed to ensure slave obedience and reduce the likelihood of slave revolts. Many of the Code’s provisions protecting slaves, considered benign for its time, were never enforced. Slaves were to be taught Catholicism and baptized (article 2); slaves practicing

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other religions, or owners allowing them to do so, were liable to punishment (article 3). The Code also expelled all Jews from French colonies (article 1) and protected Catholic slaves from religious discrimination on the part of their Protestant owners (article 5). No slave was to work, or be auctioned, on Sundays (articles 6, 7). Slave owners could not sexually abuse any of their female slaves; if they did so, the only way to avoid being fined and having the slave confiscated was to marry her and to grant freedom to the slave and her offspring (article 9). Slaves could not be married without their owner’s consent—but not against the slaves’ will either (articles 10, 11). Slavery followed the maternal line: children of free women were free, while those of slave women were slaves, regardless of the father’s status (article 13). Owners were required to feed and clothe their slaves properly, even when they grew old; the Code even set a procedure for slaves to sue their owner for mistreatment (articles 22–27). Aside from this procedure, slaves could not sign contracts, sue in court, or act as witnesses; they could, however, still be prosecuted (article 28–31). Masters were financially responsible for their slaves’ exactions against others (article 37). Slaves could not own weapons and could not hold large gatherings (articles 15, 16). They could endure the death penalty for hitting their master or stealing a large animal (articles 33–35). Escaping was also punishable by death, starting with the third attempt (article 38). Such penalties were enforceable by courts only; masters, aside from lashes, could not single-handedly resort to torture or capital punishment against their own slaves (article 42). Slaves were to be treated as property, with a few exceptions. They had to be www.abc-clio.com

shared equally among the master’s heirs at a time when primogeniture remained customary in France (article 44). Slave families could not be separated (article 47). The Code established a simple procedure for freeing slaves and stipulated that freed Africans were to be treated as full citizens (articles 57, 59). The Code, on paper, was an enlightened piece of legislation considering that few whites enjoyed due process in metropolitan France, where torture and cruel forms of capital punishment were legal. The gap between the law and reality was wide, however. Article 9 notwithstanding, masters often took one or more of their female slaves as mistresses. Despite article 47, families were frequently split up at auction, with children as young as six sold separately. Numerous anecdotes in travelers’ accounts from colonial times recount cruel treatments (including death) unilaterally imposed by masters upon their slaves even though article 42 forbade such things; masters were rarely prosecuted for these crimes. Masters, despite the Code’s clear prohibition in article 24, frequently ordered their slaves to supplement their diet by gardening in their spare time. (The practice, known as Samedi-Nègre, or Black Saturday, was legalized in 1786). In the late eighteenth century, free persons of African ancestry suffered from increasing racial discrimination, in clear violation of articles 57 and 59. Racial discrimination in French colonies continued after the abolition of slavery. Until 1946 French law distinguished between colonial “citizens” and “subjects,” the latter (black Africans) being granted few legal and political rights. Philippe R. Girard

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References Klein, Herbert. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Louis XIV. L’Edit du Roi sur la police de l’Amérique Françoise. Versailles, France, March 1685. “The Black Code: Edict of the King Governing the Enforcement of Order in the French American Islands from the Month of March 1685, Registered at the Sovereign Council of Saint-Domingue, May 6, 1687.” In Le Code Noir ou recueil des reglements rendus jusqu’a present, trans. John Garragus. Paris: Prault, 1767 [1980 rpt., Societe d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe]. Roach, Joseph. “Body of Law: The Sun King and the Code Noir.” In From the Royal to the Republican Body, edited by Sarah Melzer and Kathryn Norbber. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. South African novelist John Maxwell Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature. (AFP/Getty Images)

COETZEE, JOHN MAXWELL (1940–) The winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, John Maxwell (J. M.) Coetzee, was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940. His work has circulated widely throughout the Americas, and he is considered an innovator of the postcolonial novel. He lived for a while in England before moving to the United States to take his doctorate degree in literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote his dissertation on Samuel Beckett’s writing style. After having been denied U.S. citizenship in the early 1970s, Coetzee returned to South Africa to teach and write. In March 2006 Coetzee became an Australian citizen and he lives and continues to write there. A published author by age thirty-four, Coetzee’s present international reputation is a product of his captivating works as well as his influence over the years as a teacher and writer at universities in the United States, England, and South Africa. More www.abc-clio.com

recently, he has served on the Committee on Social Thought and taught one term per year at the University of Chicago. The transnational flair inherent in Coetzee’s life and writing leads Graham Huggan and Stephan Watson to observe in Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, “Essentially, he is a first-world novelist writing out of a South African context, from within a culture which is as bizarre and conflicted an amalgam of first- and third-world elements as any on this planet” (1996, p. 1). His novels are read around the globe and have been translated into multiple languages. Additionally, he has received several literary prizes aside from his Nobel, notably the CNA prize, South Africa’s top literary award, for In the Heart of the Country (1976) and the Booker Prize for Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and again for Disgrace (1999).

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Coetzee’s novels often deal, in inventive ways and formats, with the highly polemical issues of the times in which they were written. For example, his 1974 novel, Dusklands, critiques the countries of Vietnam and South Africa in terms of spaces of invasion through the monologues of two fictional individuals who participate, each in his own right, in projects of colonization. In his “Literature and Politics” (1998), Michael Vaughn notes that “the juxtaposition of these two sections enables Coetzee to develop his overriding theme—Western man as colonizer—in terms of a dialectical opposition. The two sections negate and reinforce each other in their dialectical juxtaposition: the historically primary image of the explorercolonizer is both reinforced and negated by the historically secondary image . . . of the hopelessly incorporated intellectual” (p. 55). Coetzee’s style indeed was something new, at least from a South African novelist, and many literary critics (Michael Vaughn, Derek Attridge, David Attwell, and others) have noted that his early writing was characterized by recent literary aesthetics, modernism or postmodernism, already featured in European and North American fiction. Coetzee’s second novel, In the Heart of the Country, was followed by Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980, and it was this third novel that propelled the author to worldwide fame. In Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004), Derek Attridge reveals that “the popularity of Barbarians led to the first-time publication of Dusklands in Great Britain in 1982 and in the US in 1985” (p. ix). Establishing Coetzee’s place on the international literary map, the allegorical Waiting for the Barbarians recounts the story of an unnamed magistrate in an www.abc-clio.com

unnamed Empire who must deal in an unspecified time period with an evil Colonel Joll. Joll, responding to rumors of attack to be led by the “barbarians” who live at the edges of the Empire, sets off on a campaign to explore their land and to capture some of the “barbarians.” He eventually brings several of them to the magistrate’s town, where they are tortured and some are killed. The magistrate himself eventually becomes directly involved when he seeks to help an injured “barbarian” girl make her way home. Many of the incidents in the novel mirror in full or part specific historical incidents, such as Stephen Biko’s death, that had taken place in Coetzee’s native country. Attridge argues that “the novel was able to have its cake and eat it too: a powerful posing of the question of torture and of the responsibilities of those in power in the places where it is allowed to happen, it could be read both as an indictment of the atrocities that were keeping apartheid in place at the time of its publication and as a universally relevant, time- and placetranscending narrative of human suffering and moral choice” (ibid., p. 42). Thus, the force of this novel is evident in the multifarious levels of interpretation and analysis it demands. Consequently, critics insist on the relevance of the text to the political interactions of many nations and they categorize it as allegory, while Attridge adds that much in the novel evades such simple classification. Like Barbarians, Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, written in 1983, has also been classified as an allegory by some critics because its action takes place in an unspecified future time. Life and Times of Michael K, winner of the 1983 Booker Prize, traces the path of a protagonist who faces the difficulties of living in a place made chaotic by civil war.

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Coetzee’s narrative experimentation is elaborated through Michael, who remains silent in the face of catastrophic events taking place around him. Michael is ironically able to “fight back” through his silence, which Michael Marais calls, in “The Hermeneutics of Empire” (1996), “a potent political tool through which the other escapes and challenges [imperial cultures]” (p. 75). In the end, Michael remains unaffected by the uprisings around him as Coetzee implies that those who, on the surface at least, appear as other, as the disenfranchised, can truly find agency to challenge “the fixity of dominant power structures and positions” (ibid., p. 75). While Michael K offers glimpses of stability despite the upheaval and turmoil caused by the South African civil war, one of Coetzee’s latest novels, Disgrace (1999), also a winner of the Booker Prize, presents perspectives of interpersonal interactions within a postapartheid context. Disgrace tackles the political and social vexations of postapartheid South Africa by following the dismissal of David Lurie from his university position. Lurie has been accused of sexual encounters with a student and is forced to leave his job. With no prospects, Lurie moves in with his daughter Lucy. They live their lives in complete disagreement and under great strain. After an incident in which three black males come onto their property to pillage, burn, and rape, Lurie blames all of society’s ills on postapartheid disruptions of the status quo. Attridge observes that, from this white professor’s perspective, all of which was perceived at one point in time as stable and good has been upended. He adds that rules and regulations no longer apply as they once did, and that nothing is in place to check and balance the actions and misdeeds www.abc-clio.com

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of criminals and politicians. Finally, and most damaging for Lurie, the white man no longer controls the power; he is now “exposed and vulnerable” to the new rules and workings of government (2004, p. 170). Coetzee’s evaluation of postapartheid South Africa through the course of Disgrace reveals sad deficiencies and shortcomings in a society that, since 1994, had anticipated great change for the benefit of all citizens. Finally, it is imperative to note that Coetzee’s contributions extend well beyond creative writing. His scholarship more than holds its own in the critical world while contributing to both literary and sociocultural arenas. Two examples, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) and Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (2005), treat the intertwining issues of culture and literature within a South African and international context. Huggan and Watson offer two important points regarding Coetzee’s writing and influence in Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee. First, they note that the author’s writing situates itself both inside and outside South Africa. That is to say, his work is both location specific and universal at the same time in terms of its subject matter and application. Second, they suggest that Coetzee is the prototypical creative author and socioliterary critic joined into one writer who realizes both with equal skill and expertise. His experiences living for periods of time in various countries around the world have served him well, as his work is as intriguing and germane for university students in cities in Europe and North America as it is for those reading from their locales in Pietersburg or Queenstown, South Africa. Walt Collins

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282 COFFEE References Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Huggan, Graham, and Stephen Watson, eds.. Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee. London: Macmillan, 1996. Marais, Michael. “The Hermeneutics of Empire: Coetzee’s Post-colonial Metafiction.” In Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, eds. London: Macmillan, 1996. Vaughn, Michael. “Literature and Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies.” In Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, edited by Sue Kossew. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.

COFFEE Coffee has been an international commodity from the sixteenth century to the present. It is one of the leading internationally traded commodities today. Arabica and robusta are the two major types of coffee that are grown and marketed worldwide. Coffee was first cultivated in Yemen around the sixth century. The Dutch brought it from Yemen to their colonies in Africa in the sixteenth century. Coffee crossed the Atlantic early in the eighteenth century when the Dutch brought it to Suriname. As the demand for coffee grew, so did slavery, which until abolition was the major form of labor used for its cultivation. In Brazil, for example, where the economy rested on coffee trade, approximately 2 million slaves imported from Africa labored on plantations until the late nineteenth century. Today, the world’s leading coffee producers and exporters are two Latin American countries. Brazil, which produces about 30 percent of the world’s coffee, is followed by Colombia, whose share is www.abc-clio.com

about 10 percent. The crop is grown in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, too. In terms of their share in worldwide coffee production, the countries following Colombia are Vietnam, Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire, Mexico, Guatemala, India, Uganda, Ethiopia, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Thailand, Kenya, Cameroon, Venezuela, Papua New Guinea, and Nicaragua. The largest coffee importer today is the United States. It is followed by Western European countries such as Germany, France, and Italy. The remaining major importers are Eastern European countries and Japan. In terms of coffee consumption, the top three countries today are the United States, Brazil, and Germany. The exporters and importers are linked by transnational corporations (TNCs). Coffee enters the importing countries largely in the form of green coffee. It is processed and marketed by TNCs whose headquarters are in importing countries. Elif Oztabak-Avci See also: Agriculture; Cameroon; Colombia; Colonialism; Dutch Empire; Nicaragua; Peru References Graaff, de J. The Economics of Coffee. Wageningen, Netherlands: Pudoc, 1986. Lucier, Richard L. The International Political Economy of Coffee. New York: Praeger, 1988.

COLD WAR Tension and hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) was evident across the globe from the late 1940s through the early 1990s. Their rivalry, known as the cold war, expressed itself in Africa through U.S. and Soviet involvement in regional African conflicts and

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in economic and military aid granted to African states by both superpowers. The transatlantic connections between the Americas and Africa during the cold war are clearly seen in activities such as Cuba’s involvement in Angola’s civil war and its provision of aid to other African states; the involvement of the United States in the Congo and other areas; and the ideological importance of Africa to the American Civil Rights Movement. The early years of the cold war coincided with the onset of decolonization in the late 1940s and extending through the early 1960s. Newly independent states were increasingly pressured to align themselves with one superpower or the other. Some states chose to remain formally uncommitted to alignment with the United States or the Soviet Union. As nonaligned nations, these states could become ideological battlegrounds for the superpowers, yet official neutrality also allowed nonaligned countries the opportunity to manipulate the superpowers to achieve their own objectives of domestic security and economic development. For example, in the 1960s, Ghana, under the leadership of President Kwame N’Krumah, was able to exploit superpower rivalry to obtain economic aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union. N’Krumah was one of the leading African members of the Nonaligned Movement and was deeply involved in Pan-Africanism and the formation of the Organization of African Unity. Under N’Krumah’s leadership, Ghana received aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to build the Akosombo (Volta) Dam to generate electrical power for the area. Ghana also received aid from the Soviet Union to develop technical www.abc-clio.com

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schools, airstrips, hospitals, and state-run farms. By the mid-1960s Ghana was increasingly dependent on Soviet aid, causing some (including the Ghanaian military) to consider Ghana to be a client state of the Soviet Union and leading to N’Krumah’s deposition by military coup in 1966. Throughout the era of the cold war some African nations, such as Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, experimented with “African” versions of socialism, while other countries followed a more Marxist model. The Soviet Union and Cuba both wished to increase the number of Communist nations around the world, and Cuba was particularly concerned with encouraging revolutionary movements leading to Communist states. In a speech before the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in September 1960, Cuban leader Fidel Castro drew parallels between Cuba and the Congo as states that had been ruled by racially discriminatory elites and emphasized Cuba’s support for the Congo’s leader, Patrice Lumumba, and for African self-governance across the continent. Cuba then supported this rhetoric with aid. In 1963 Cuba sent medical and military assistance to newly independent Algeria, and in 1965 a small Cuban force under the leadership of Che Guevara was sent to the Congo. In the mid-1960s Cuba also provided military and medical aid to Guinea-Bissau. Cuba’s intervention in Africa increased in the 1970s. In its support for revolutionary movements in Latin American countries, Cuba was often acting against legal governments and attracting the censure of the United States. In its actions in Africa, Cuba was generally supporting African anticolonial movements or assisting new states, as in Angola.

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Civil war broke out in Angola during 1975 over which of three rebel groups would lead Angola at independence: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), or the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The MPLA received aid from Cuba and the Soviet Union, while the United States, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), supported the FNLA and UNITA. South Africa supported UNITA as well. By 1976, with Cuban training and troops, the MPLA had gained the upper hand and formed a Marxist government. Because of continued guerilla warfare by the FNLA and UNITA, Cuba sent over 50,000 troops to Angola to support the government, and Cuban forces remained in Angola until the late 1980s. Cuba was also involved in cold war conflicts in the Horn of Africa (the area that is now Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia). The Horn became a surrogate battlefield for the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Eritreans formed the Marxist group, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, to fight for Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia, and Somalia wished to create a “Greater Somalia” including parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. The USSR helped Somalia build up its arms, and the United States responded by providing economic and military aid to Ethiopia. In 1974 Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie was removed from power by the military, and the ensuing military coordinating committee declared Ethiopia a socialist state. The Soviet Union replaced the United States as the primary cold war power in Ethiopia. In 1977 Somalia invaded Ethiopia. Cuba, acting in concert with the Soviet Union, sent approximately www.abc-clio.com

15,000 troops to aid Ethiopia. Somalia then asked the United States for aid, and reversal in the Horn’s cold war alignments was complete, with the Soviet Union and Cuba now dominant in Ethiopia and the United States prominent in Somalia through the 1980s. In the 1980s over 10 percent of Cuba’s annual budget went to maintaining a military presence in various African states, and by 1988 Cuba was beginning to withdraw Cuban troops from Angola and Ethiopia. Cuban interest in Africa did not cease, however, with the end of the cold war. Throughout the cold war Cuba’s stated goal was to support African states in their fight for freedom from colonial and racist governments. Since the conclusion of the cold war, aid to African states has continued in the form of educational and medical assistance. The Cuban government offers scholarships for African students to study in Cuba and sends Cuban medical personnel to African countries. The involvement of the United States in Africa during the cold war was apparent not only in the Horn of Africa and Angola, but in the Congo as well. The civil war in the Congo from 1960 to 1965 was the first cold war conflict in Africa. Belgian colonial rule ended on June 30, 1960, and on July 1 Patrice Lumumba became prime minister of the independent nation of the Congo. Within two weeks of taking office, Lumumba was faced with a mutiny by the army, the secession from the Congo of the wealthy Katanga province, and the reentry of Belgian troops into the Congo. Lumumba requested United Nations assistance in recovering Katanga and Soviet assistance in removing the Belgians. The Soviet Union viewed involvement in the Congo crisis as a way to establish its

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influence in newly independent Africa. The USSR sent equipment and over 100 military advisers to assist Lumumba. His turn to the Soviet Union for help discomfited the United States, however, and the CIA developed several unsuccessful plots to assassinate Lumumba. Because of its concerns about Lumumba’s Soviet ties, the United States (through the CIA) backed Joseph Mobutu (later known as Mobutu Sese Seko) as an alternative leader of the Congo. After Lumumba’s assassination in January 1961, power shifted to Mobutu. He acceded to power through a coup in November 1965 and imposed authoritarian rule for more than thirty years. In 1965 Latin American resistance fighter Che Guevara and around 100 Cubans arrived in the Congo to provide assistance to former Lumumba supporter Laurent Kabila and his forces. Guevara’s plan was to teach guerilla fighting and Communist ideology to the Congolese. Guevara found the Africans to be superstitious, ineffective fighters for whom classic Marxist reasons for revolution had little appeal. Seven months later Che and his troops left, their attempt at internationalizing the Communist revolution unsuccessful. For much of the cold war, the United States also supported states in southern Africa as apparent bulwarks against Communism. South Africa portrayed itself as a leader in the global struggle against Communism, calling the African National Congress (ANC) a Communist organization and asserting that Communists were behind the uprisings in 1960 in Sharpeville and in 1970 in Soweto. South Africa passed laws such as the Suppression of Communism Act (1950) that outlawed perceived Communist activities, thus enabling the state to prosecute individuals involved in www.abc-clio.com

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antiapartheid groups such as the ANC. The United States valued South Africa for its strategic mineral resources, such as uranium, that were indispensable in the Cold War era of potential nuclear warfare, and the United States was willing to overlook South Africa’s discriminatory policies in the name of anti-Communism. The United States refused until the mid-1980s to impose economic sanctions on South Africa for its policy of apartheid. Similarly, some Americans supported Rhodesia from its unilateral declaration of independence to its final independence as Zimbabwe in 1980. During this period the United States disregarded UN sanctions against Rhodesia by buying chrome from that country (to avoid getting it from the Soviet Union, the world’s other major producer), and Vietnam veterans enlisted in the Rhodesian armed forces as mercenaries. Although much of the cold war was fought by third world proxies, it was also an ideological conflict between democracy and Communism, with both sides touting the supremacy of their moral and philosophical systems. After World War II, the existence of Jim Crow laws separating African Americans and whites in the United States undermined claims the United States made to moral superiority over the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union and other Communist states pointed to racial discrimination in the United States as proof that American democracy was neither just nor fair. In 1960 Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his entourage stayed in a Harlem hotel while attending a session of the United Nations, improving Cuba’s image among African Americans, AfroCubans, and Africans. Before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, African dignitaries and diplomats

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visiting the United States might be harassed because of their color, leading to increased tension with newly decolonized nations. During the cold war the United States passed civil rights laws in part to cultivate a global image as a bastion of equality and democracy and thereby, as one of the consequences, to win over newly independent states. The Voice of America transmitted news of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case in thirty-four languages, and African newspapers published news on American race relations. From 1956 to 1978, the U.S. State Department sponsored tours of jazz and gospel musicians to the Soviet bloc and to developing countries such as the Congo in an effort to promote democracy and present jazz as the music of freedom. One Communist counter to American actions was education. For example, Cuba educated orphans of Algeria’s war for independence, and in 1960 the Soviet Union founded a university in Moscow for students from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, enrolling over 500 students in its first year. In 1961 the university was renamed the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University to emphasize its anticolonial sentiments, and it bore Lumumba’s name until 1992. Patricia G. Clark See also: Castro Ruz, Fidel; Cuba; Selassie I, Haile; Socialism; South Africa, History and Politics References Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

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Guevara, Ernesto Che. The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo. Translated by Patrick Camiller. New York: Grove Press, 2001. Horne, Gerald. From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Von Eschen, Penny M. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

COLOMBIA Colombia is a country of northwest South America with coastlines on the Pacific and the Caribbean. Involved with the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, Colombia’s modern and contemporary black communities of the twentieth and twenty-first century have faced unique social and political struggles. Enslaved Africans entered New Granada, or present-day Colombia, starting in the sixteenth century with the rise of the slave trade in the Atlantic. New Granadian elites imported slaves mostly for mining. The most important port of trade for African slaves was Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast. Many Maroon communities developed in the viceroyalty, like those of San Basilio in the Atlantic region and Patía in the southwest, in which runaway slaves settled. During the independence wars between 1810 and 1821, slaves and free blacks were utilized by royalist and patriot armies alike. Final abolition came in 1851, after long struggles by slaves and strong resistance by slave owners. In republican Colombia, national identity was based on the ideal of mestizaje, which praised race mixture. Hence, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries black communities in Colombia either pursued cultural adaptation or remained

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spatially bounded to their inherited, isolated territories. In the late twentieth century, along with indigenous movements, black communities organized and have pushed ethnic rights to the center of contemporary multicultural Colombian politics and the nation’s constitution. Colonial Colombia was organized into economic regions according to the extractive and productive needs of the Spanish Empire. In the northern Caribbean emerged Cartagena, the most important port city, controlling commerce and slave traffic. It was one of the only two ports of the empire authorized to receive slave imports. The city was an early center of an important point of encounter for newly arrived African slaves and domestic servants. Enslaved Africans were imported through Cartagena and taken inland to the Atlantic provinces, Antioquia, the southwestern mining regions, and further to the south into Quito. In the eighteenth century the economic use of slaves diversified to include production of sugar and its derivatives, cattle raising, craftwork, and domestic work. The southwestern province of Cauca, with its center in Popayán, constituted an important location for slave labor in Colombia. Given the decimation of the indigenous population and the discovery of gold mines on the Pacific coast, slaves became the most common source of labor. Barbacoas was an important mining center in the seventeenth century, although its production receded early in the next century. By that time, however, new mines had been discovered in the northern Pacific coast in Chocó, where slave owners rushed to extract gold. Communities of free blacks formed near the gold-mining centers of Chocó, transforming race relations in the www.abc-clio.com

region. Free blacks became important sources of labor—they sometimes even owned mines—progressively affecting the notion of how black productivity was defined in the region. Eighteenth-century Colombian slave society saw an important transformation with the advent of Bourbon rule and reform in the eighteenth century. Slavery was regulated by law for the first time in the Spanish Empire, and the enlightened tone and ideals of the new laws gave slaves a reason to turn eagerly to judicial courts to claim their new rights. These rights included being well fed and clothed and being instructed in the Catholic religion. Emphasis was placed on the care of slaves and the reduction of punishment. Southwestern slave owners reacted negatively to the pretensions of the Spanish crown to reduce their sovereignty over slaves, an attitude that foreshadowed their resistance to abolitionist thought in the nineteenth century. Along with Bourbon reform the Atlantic slave traffic grew, but in Colombian territory by the late eighteenth century a stable homegrown slave population was already in place, and hence slave imports decreased. Also, especially in Chocó and Antioquia, free blacks and mulatos were becoming an alternative workforce. Slave resistance took many forms. Legal strategies were customary from the seventeenth century. Slaves denounced their masters’ cruelty and pleaded for their natural right to good care as Christians. Such strategies became more frequent in the enlightened context of eighteenthcentury Bourbon legislation. Rebellion, on the other hand, was not always a safe path, as colonial authorities and slave owners applied strong measures to insubordinate

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slaves, such as mutilation or even death. However, New Granada saw many rebellions from the arrival of enslaved Africans in the early sixteenth century. A better alternative for slaves was to run away and form free communities, or palenques. The most important were San Basilio, west of the Magdalena River, and El Castigo, near the Patía River in the south near Popayán. San Basilio was formed by groups of Kongo, Angola, Arará, Mina, and Karabalí runaway slaves from haciendas around Cartagena, who defended their freedom under the leadership of a captain. In the seventeenth century the colonial government gave up on its project to subdue them and recognized them as autonomous black communities. The palenque of Patía congregated runaway slaves from the haciendas near Popayán and Valle del Cauca and from the mines in Barbacoas, Panamá, and Chocó. In constant tension with colonial society, the Maroons represented a menace to slave owners and an example of rebellion against domination for those who remained enslaved. Interestingly, their antagonistic position would be transformed when they participated in the independence wars on the royalist side. Abolitionist ideas in Colombia were at first a by-product of the independence crisis. It was the royalists who first offered freedom to those slaves who joined their armies to fight the American rebels. This offer was an important source for destabilization of the slave regime, as slaves revolted. Royalist slaves enlisted to fight patriots because most Creole patriot elites were slave owners. An important royalist militia was in the Maroon community in Patía, which joined General José Maria Obando and the Spanish Army, which were www.abc-clio.com

combating southwestern patriots. Slaves and free blacks also joined patriot armies and became important symbols of slave liberation. Especially in Cartagena, where nearby Caribbean struggles such as that of Haiti had set an example, liberty and equality, including abolition, became the goals of independence. In 1820 Simón Bolívar ordered that 3,000 slaves be recruited for the liberation army and that they be offered their freedom in exchange. Hence, military participation became a crucial strategy for slaves who wanted to fight for their freedom. After independence in 1821 the Congress of Cúcuta established as a national goal the incorporation of black slaves and Indians into the republic as citizens through the process of gradual manumission. By the mid-1840s the slave population was in decline, the product of an accelerated pace in manumissions, since in the context of Liberal government, antislavery ideas were on the rise. Finally, in 1851, while General José Hilario López was president, Congress decreed the abolition of slavery as law beginning in January 1852. In the nineteenth century most AfroColombians were Liberals. Even if they had never been slaves, their politics were linked to erasing all the legacies of slavery, which included questions of land, rights, and citizenship. The entrance of blacks into national politics profoundly shook social dynamics. In the southwest it was the Liberal Party that embraced black populations, paving the way for democratizing Colombian political discourse. A new phase of politics in Colombia’s black communities began in the 1970s when, following the example of North America’s black rights movements,

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Afro-Colombians organized their own movements, especially in urban areas. Besides advocating for civil rights and a voice in the political process, these organizations emphasized the resistance of AfroColombians to their historic exploitation since their arrival as slaves. First, the goal was to integrate into the national society. More recently, the emphasis has shifted to a struggle for the recognition of cultural difference. This national political reform resulted from the new Constitution of 1991. That document challenged the previous national project, which was based on promoting a homogeneous “mixed” race; put forth a notion of a multicultural and pluri-ethnic society; and gave unprecedented rights to ethnic and religious minorities. This context made possible the emergence of new indigenous and black movements in line with the cultural and political precepts of the new legal framework. The most important project and product of black organization in the 1990s was Law 70, which aimed to demarcate collective territories for black communities. The many black groups in Colombia defend general political rights for blacks such as their right to their own identity, to have a territory and political autonomy, and to build their own vision of the future based on their traditional forms of production and social organization. They also claim solidarity with the struggle of black people around the world in their search for an alternative vision of development. The communities have emphasized territory as a fundamental element of a vision of their future and a guarantee of their reproduction as cultures. Such notion of territory is different from the notion of land characteristic of peasant struggles in Latin America. It reflects the www.abc-clio.com

new nature of the political practice of black communities, profoundly embedded in postmodern notions of development. Colombia’s black communities also share the struggle to build a collective identity with other contemporary social movements that are facing the challenge of cultural politics, namely, to provide an alternative to the state’s global interests regarding development and environmental issues. Marcela Echeverri See also: Coffee; Diaspora; Quilombo; Slavery (History); Slave Revolts/Maronnage

References Escalante, Aquiles. El negro en Colombia. Bogota, Colombia: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1964. Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Friedemann, Nina S. De sol a sol: Génesis, transformación, y presencia de los negros en Colombia. Bogota, Colombia: Editorial Planeta, 1986. Helg, Aline. Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Jaramillo Uribe, Jaime. Ensayos de historia social. Bogota, Colombia: Ceso-Banco de la República-ICANH-Colciencias-Alfaomega, 2001. Romero, Mario Diego. Poblamiento y sociedad en el Pacífico colombiano, siglos XVI al XVIII. Cali, Colombia: Editorial Universidad del Valle, 1995. Safford, Frank, and Marco Palacios. Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Sanders, James. Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Wade, Peter. Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

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COLONIAL ARMIES IN AFRICA Africa has a history of conscripted army service in which colonial powers used local populations. These armed forces are known as colonial armies in Africa. Colonial powers relied heavily on locally recruited colonial armies to secure territory, guard frontiers, and maintain law and order. The earliest such armies were recruited in the Americas and were composed of slaves: for example, the West India Regiment, formed in 1795, employed to police Britain’s West Indian possessions but also used in recently acquired areas of West Africa. The Spanish also had a sizable black army in Cuba during the nineteenth century. These patterns and practices were transferred to Africa in the nineteenth century. Other powers in Africa, for example the Ottoman-Egyptian state under Muhammad Ali, recruited African slaves as soldiers for the armies that fought in the Sudan and the Levant. The largest colonial army in the world was the Indian Army. From 1858 to 1946, Indian troops were used in imperial campaigns in Asia, Africa, and Europe, thus reducing the need to employ African troops overseas. Colonial armies were essentially mercenary forces. In the early days, most were composed of runaway slaves. However, for regular recruitment Europeans began to identify as martial races ethnic groups living on the periphery of a colony and even outside its borders. Thus Hausa and Bambara men were recruited by the British, French, and Germans in West Africa. The martial race idea was a myth, but it served the interests of colonial recruiters. Soldiers were loyal aliens who transferred their allegiance from African rulers to white officers and who could be used to police people different in language and culture. Soldiers’ allegiance to the colonial order was www.abc-clio.com

cemented by their acquisition of arms, a uniform, regular wages, and welfare and fiscal benefits. In the twentieth century many former soldiers were employed as policemen and in other security roles. As agents of the colonial system, African soldiers were regarded with considerable hostility by most subject peoples. The allegiance of colonial armies could not be taken for granted by the colonial authorities, which kept a watchful eye on their “loyal aliens” to prevent excesses in policing, desertion, and mutiny. Serious mutinies did occur, for example, in the Congo Free State in the late 1890s, in the Sudan Defence Force in 1924, in British Somaliland (1937) and the Belgian Congo (1895), and in Dakar in 1944. However, mutinies were rare. Most were little more than strikes by soldiers over pay and conditions of service and thus easily contained. Colonial armies were commanded by white officers and had a leaven of strategically placed European noncommissioned officers. Before 1940 only the French were prepared to give Africans, or black men, a commissioned rank. By the 1930s 10 percent of the officers in the French colonial army were black. In the British colonial forces the highest rank an African could achieve was warrant officer. Policy changed in 1940, and by the end of the war three Africans had become officers in the West African Frontier Force. By the end of the colonial period, Africanization was accepted policy, although it was slowly implemented. The Belgians failed to promote Africans to commissioned rank in the Force Publique, one of the causes for the mutiny by the army at independence in 1960. Ironically, in the 1970s and 1980s, the armies of the remaining whiterun regimes in southern Africa—the

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Portuguese colonies, Rhodesia, and South Africa—had a growing percentage of Africans in their total forces and a growing number of African junior officers. Most colonial powers in Africa recruited soldiers for use within the colony. For example, in South Africa, African regiments, commanded by Europeans, fought in the frequent frontier wars of the nineteenth century. Although the World Wars changed these colonial policies of restricted employment, from the outset the French used colonial troops in overseas campaigns. In the 1850s Louis Faidherbe in Senegal recruited tirailleurs to conquer the French Sudan, and they were later used to fight colonial wars in Indochina and Madagascar and to serve as garrison troops in North Africa. With the partition of Africa in the late nineteenth century, all the colonial powers began to recruit armies. Most were small in size, numbering no more than a few thousand men, infantry forces of lightly armed gendarmeries commanded by white officers. The French colonial army was the largest. General Charles Mangin envisaged la force noire, recruited in West Africa, as a contingent that would relieve French troops in North Africa in the event of a war with Germany. When World War I came in 1914–1918, French West Africa contributed 160,000 men, many of whom died on the western front. There were also sizable North African contingents fighting in France. The Force Publique, used to conquer and police the vast area of the Congo Free State (Belgian Congo after 1908), was also relatively large, with 18,000 men in 1914–1918. So also was the Italian colonial army in Eritrea, where men were recruited to fight a disastrous war with neighboring Ethiopia in 1896, against the Senussi in Libya, and then in the invasion of Ethiopia www.abc-clio.com

in the 1930s. Mussolini’s fascist regime in the 1930s claimed to have a colonial army of over 200,000, but this proved to be chimerical when Italy went to war with Britain and France in 1940. The two World Wars forced the belligerent colonial powers to recruit larger colonial armies and to employ them in new roles. In 1914–1918 the French conscripted West African soldiers for the war in Europe, a policy that led to serious rebellions in the Sudan. In the same conflict British colonial armies soon defeated the small forces of Schutztruppe (“Protection Force”) in the German colonies of Togoland and Kamerun. However, the campaign to control German East Africa started badly for British and Indian troops. From 1916 onward the bulk of the fighting was left to colonial troops, including men from West and southern Africa, who were deemed more expendable as well as better suited to tropical conditions. During the war French colonial troops fought in various European theatres; after the war, in 1919, they were used, in the face of much German and international opposition, to occupy the Rhineland and as part of French military intervention in Russia. Selective conscription was used by the French in West Africa during the interwar years, and when war with Germany broke out in 1939, a sizable force of colonial troops was in France, deployed to defend the country. With France’s defeat in mid1940, the bulk of General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French force consisted of African colonial troops in Chad, located in central Africa. Colonial troops fought for both the Vichy and Free French in the conflicts in Africa, Syria, and Madagascar. Colonial soldiers, invading from the south, helped to liberate France in 1944. Britain’s

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policy not to use Africans in European wars was questioned in times of acute manpower shortages, especially in 1918 and 1940. In 1918 the war ended, but in 1940–1941 African colonial troops from West and East Africa fought against the Italians in the Horn of Africa. Having proved their worth, military commanders decided to use them in North Africa, the Levant, and also in Italy. Many African soldiers were recruited as noncombatant labor. South African policy in both World Wars was that black troops should be used only as labor, although battlefield circumstances moderated this policy slightly. The commonly held view that the British did not use conscription in Africa during World War II is not borne out by the evidence. Conscription was selectively used to recruit certain groups of soldiers and also to secure labor for use both within and without the colony. As with French conscription policy in both World Wars, forcible enlistment in British colonies was widely resisted, although it did not lead to rebellion. People fled at the approach of recruiting parties and whole villages crossed nearby borders to the relative safety of foreign territory. When Japan invaded Southeast Asia and Burma and threatened India in 1941–1942, the British decided that African troops should be used as garrison troops in India and Ceylon and also against the Japanese. By 1943 East and West African troops were fighting in Burma. They acquitted themselves well because of their skills in forest fighting and also because they were able to operate flexibly in rugged terrain with supply lines worked by porters. When the war ended, African troops were slowly repatriated and demobilized, a process not completed until 1947. www.abc-clio.com

Lack of work, shortages of goods, and inflation in the postwar colonies led to unrest among veterans. A few were involved in protests, the most notable being the demonstration in Accra, Gold Coast, in February 1948, when armed police killed three former soldiers. In Kenya and South Africa a small number of veterans were prominent in nationalist politics. However, contrary to what is argued by the nationalistfocused literature of the 1960s, former soldiers were no more active politically than any other occupational grouping. The vast majority of soldiers recruited during World War II came from the traditional recruiting areas. They were illiterate peasants who on demobilization returned to their rural homes. Of course, wartime service helped to broaden soldiers’ horizons and gave them new cultural experiences; some learned to speak other languages, but this was rarely translated into political activity. All tropical campaigns, especially those fought in tsetse fly–infested areas where cattle and horses could not be used, required large numbers of porters or carriers. Carriers were recruited, often by force; in some colonial armies they constituted a regular part of the army. For example, the operations against the Asante in 1873–1874 involved 20,000 carriers drawn from different parts of West Africa. The campaigns of World War I required large numbers of laborers, mainly men but some women, many arbitrarily rounded up and conscripted. A brass disk bearing a number was commonly their only form of identification. In the long-drawn-out military operations in East Africa from1914 to 1918, as many as one million porters were recruited. Up to 10 percent of the porters died from disease, malnutrition, and harsh

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treatment. In Egypt, the British also recruited several hundred thousand fellahin (“peasant”) laborers for use in the operations against the Ottoman forces in Sinai, and smaller contingents of African laborers were employed in other theaters. The South African Native Labour Contingent was sent to Europe in 1916, 20,000 unarmed but uniformed laborers who in France were lodged in closed compounds similar to those used for African labor in the South African mines. In World War II, a large part of the British colonial army was composed of noncombatants. Men from the Indian Ocean islands, organized in a military labor corps, continued to be employed by the British in the Middle East until the early 1950s. After 1945 African colonial armies continued to be used in imperial campaigns. The French employed West African troops in their wars in Indochina and Algeria between 1945 and 1960. In 1952 detachments of the King’s African Rifles, recruited in East and Central Africa, went to fight in Malaya at the same time as battalions at home were being deployed to combat the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. As nationalist agitation increased throughout Africa in the 1950s, so colonial armies were increased in size and better trained to deal with internal unrest. However, military forces were rarely used except in those colonies of white settlement where there was strong resistance to a transfer of power. At independence most African armies for a brief period continued to be led by white officers. This changed, but enlistment patterns for many decades continued to be largely determined by the recruitment patterns of the colonial period; the majority of the rank and file came from specific ethnic groups, while officers were drawn www.abc-clio.com

from a small educated elite from another area of the country. This led to instability and rivalry within the armies of many African states and was a major cause of repeated coup attempts within military regimes. David Killingray See also: Colonialism; Hausa; South Africa, History and Politics References Echenberg, Myron. Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalaise in French West Africa, 1857–1960. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991. Hodges, Geoffrey. The Carrier Corps: Military Labor in the East African Campaign, 1914–1918. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Killingray, David, and David Omissi, eds. Guardians of Empire. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999. Killingray, David, and Richard Rathbone, eds. Africa and the Second World War. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1986. Lawler, Nancy Ellen. Soldiers of Misfortune. Ivorian Tirailleurs of World War II. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992. Lunn, Joe. Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999. Parsons, Timothy H. The African Rank-andFile: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–1964. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999.

COLONIALISM Colonialism is the expansion of one country’s control over another territory, resulting in the effective occupation of that territory and its peoples. The aim of colonialism is to dominate another region’s resources, labor, and markets to ensure economic security and supremacy. Colonialism also refers to the set of beliefs used to legitimize the occupation. From the ancient Romans to Europe’s occupation of

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the Americas, great empires have benefited from the resources of their colonies. Countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia all had their beginnings as colonies. While there are examples of colonialism that date back to the ancient world, and while colonial empires in the Western Hemisphere played an integral part in Europe’s economic development from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, the term “colonialism” in reference to Africa is generally used to refer to the expansion of European power and influence in the late nineteenth century, during a time often referred to as the Age of Imperialism. The demands of the industrial revolution placed increased pressures on European nations to secure sources of raw materials, markets for manufactured goods, and new opportunities for investment. European nations looked outside their borders to secure what they needed for continued prosperity. European nations had a long history of contact with African kingdoms. During the ancient era, Africa interacted with Europe via the extensive Mediterranean and transSaharan trade systems. In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese made their way down the western coast of the continent on route to Asia, establishing trading posts along the way. The first time European colonialism was felt in Africa was through its incorporation into the emerging Atlantic World via the transatlantic slave trade. But even with the onset of the slave trade, economic relations between Europeans and Africans were conducted as equal partners. Europeans had to recognize sovereign African kingdoms and negotiate trade agreements. But once Europe industrialized, the balance of power shifted and the relationship changed. With the abolition www.abc-clio.com

of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, Europeans demanded that African kingdoms develop “legitimate trade” focusing on agricultural commodities such as cocoa, peanuts, and palm oil. This transition was not easy for many African states. However, despite the economic dislocation caused by the abolition of the slave trade, Africans showed great resourcefulness and adaptability, so that by 1880 the mainstays of Africa’s external trade economy were ivory, gum, cloves, beeswax, honey, wild coffee, peanuts, cotton, and rubber. Africans proved themselves interested in and eager to gain the knowledge of a technologically advanced Europe. But while Europeans were increasingly interested in what Africans could offer their newly industrialized economies, African rulers were not always amenable to European demands. Europeans became aware of the economic potential of Africa’s natural wealth at a time when industrialization was creating competition between European powers over access to and control over such resources. European interstate rivalry was exacerbated by French and British expeditions into the African continent. As a result of industrialization, European nations were no longer interested in negotiating with sovereign African states but rather sought to exert direct political and economic control of resources and markets. And by the end of the nineteenth century, industrialization had also given European nations the military means they needed to ensure their interests were served in Africa. Breech-loading rifles and the Maxim gun ensured supremacy over African armies armed at best with muzzleloading muskets or flint rifles. The last barrier to European expansion into Africa fell in the 1850s when European medical

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advances decreased the impact of malaria. However, by 1880 there were no real indications of Africa’s susceptibility to European power. An overwhelming majority of Africans enjoyed a sovereign existence, and so what happened in the next twenty years was in many ways surprising and sudden. Between 1880 and 1900, 90 percent of Africa was occupied by Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and Italy; only Ethiopia escaped colonization. While the demands of continued industrialization were clearly at work behind Europe’s expansion into Africa, there were also powerful political and social forces behind the establishment of colonialism there. Nineteenth-century Europe was characterized not only by the profound economic transformation caused by the industrial revolution but also by the development of nationalism often expressed in an exaggerated promotion of a country’s prestige. European nations sought not only economic and political security but also recognition, and overseas colonies became status symbols for their influence. The influence of nationalism cannot be underestimated in the expansion of the colonial system. Colonies not only ensured necessary elements for continued economic development but also determined status within Europe’s community of nations. The other element in Europe’s new relationship with Africa centered on the moral justification for colonialism—the civilizing and Christianizing mission, the so-called “White Man’s Burden.” The moral justification centered on the belief that colonialism elevated the colonized, that European control of Africa would provide the economic, political, and social www.abc-clio.com

infrastructure necessary for the development and modernization of the continent and its peoples. Such attitudes exhibited the overt ethnocentrism that is inherent in colonialism. But if the social and religious justifications for European colonial control over Africa were insufficient, the words of French poet Hilaire Belloc illustrate the European attitude toward Africa on the eve of colonization: “Whatever happens we have got; the Maxim gun and they have not.” As European states sought to extend their presence in Africa, concern arose among the European powers of the potential for conflict that the “Scramble for Africa” could cause. So to decrease the potential for clashes, representatives of all major European powers met at the Berlin West Africa Conference in November 1884 to determine the “rules of the game.” There were no African representatives in attendance. In January 1885 the participants called for free commerce on the Niger and Congo rivers and the continued effort to eradicate the slave trade and the four main rules of European colonial expansion: before a European power could claim an area in Africa, it had to inform other European powers of its intent to do so; claims had to be followed by formal annexation of the region and effective occupation; European nations had to respect the sovereignty of any treaties signed between other European powers and African rulers; and each European power had the right to extend its coastal presence inland to establish a sphere of influence that could later be claimed, annexed, and occupied. These four rules were set up to avoid European conflicts, to facilitate the carving up of that “magnificent cake” of Africa, and to establish a process for the advance of colonialism throughout the world. The race for colonies in Africa

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was actually part of a worldwide phenomenon of European expansion. With the rules of the game established, European nations pushed into the continent via three mechanisms. European nations and African rulers signed protectorate treaties in which Africans gained protection of the European nation in return for exclusive trading rights; however, many of these treaties caused African rulers to unwittingly give up their sovereignty. European nations also signed bilateral treaties between themselves, defining their spheres of influence without any input from African rulers. The final stage to the Scramble was the effective occupation of a region by a European power that often came through military conquest and occupation. The Africans’ reaction to the loss of their sovereignty was varied. In some cases, African rulers submitted to European powers, recognizing that resistance would be futile or hoping that cooperation could result in benefits. Others sought alliances and tried to play off one European power against the other, not aware of the cooperation among European powers engendered by the Berlin Conference. Some rulers attempted diplomacy and others attempted military resistance. But armed resistance proved futile against the industrial and military strength of the Europeans. Some kingdoms, like the Asante in West Africa and the Zulu in the Cape, fought bitter battles to prevent colonial control. Other groups like the Magi Magi in Madaba and the Matumbi Hills in present day Tanzania, armed with only traditional charms and magic water believed to make them impervious to bullets, fell quickly to the advanced weaponry of the Germans. Europeans had the technological edge as African armies had outmoded weapons and limited economic resources to www.abc-clio.com

sustain protracted conflict. Europeans also continued to use the “divide and conquer” strategy—promoting old conflicts and rivalries—that had served them well for centuries in Africa. In two decades, Africa’s complex system of independent states was replaced by approximately forty artificially created colonies controlled by European powers. The Berlin Conference proved effective in keeping European conflict to a minimum during the era of colonial expansion, but now the practical questions of how to oversee the new colonies quickly emerged. Generally, two systems, indirect and direct rule, were established to administer the colonies. No matter which system was implemented, all colonial powers were concerned about the cost of colonization and all used a combination of the two systems. The British implemented the policy of indirect rule, developed by F. J. D. Lugard, high commissioner of the British Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. Britain ruled through existing tribal authorities where possible. These authorities continued to oversee the population using traditional systems and customary laws; the British simply administered from above. This system required the least effort and cost and preserved African political traditions, thus having moral benefits as well as practical ones. In areas where strong, highly centralized states existed, indirect rule preserved traditional tribal community structures, but in areas where cultural identities were more complex and fluid, the British had to create authority structures where none were thought to exist. As a result, colonial powers created artificial communities and authority structures that necessitated rigid ethnic identities and sowed the seeds for future conflict. Generally, however, the

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system of indirect rule left indigenous customs and practices undisturbed—although the activities and demands of Christian missionary organizations did not. Where there were no obvious indigenous political elites, the British created them, and where local elites proved uncooperative, the British removed and replaced them. Those local elites who cooperated were rewarded, as the British confirmed their authority and often unwittingly removed restrictions on a chief ’s power by abolishing traditional systems of checks and balances. Local authorities were expected to maintain order, collect taxes, and organize labor and military drafts. They were under the supervision of British district officers who served as intermediaries between local authorities and the central colonial administration. While the British system of indirect rule appeared to function with little disruption of traditional authority, in actuality, local authorities often found their legitimacy challenged as they were seen as simply implementing and enforcing British desires and as being complicit in the maintenance of a colonial system that denied opportunities to the African population. Most other European powers initially used direct rule, a model of governance most associated with the French. Using the model established in France, the French divided up their colonies into districts, assigned a French commissioner to oversee them, and appointed a governor-general to administer all the districts in a single colony. Colonial administrative boundaries were often established to divide up powerful tribes to weaken their resistance to French policy, and powerful African leaders were undermined or replaced with more cooperative figures. The French commissioners were responsible for tax collection, www.abc-clio.com

labor and military drafts, overseeing public and social works, acting as a local judiciary, and enforcing the decisions of the governor-general. Africans had access to positions in the lower levels of the French bureaucracy but generally had to be considered assimilated into French culture and fluent in the French language. The French generally had two policies for the African population, assimilation and association, and they vacillated between the two throughout the colonial era. Assimilation of the African was the stated goal of French colonial policy as they sought to transform the African in the Western image. This policy rested on the assumption of the superiority of French culture above all others and to a certain extent on the legacy of the Enlightenment’s ideals of the universality of man. For those not capable of assimilation, the French established association, a kind of collaboration with locals. As the colonial era wore on, the French increasingly embraced elements of indirect rule. Direct rule was too costly, required too much manpower, and was not as effective in dealing with local customs and communities. After World War I most colonial powers implemented elements of indirect rule, although the timing varied throughout the continent and was often determined by the nature of the colonies’ populations. The colonial system was expanded as administration extended into rural areas usually under the direction of a district official and small native army under European command. Colonial policy matured, and while the development of natural resources continued to be a focal point of the system, colonial authorities attempted to extend social services and opened up some limited mobility to Africans within the colonial bureaucracies as a growing Westernized and

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educated African class emerged. In some colonies the expanded opportunities for Africans within the system were met with segregation and increased race consciousness among the European settler elite. But ultimately the impact of the two World Wars resulted in the transformation of the colonial system into a type of “sacred trust” that was to be managed by Europeans until Africans were capable of self-government. Labor unions and young political activists in Africa, influenced by socialism, began pressuring the colonial systems to change. By the late 1940s colonial occupation was seen as costly and was increasingly criticized; by the 1950s African nationalist movements started sweeping the continent. In some regions of Africa the colonial era transitioned into the post-independence era with relative ease, but in other regions independence came at a great cost and often with violence and conflict. There has been great debate about the impact of colonialism on Africa. In the grand scheme of the continent’s history, the colonial era lasted a short time—less than a century. Most early accounts of the colonial period were written by Eurocentric scholars who emphasized the positive impact of colonization by focusing on the civilizing mission, the introduction of new technology and medical advances, and the onset of modernity. But the era of African nationalism resulted in the emergence of Afrocentric and Marxist analyses of the colonial era that were hardly sympathetic to the European point of view. Generally, these studies concluded that the colonial era interrupted Africa’s natural development and condemned the continent to stagnation and continued exploitation. It is clear that African nations emerged as artificial creations of colonial powers with populations www.abc-clio.com

often burdened with rigid, artificially created ethnic identities. While European political institutions were established with the intent to develop forms of representative democracy, the lack of African participation and access to those institutions during the colonial era undermined their legitimacy even after the colonial system was dismantled and Africans took control of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Some scholars blame colonialism for a kind of political immaturity in Africa. While Africa was integrated into a world economic system, it was accomplished through exploitative relationships. Politically, Africans were isolated from the rest of the world, for as colonies they could not exercise independent diplomacy or foreign relations. Some critics refer to a kind of “colonial mentality” exhibited in the belief that public property and finance belong not to the people but to the colonial government and could and therefore should be taken advantage of at the least opportunity. This belief continued, they say, into the national era, resulting in high levels of government corruption. Still others blame colonialism for Africa’s chronic political instability because of the powerful and interventionist militaries established in that era, arguing that the colonizers used black soldiers against their own peoples and manipulated ethnic differences within the armies against the general population. This, the critics claim, set a dangerous precedent for postcolonial military intervention in the political processes of African nations. Economically speaking, colonialism fostered the construction of economic infrastructure—roads, telegraph, railroads, and ports—but again critics point out that these facilities were built to extract Africa’s

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resources for the benefit of the colonial power and not for the future development of Africa’s peoples. The nature of economic activities promoted during the colonial period caused the spread of cash crop agriculture, which in some cases allowed Africans to acquire wealth and raise their standard of living. But while these new market opportunities benefited some, they often eroded traditional standards of wealth and status in communities and thereby increased tensions among the population. The purposeful emphasis on cash crop agriculture impeded industrial development in Africa: European nations did not want industrial competition. Also, Africa’s integration into a world economy resulted in a system that encouraged Africans to produce what they could not consume and consume what they did not produce, creating national economies extremely susceptible to economic crisis. In the arena of social impacts, those who promote the benefits of colonialism often refer to the introduction of modern medicine and the new economic opportunities and modern amenities provided by urbanization. Such arguments are often countered by the criticism that these benefits were limited in number and access. Other critics comment on the negative impact of colonialism on women, who often found themselves pushed into domestic activities and out of traditional economic activities and social roles. But the topic most debate on the social and cultural legacies of colonialism is that of the impact of Christianity. The introduction of Christianity and its adoption by some Africans introduced new social tensions into African society. Converts adopted European behaviors and dress, gained access to modern medicine and European education, and as a www.abc-clio.com

result abandoned traditional practices. African societies split into two groups: a small, Christian European-educated Africa elite and a larger traditional, predominantly rural and illiterate group. The adoption of Christianity meant undergoing Westernization and resulted in many Africans being alienated from both cultures. They were no longer traditional, and in fact often openly condemned anything traditional, but neither were they allowed, despite their dress, education, and behavior, to be European. It was in this transformation that the seeds of colonialism’s dismantling were planted. For it was out of the Westernized, European-educated African elite that movements for Africa’s independence would grow. The colonial era came to an end with the emergence of independence movements in Africa. The century of European domination and colonialism was an extremely important era in Africa’s history, one whose legacy continues to impact and direct the continent’s present and future. Heather Thiessen-Reily See also: Africa, Precolonial; Afrocentrism; American Missionary Association; Berlin West Africa Conference; British Empire; Brussels Act; Columbian Exchange; Decolonization, African; Neocolonialism; Pre-Columbian America; Portuguese Empire; Spanish Empire References Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Adu Boahen, A. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1989. Adu Boahen, A. Africa under Colonial Domination 1880–1935. Vol. VII. General History of Africa. Abridged ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Falola, Toyin, ed. Africa. Vol. 3, Colonial Africa 1885–1939. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2001.

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300 COLORED FARMERS NATIONAL ALLIANCE Oliver, Roland. Africa since 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Packenham, Thomas. Scramble for Africa. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. Robinson, Ronald, and John Gallagher. Africa and the Victorians. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967.

COLORED FARMERS NATIONAL ALLIANCE The Colored Farmers National Alliance was formed to address unfair practices in labor and economy for black farmers in postemancipation America. Faced with racial segregation, escalating interest rates, and decreasing commodity prices, all farmers sought relief during the mid1880s. On December 11, 1886, sixteen black farmers and one white farmer organized the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union in Houston County, Texas. Unable to gain membership in the white-controlled Northern and Southern Alliance, black farmers envisioned their Alliance as a mechanism to confront unfair practices. The lone white member, R. M. Humphrey, viewed the organization as a method for gaining black political support in Reconstruction-era Southern politics. Humphrey assumed leadership as superintendent and J. J. Shuffer was named president. The Alliance worked to organize poor, uneducated, and landless black farmers. Fearing retaliation from white supremacists, organizers worked quietly behind the scenes. Adopting many populist ideas, the group promoted railroad regulation, an increased money supply, and fair taxation policies. A fraternal organization, the group formed banks and insurance agencies. In 1890 the group merged with the National Colored Alliance. The following year, the www.abc-clio.com

new organization claimed over one million members in twelve states. Despite impressive growth, the organization could not escape the tentacles of white supremacy. Unconvinced that the growing Populist Party, which supported the Alliance, could sustain political clout, black Republicans were reluctant to desert their well-established party. Other blacks, fearing increased white power in the Democratic Party, rejected the perceived radicalism of the Alliance. Yet despite pressure from black Republicans, assaults from white supremacists, and politically divided black laborers, the Colored Farmers National Alliance paved the way for subsequent labor and political organizations. Janice E. Fowler References Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South: 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Handbook of Texas Online. “Colored Farmers’ Alliance.” http://www.tsha. utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/ CC/aac1.html.

COLORED METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church is an African American church body in the Methodist tradition, formed after the Civil War. In 1865, during the final days of the American Civil War, thousands of former African American slaves sought to form a church body affiliated with the historic Methodist tradition yet separate and independent from the predominantly white Methodist Episcopal Church, South. These

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men and women did not want to attend churches comprised of former slave owners, nor did they desire to join the historically free black churches of the North, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1870, during Reconstruction in the U.S. South, a group of over forty black ministers and church leaders met at Jackson, Tennessee, to form the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America (CMEC). Once the organizational structure of the CMEC was in place, the leaders created nine separate conferences composed of various church congregations throughout the southern United States. The church also started a printing house and published a newspaper, The Christian Index, for church members interested in the latest church reports and news from around the country. The CMEC was the first national organization composed of former slaves, and it elected two African American ministers, William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst, as bishops to guide the church into the future. In the years following, the CMEC forged its own religious identity and provided a safe refuge for black membership experiencing racial discrimination in the post–Civil War United States. During the twentieth century the CMEC was very active in the American Civil Rights Movement, particularly within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1954 the leadership of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church changed the name of the denomination to the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The name change reflected the desire of many within the church to emphasize inclusiveness and racial diversity. Today, the national www.abc-clio.com

headquarters of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church is located in Memphis, Tennessee. The church sanctions five institutions of higher education and remains active in social and political concerns throughout the world. Christopher J. Anderson See also: Christianity (African American); Civil Rights Movement References Dvorak, Katharine L. An African-American Exodus: The Segregation of the Southern Churches. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1991. Lakey, Othal Hawthorne. The History of the CME Church. Memphis, TN: CME Publishing House, 1985. Sommerville, Raymond R. An Ex-Colored Church: Social Activism in the CME Church, 1870–1970. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004.

COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE Following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492, a dramatic biological, cultural, and human exchange known as the Columbian Exchange took place between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Prior to Europeans’ arrival in the Americas, the Western Hemisphere’s northsouth orientation, combined with high mountain ranges and geographical isolation, had resulted in limited biological diversity, particularly for large mammals and germs. When the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French explored and then settled areas previously occupied by Amerindians, and as millions of African slaves were brought to the Americas, a vast exchange of germs, crops, animals, and humans took place across the Atlantic Ocean. The number of germs brought back to Europe from the Americas was limited.

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Columbus’s crew may have brought back venereal syphilis to Spain in 1493. Animals imported from the Americas were equally small in number (guinea pigs, llamas, cochineals). On the other hand, the Americas contributed many new crops such as varieties of beans, cacao, corn, manioc, peanuts, chili peppers, pineapples, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, squash, tobacco, tomatoes, and vanilla. Such crops as potatoes, which allowed a high yield per acre, and tomatoes, which provided muchneeded vitamins, improved Europeans’ diet and resulted in a dramatic increase in Europe’s (as well as China’s) population. Europeans introduced a wide variety of germs to the Americas, including whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza, measles, the bubonic plague, smallpox, and typhus. The Native American population, estimated at 50 to 100 million prior to Columbus’s arrival, dropped 50 to 90 percent in the following century, in large part because Amerindians had no immunity to these diseases. Tainos and Caribs disappeared from most Caribbean islands entirely; Mexica and Quechua Indians (in present-day Mexico and Peru, respectively) fared slightly better. Aside from the demographic impact, smallpox facilitated Spanish conquest, as in Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), where an epidemic broke out during Hernán Cortés’s conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–1521), and Peru, where the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and his heir both succumbed to smallpox, sparking a bloody civil war before and during Francisco Pizarro’s conquest (1531–1533). Europeans contributed animals, such as cows, large dogs, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, and rats. Mediterranean crops introduced by the Spaniards (figs, grape vines, lemons, olives, onions, oranges, chick peas, www.abc-clio.com

wheat) were not always suited for the Americas; other plants that they introduced, such as sugarcane (of Middle Eastern origin), coffee bushes (from Ethiopia), and banana trees (originally from Southeast Asia) radically transformed the agricultural economy of the American tropics. Africans’ presence in the Americas was a direct consequence of the Columbian Exchange. Following the introduction of lucrative tropical crops in the Caribbean and Brazil, and as the native population there was limited (Brazil) or dwindled into oblivion (the Caribbean), the need for imported labor grew more acute. An estimated 10 million African slaves were forcibly transported to plantation colonies (mostly in Brazil and the Caribbean). Tropical diseases the slaves brought along, most notably yellow fever and malaria, further increased reliance on African labor, since Africans were less vulnerable to these diseases than were Europeans and Amerindians. Internecine warfare in Africa, aimed at seizing slaves for the American market, destabilized several African kingdoms, including the Kongo. The Americas today remain deeply marked by the Columbian Exchange, particularly on a human level. Population exchanges have created remarkable racial diversity, including large groups of mixed racial background, such as the mestizos (Caucasian-Amerindians), mulattos (African-Caucasians), and zambos (AfricanAmerindians). Religious syncretism (Haiti’s voodoo, for example) and a blending of languages (creoles) are other, more indirect consequences of the Columbian Exchange. Philippe R. Girard

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COLUMBUS, CHRISTOPHER 303 References Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1997.

COLUMBUS, CHRISTOPHER (1451–1506) Christopher Columbus was a Genoese sailor and merchant often credited with the “discovery” of the Americas by Europeans. Although Columbus cannot be held directly responsible for the institution of slavery in the New World, his position regarding the mistreatment and enslavement of indigenous peoples, which Queen Isabel herself openly opposed, sparked a larger debate about slavery that ultimately justified the use of African slave labor in the Americas. (For more information see the exchange between Bartolomé De las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda). It is also important to note that with Columbus’s arrival, many European diseases were introduced into the New World, thus decimating a large percentage of native populations and contributing to the search for alternative labor sources elsewhere. Columbus, seeking to establish a Western trade route from Europe to Asia via the Atlantic Ocean, first approached the Portuguese king João II for patronage and financial support, but he refused to honor Columbus’s request. Columbus later appealed to the Spanish king and queen, Fernando de Aragón and Isabel de Castilla y León, also known as the Catholic Monarchs, who finally agreed to back what became known as “the enterprise of the Indies” following the expulsion of the www.abc-clio.com

Moors from southern Spain, which marked the end of the 700-year-long Spanish Reconquest. Throughout the fifteenth century, the Spanish and the Portuguese competed for control over African trade routes along the Atlantic coast. This conflict eventually resulted in the signing of a treaty in which Spain agreed to relinquish its claims on West African gold markets as well as cede control over the eastern route to India to the Portuguese. Due to large debts incurred during the Reconquest, the Catholic Monarchs eventually agreed to support Columbus on his voyage, with hopes that he would find the much-desired gold needed to replenish the royal treasury. Likewise, conversion of people to Christianity also became a primary goal for Columbus in an attempt to expand the holdings of the Spanish Empire, both geographically and spiritually. In exchange for discovering new lands for Spain and converting its inhabitants to Christianity, Queen Isabel granted Columbus the “Admiralty of the Ocean Sea” and governing rights over the lands that he would discover, in addition to a small percentage of the profits, based on the amount of gold that he would find. On October 12, 1492, Columbus and his men accidentally landed their ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, on what he thought was the Indies. Beginning with his first voyage (1492) and ending with his fourth and last voyage (1504), Columbus succeeded in claiming a large portion of the New World for the Spanish crown, namely Central America, many Caribbean islands, and the mouth of the Orinoco River in present-day Venezuela. However, Columbus failed to find an adequate amount of gold to cover his costs, let alone a surplus, and spent most of his life

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trying to claim the money and recognition that had been promised him. The information that we gather about Columbus comes primarily from his journals documenting his voyages. His writing style is often described as an awkward Castillian Spanish, strongly influenced by Portuguese. Interestingly enough, as his text Libro de Profecías (“Book of Prophecies”) suggests, Columbus was heavily influenced by millenarian philosophies, whose goals included worldwide conversion of people to Christianity and the restoration of Christian control over Jerusalem, which was under Muslim jurisdiction, in order to prepare the way for the second coming of Jesus Christ. Nicole L. Sparling and María Luján Tubio References Davidson, Miles. Columbus Then and Now: A Life Reexamined. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Garganigo, John F., et al., eds. Huellas de las literaturas hispanoamericanas. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002. Kadir, Djelal. Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Phillips, William, and Carla Rahn Phillips. The Worlds of Christopher Columbus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

COMOROS A nation in the Indian Ocean, the Union of the Comoros has a population of about 812,000 concentrated on three small main islands. Located off of Africa’s eastern coast, northwest of Madagascar, the Comoros Islands have been important transit points for traders and sailors. Consequently, starting in the sixteenth century, the islands saw the simultaneous arrival of both Arab and Portuguese traders. French influence grew www.abc-clio.com

rapidly across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1908 Comoros became an official French colony. The islands gained independence in 1975. Like other African island nations, Comoros is historically connected to the Americas primarily through transoceanic trade and through its strategic geopolitical and military location. Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Comoros served as a major transshipment point for trade in spices across the Indian Ocean to the Americas. Because of this role, Comoros has historically contained a diverse mix of people of Arab, European, African, and Asian, particularly Malaysian and Indonesian, descent. Although the opening of the Suez Canal changed shipping patterns for the region, the islands rose in geopolitical importance as European powers such as France, Britain, and Russia vied for economic and political dominance in the Indian Ocean. Later, as World War II drew near, Japan and the United States would also enter the region seeking to expand their influence. During and after World War II, the defeat of British naval forces in the Indian Ocean weakened British regional influence and, in the postwar era, the major powers in the area would be the United States and the Soviet Union. France, Comoros’s colonial power, would also retain a large naval force in the Indian Ocean, with bases in the Comoros. In effect, these small islands found themselves part of the larger geopolitical maneuverings of the cold war. Like Madagascar, Comoros was a focus of U.S. cold war strategic interest because of its location in the Indian Ocean. Since the end of the cold war, attention has shifted to Comoros as a transfer point for narcotics

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coming to the United States across the Indian Ocean. Independence in 1975 was followed by thirty years of political instability. In those decades, the nation experienced more than eighteen coups. Two of the larger islands, Anjouan and Moheli, violently seceded in 1997. They rejoined the Union in 2001 only after being given autonomy. Comoros held its first peaceful elections in early 2006. Although U.S. relations with Comoros have been friendly, the latter’s political instability has made the United States reluctant to send economic aid to the nation, despite its general poverty and indebtedness. In 2000, Comoros was one of thirty-four African nations regarded as too unstable to be included in the trade liberalization policy announced by U.S. president Bill Clinton, aimed at improving African access to U.S. markets. In 2006, as the elections approached, the African Union (AU) sent troops to the country in an effort to bolster stability. Comoros has become one test of the AU’s ability to create stability in the region. Comoros has also received international attention as one of Africa’s most biologically unique regions. Because of its location, Comoros and the surrounding waters have many rare animals and plants. Three species are internationally famous: the Livingstone fruit bat, the ylang ylang, and the coelancanth. Comoros has a diverse range of African fruit bats, and the giant Livingstone fruit bat, among the largest of its kind, is unique to the islands. Endangered fruit bats have been the focus of considerable scientific study and conservation efforts. Ylang ylang is a plant producing an essential oil commonly used in perfumes. Comoros is the source of 80 percent of the world’s supply of ylang ylang. www.abc-clio.com

The coelancanth is a rare ancient fish of significant scientific value. From 66 to at least 400 million years old, the species was formerly thought extinct until it was recognized that fishermen from Comoros had been catching them for some years. Because of its biodiversity, Comoros and its surrounding waters have become, over the last decade, the focus of conservation efforts through the United Nations and U.S. agencies and nongovernmental organizations. Richard Juang See also: African Union; Environmentalism Reference Newitt, Malyn. “The Perils of Being a Micro State: São Tomé and the Comoros Islands Since Independence.” In The Political Economy of Small Tropical Islands: The Importance of Being Small, edited by H. M Hintjens and M. D. D. Newitt. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1992.

COMPANY OF MERCHANTS TRADING TO AFRICA The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa was created in England during 1750 to facilitate the coastal slave trade in West Africa. The company’s trade rapidly increased the number of slaves carried across the Atlantic while developing England’s relationship with the Fante. The late-seventeenth-century decision by Parliament to expand England’s African trade by allowing “free traders”—traders representing individual, rather than national, interests—to buy slaves set the foundations for the decline of the Royal African Company (RAC), which had formerly monopolized the slave trade, and the expansion of England’s slave trade. While the RAC continued to operate during the first half of the eighteenth century, Parliament

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finally decided to replace it in 1750 with a new company. The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa embodied the growing belief that free trade allowed anyone willing to pay the forty-shilling fee to join the company. While the company embraced free trade, Parliament believed that England’s African trade could only be successful by maintaining a state-sponsored coastal presence. The company’s creation allowed England to maintain its numerous coastal structures, and the continued English presence in turn continued the already-existing relations with various coastal peoples. In the act that created the company, Parliament agreed to provide it with a yearly grant to maintain this coastal infrastructure. This was vital because while the company’s servants were allowed to trade in slaves, the corporate entity was not. Therefore, the company possessed no way to raise a revenue. This yearly parliamentary grant was given to the company’s London-based African Committee, consisting of three members who were from London, Liverpool, and Bristol. They used the money to purchase commodities to send to Cape Coast Castle, the company’s administrative headquarters in West Africa, where they would then be distributed to the various other forts. (The company was not allowed to send currency to West Africa.) Large quantities of commodities were sent from England on the yearly supply ships. For these shipments to be useful, the Africa Committee members needed to know what was desired along the Gold Coast; thus, the governor of Cape Coast Castle continually informed them of what was in demand. This knowledge added to the servants’ success as slave traders. Once these goods arrived in West Africa, the company utilized them in a variety of ways. www.abc-clio.com

One was to pay the wages of the company’s European servants, who then used the goods to buy and sell slaves. The servants paid their free and unfree African laborers; kept members of the coastal elite in their pay; paid a series of ground rents and customs to the local peoples where their forts stood; and used the goods to settle local disputes. From its establishment in 1750 to its decline after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the company proved successful in maintaining this coastal infrastructure. It did so by preserving old coastal relations while developing new ones, by building new trade enclaves, especially at Annamaboe, and by challenging the French and Dutch along the Gold Coast. Ty M. Reese See also: Cape Coast Castle; Royal African Company References Martin, Eveline C. The British West African Settlement, 1750–1821: A Study in Local Administration. 1927. Reprint, Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970. Priestly, Margaret. West African Trade & Coast Society: A Family Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

CONDÉ, MARYSE (1937–) Maryse Condé is a novelist, essayist, and educator from Guadeloupe who publishes her works in French. She was born on February 11, 1937, in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, the eighth child in her family. Before writing her first novel, Maryse Condé experimented with drama, producing several plays, including Le Morne de Massabielle (The Hills of Massabielle) (1974) and The Tropical Breeze Hotel (1988), staged respectively in 1991 and 1998 at the Ubu Repertory Theatre in

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New York. Her play, An Tan Revolisyon (In the Time of the Revolution) (1989), was commissioned for the bicentennial of the French Revolution and performed at the University of Georgia at Athens. In addition to being a renowned writer and awardwinning novelist, Condé has taught at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and the University of California at Berkeley. She has also held several prestigious and distinguished appointments, including the chair of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Columbia University. Additionally, Condé was elected an honorary member of the Académie des letters du Québec in 1998 and president of the Comité Mémoire in Paris in 2002. The author of numerous novels, Condé has gained not only national but also international recognition—many of her novels have been translated into English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. Condé lived in Africa for several years, namely in Ghana, Senegal, and Guinea, where she worked in the capacity of instructor-schoolteacher at various secondary schools. Condé’s personal experiences in Africa have shaped her writings, as her first two novels testify. Disillusioned with her mother’s land, Guadeloupe, like her protagonists in her semi-autobiographical novels Heremakhonon (1988) and Une Sason à Rihata (A Season in Rihata) (1981), Condé migrated to Africa. The exact geographic locations are skewed in Condé’s first two novels, but Segou: Les Murailles de terre (1984), awarded the Prix Liberatur (Germany, 1988), is set in the eighteenth-century African kingdom of Segu, a town on the Niger River in present-day Mali. Condé details the transformations—cultural, political, and geographical—of this African www.abc-clio.com

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tribal society, changes that were forged by religion, specifically the rise of Islam, and the slave trade. The Bambara tribal beliefs and customs were challenged and obfuscated by the intervention of New World culture and religion. Condé’s fourth novel, Segou: La Terre en Miettes (The Children of Segu) (1985), a sequel to Segu, further depicts the theme of the spread of Islam and French colonialism, detailing the invasion of the French and the subsequent fall of the once great Bambara Empire at the hands of the French colonial army. In Moi, Tituba, Sorciere Noire de Salem (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem) (1986), the winner of La Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, Africa is no longer a designated home site; instead the Caribbean is reclaimed as the “true” native land. Condé traverses the Caribbean through her eponymous heroine, Tituba, giving her voice and visibility and according her agency. Tituba is the embodiment of an African soothsayer and healer, for in her reside the voices of the novel’s ancestors, her surrogate mother Mama Yaya and her biological mother Abena. Tituba’s legendary status is also linked to Nanny, the famous Jamaican Maroon, a figure of empowerment and resistance, responsible for not only staging a revolution but also saving her people from a life of servitude and bondage. La vie Scelerate (Tree of Life) (1987), awarded the Prix de L’Academie Française in 1988, details the impoverished life of a Guadeloupean family that battles not only poverty but also racism and discrimination yet manages eventually to escape its impoverished state, while Traversee de la Mangrove (Crossing the Mangrove) (1989) also invokes the past as important to the needs of the present. Windward Heights (1998) is Condé’s rewriting of Emily

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Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, providing a Caribbean sensibility and geography as the events of the novel take place in Guadeloupe, her homeland, Cuba, and Dominica. Condé returns to the theme of lack, absence, secrecy, and loss in Desirada (1997), winner of the Prix Carbet de la Caraibe. In her memoir, Le Coeur à rire et à pleurer, contes vrais de mon enfance (Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood) (1999), which won the Prix Yourcenar 1999 for excellence in French writing, Condé offers an autobiographical account of her childhood, providing rich details of her pains, her joys, and her relationships with her parents and her brother and confidant. She documents the racial and class struggles that affect the Guadeloupean populace, including her parents, who identified more with the French colonials than with the native people. Condé details her dismay, lack of identity, and alienation in this coming-of-age story. Simone A. James Alexander See also: Caribbean Literature; Colonialism; Nanny References Alexander, Simone A. James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-CaribbeanWomen. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Condé, Maryse. “Pan-Africanism, Feminism, and Culture.” In Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, edited by Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelly. New York: Verso, 1994. Condé, Maryse. Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Soho Press, 2001.

CONGO (BRAZZAVILLE) Located in west-central Africa, the Republic of Congo is often distinguished by its capital as Congo (Brazzaville) from the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Congo (Kinshasa). Congo (Brazzaville) has ties to the Americas dating back to www.abc-clio.com

the precolonial era. The kingdom of the Kongo traded with the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century and its coast was heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade. The kingdom of the Kongo exported approximately 13,000 slaves a year. Connections also existed in the other direction as well: maize, manioc, tobacco, groundnuts, and other New World plants were introduced into the kingdom. These crops from the New World transformed Kongo’s agriculture in the seventeenth century by increasing yields and providing better nutrition and health. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Congo was a French colony. Congo gained its independence in 1960. The new nation faced several years of recurrent civil war, followed by a quarter century of experimentation with Marxism and some forms of multiparty democracy. In the 1970s and 1980s, Congo was a socialist nation with strong educational, economic, and military ties to the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Cuba. With the waning of the cold war, the late 1980s saw a warming of Congolese relations with the West. When Communism fell in 1991, Congo adopted multiparty democracy, improving its relations with the United States. The United States gave substantial support to Congolese democratization efforts, helping to fund elections. Democratization and free-market economic reforms have led to American and Canadian interest and support. Starting in the 1990s, the United States made African democratization a central priority of its foreign policy toward the continent, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) began to oversee the implementation of U.S. assistance programs

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in Congo, focusing on its central objectives: economic development, improved health, protection of basic human rights, the development of communications technology, women’s education, government accountability, and environmental protection. Congo’s economy is based primarily on petroleum, by far the country’s major revenue source, although its abundant mineral and natural resources (timber, lead, zinc, uranium, phosphates, natural gas, plywood, sugar, cocoa, coffee, and diamonds) has attracted American investments. Though the Congolese oil sector is dominated by the French oil company TotalFinaElf, American oil companies, including Amoco, Conoco, Chevron, and Texaco, are active in petroleum exploration and production. In June 1997 Congo and the United States signed a treaty designed to facilitate and protect foreign investment. Philip A. Ojo See also: French Empire; United States Agency for International Development References Gibbs, David N. The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Harbeson, John W. “Externally Assisted Democratization.” In Africa in World Politics: The African State System in Flux, edited by John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000. Rotberg, Robert I., ed. Africa in the 1990s and Beyond: U.S. Policy Opportunities and Choices. Algonac, MI: Reference Publications, 1988. Vansina, J. “The Kongo Kingdom and its Neighbours.” In UNESCO General History of Africa. Vol. V, Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, edited by B. A. Ogot. London and Berkeley: Heinemann Educational Books and University of California Press, 1992.

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CONGO (KINSHASA), DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly known as Zaire, is a republic of west-central Africa that achieved independence from colonial rule in 1960 and is known for its role in world politics in both the colonial and independence eras. The DRC, with a vast wealth of mineral resources, is potentially one of the richest countries in Africa. This same mineral wealth has proven attractive to foreign governments and corporations seeking riches to plunder. From the brutalities of Belgian colonialists and their Western backers to the trespasses of neighboring governments in Uganda and Rwanda, Congo has been made a killing floor of exploitation. In Congo, various national armies and local militias, proxies of imperialist powers, have fought or are fighting over control of some of the world’s largest and richest deposits of gold, diamonds, cobalt, and coltan. The death toll from the ongoing war in the DRC, which began in 1998, is higher than in any other military conflict since World War II, with an estimated 4.7 million killed in the last four years alone. The International Rescue Committee, an aid agency based in New York, reports that the mortality rate in Congo is higher than the United Nations rates for any other country. The war in Congo began in August 1998, when an uprising against the Kinshasa government of Laurent Kabila was launched in the east, backed by forces of the Ugandan and Rwandan governments (which received their main support from the governments of the United States and Britain). The Ugandan government claimed it was defending its western borders against rebels based in Rwanda,

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while the Rwandan forces claimed to be defending themselves against Hutu militias on the Congo border. Apparently, this border protection required Rwandan forces to occupy the diamond-rich town of Kisangani, 700 miles inside Congo. Militias were also funded by neighboring governments hostile to the Congolese government. The conflict in Congo has over its course seen involvement from the governments and rebels of Angola, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Africa. This has led some commentators to refer to the conflict as “Africa’s World War.” Along the way there has been evidence of involvement by mercenary companies including MPRI of the United States, Sandline of Britain, and Executive Outcomes of South Africa. Throughout the tumultuous postindependence era, Congo has remained subjected to the forces of imperialism and neocolonialism. Imperialist interests pursuing private gain have always played a significant and sinister part in the ongoing Congo tragedy. Congo has been geopolitically significant for a number of reasons. It is the second largest African country in terms of area, bordering nine other countries in the center of the continent. The country is a link between the states of the Indian and the Atlantic oceans. DRC is home to the world’s largest deposits of copper, cobalt, cadmium, and coltan. For many Westerners, Congo “has long been a symbol of Africa. The very word ‘Congo’ has resonance for the many Americans who never heard of most of the African states which quietly reached independence and unobtrusively went about their business” (Ferkiss, 1966, p. 169). In few areas have Western colonialism and www.abc-clio.com

imperialism been so vicious and destructive as in Congo. In his “Congo: The Western Heart of Darkness” (2001), Asad Ismi notes that genocide and plunder have been central to Western policy toward mineralrich Congo since the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–1885 assigned Congo as the personal property of Belgium’s King Leopold II. Congo suffered under 115 years of Belgian colonialism and neocolonialism. More than ten million Congolese were killed in those years, halving the population. Under brutal Belgian rule, millions of Congolese were subjected to torture, slavery, and forced labor as the colonizers pursued the maximum exploitation of ivory and rubber. Workers’ hands were severed for not working hard enough, and women were kidnapped to force their husbands to collect rubber sap. The regimes of primitive capitalist accumulation imposed by the Belgian colonialists were so horrific that George Washington Williams, an African American human rights activist who worked to end the atrocities in Congo, coined the term “crimes against humanity” in 1890 to describe what he had seen upon a visit to the country. As an eerie precursor to the present-day exploitation of Congo to serve the needs of the information age, Leopold’s brutal predations in the Congo were driven by the newly emerging appetites of the auto age, notably, the growing need for rubber for pneumatic tires. As V. C. Ferkiss has noted in Africa’s Search for Identity (1966), “the ghost of a Congo political entity which was a mask for foreign economic exploitation of Africans was born at the Free State’s demise” (p. 170). Since independence, governance in the Congo has followed this same pattern.

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Congo fell within the U.S. sphere of influence in 1960–1961, after a CIAsponsored coup that saw the murder of Patrice Lumumba, leader of the country’s first elected government. The U.S. government feared that Lumumba would take Congo into the pro-Soviet camp, and President Dwight Eisenhower himself approved of Lumumba’s assassination. Western political machinations were responsible for finally installing the CIA’s paid agent, Mobutu Sese Seko, in power in 1965. Under his dictatorship, which received ongoing U.S. backing, Congo suffered another thirty-seven years of terror and looting similar to what had been imposed under Belgian rule. In the years following independence in 1960, much of Congo’s turmoil centered on the mineral-rich Katanga Province and its Western-backed secessionist government. Two major invasions of Katanga Province by opposition forces of the Front de la Libération Nationale Congolaise (FNLC; Congolese National Liberation Front) were met by interventions from outside forces in support of Mobutu: Moroccan forces in 1977 and French forces in 1978. Indeed, outside forces were instrumental in defending the Mobutu regime from popular uprisings. Between 1965 and 1991, Mobutu’s regime received more than $1.5 billion in military and economic aid from the United States. At the same time, U.S. multinational corporations were granted increased access to Zaire’s mineral wealth. As a Western ally, Mobutu also played a part in cold war geopolitics. As an imperialist foothold, Zaire was used by the United States as a base to launch campaigns against the nominally socialist government in Angola from its assumption of power in 1975 until Mobutu’s ouster in 1997. www.abc-clio.com

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Eventually, Mobutu’s personal pillaging of Zaire, which saw as much as 95 percent of the country’s budget reserved for his own “discretionary spending,” led the United States to seek alternatives in the country that might allow even greater access for Western corporations. Especially unacceptable to imperialist interests were Mobutu’s attempts to maintain state control over mining operations. Since the removal of Mobutu, outside forces have maintained a steady hold on the successor regimes, continuing to shape the political economy of Central Africa. The manner in which imperialist forces have maintained their grip on the postMobutu Congo is crucial for any understanding of the political economy of contemporary Central Africa. The struggles that led to the replacement of Mobutu by Kabila in some ways had the character of classical imperialist battles between competing states as described by Lenin. Laurent Kabila’s rise to power came with considerable backing from North American interests. U.S. backing of Kabila provided the opportunity “of playing the modernising card in opposition to the neo-colonial manipulation of the European powers” (Biel, 2003, p. 84). Once in power, Kabila surprised his former allies by refusing to hand over control of Congo’s mineral wealth. Kabila also retracted several mining contracts signed with U.S. and European companies during the period of his alliance with Uganda and Rwanda, including a US$1 billion contract with American Mineral Fields International (AMFI), a mining company based in former U.S. president Bill Clinton’s hometown of Hope, Arkansas. He also refused to pay the huge debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank

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run up under Mobutu. Kabila began to nationalize resources and allowed mining concessions to China and North Korea. International capital grew so frustrated with Kabila’s dishonoring of contracts that he had signed with foreign businesses that some companies offered him $200 million to leave the Congo. There is even reasonable speculation that Kabila was assassinated because he refused to cede outright control over the country’s enormous mineral deposits, including some of the world’s most significant deposits of gold, diamonds, cobalt, manganese, uranium, copper, zinc, and, increasingly important, coltan, a key component in cell phones and computers. The new president, Kabila’s son Joseph, has openly embraced neoliberal capitalist policy. One of his first acts as president was to fly to the United States to give back mining concessions to companies whose rights had been revoked under his father’s rule. In trips to Paris, Brussels, Washington, and New York, he has held many private sessions with top European and American business leaders. Additionally, he publicly pledged during a trip to the United States to deregulate the Congolese economy, privatize major staterun companies, and introduce neoliberal investment codes in line with IMF demands. Jeff Shantz References Biel, Robert. “Imperialism and International Governance: The Case of U.S. Policy toward Africa.” Review of African Political Economy 95 (2003): 77–88. Ferkiss, Victor. C. Africa’s Search for Identity. Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1966. Griswold, Dierdre, and Johnnie Stevens. “Bush, Clinton in the Web: Behind the Assassination of Kabila.” http:// www.iacenter.org, 2001.

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Taylor, Ian. “Conflict in Central Africa: Clandestine Networks and Regional/Global Configurations.” Review of African Political Economy 95 (2003): 45–55.

CONGOLESE INDEPENDENCE The crucial importance of Congolese raw materials to the U.S. economy and the determination to resist any expansionist drives of the Soviet Union led to U.S. intervention in the 1960s in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As part of its economic and cold war interests, the United States supported the overthrow of Congo’s first president, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960 and supported the subsequent regime of Mobutu Seso Seko. The rich mineral deposits in the Katanga area made the former Belgian Congo one of the most highly developed regions of the African continent. Congo’s vast resources also attracted American interests. Although Western interests in Congo were predominantly Belgian at the time of independence in 1960, the United States perceived the central African country to be an untapped source of wealth, including valuable mineral resources (gold, copper, cobalt, diamonds, and uranium), and a place with potential investment opportunities. This perception influenced American conduct in Congo. The U.S. government also sought to protect American business interests in Central Africa more generally, which included important investments through American Mineral Fields Incorporated (AMF), a gold and diamond mining corporation; American Metal Climax (AMAX), a mining company with extensive African holdings; Morgan Guaranty Trust; Standard Oil; Mobil Oil; Read and Company; and Dillon. Specifically, the

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United States sought to reduce Belgian influence in Congo, both politically and economically, and to increase its own influence. By late 1965 the United States had emerged as the dominant power. By 1970, when a Tempelsman-led consortium gained control of the largest copper seams in the Congo, at Tenke Fungurume, American investors, especially contractors and commercial lenders, had largely displaced Belgian influences. The dominant position of the United States emerged in the context of postindependence turmoil. Between late 1959 and early 1960, internal tribal and regional differences developed into what was known as the Congo crisis of 1960, in which the United Nations (UN) intervened in the newly independent nation. The United States seized the opportunity for vigorous involvement in African affairs while working under the auspices of the UN. In the wake of the political and social instability of the early years of Congolese independence, the most distinctive feature of U.S. policy was the deep hostility toward the then prime minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who was suspected by the U.S. government of serving the interests of the former Soviet Union and accepting Soviet military and technical assistance. There was no evidence that the Soviets actually sought to take control of the Congo, and Lumumba’s actions as prime minister did not suggest a predilection for Communism. The United States was acting primarily to preclude Soviet expansionism and Communist influence and to protect Western security, and to defend its economic interests. The CIA-sponsored coup d’état resulting in Patrice Lumumba’s assassination in 1961 would lead to the profoundly corrupt and violent government of Mobutu www.abc-clio.com

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Sese Seko. Mobutu received large amounts of U.S. aid to sustain Congo as an antiSoviet sphere of influence and protect U.S. economic interests in the Central African nation’s mineral wealth. Philip A. Ojo See also: Congo (Kinshasa), Democratic Republic of the; Lumumba, Patrice References Arkhurst, Frederick S. U.S. Policy toward Africa. New York: Praeger, 1975. Gibbs, David N. The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Whitaker, Jennifer Seymour. “Introduction: Africa and U.S. Interests.” In Africa and the United States—Vital Interests, edited by Jennifer Seymour Whitaker. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

CÔTE D’IVOIRE Located in West Africa, the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire has ties to both its former colonial ruler, France, and has had connections with the Americas beginning with the transatlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century. Precolonial Côte d’Ivoire’s coastal towns of Assinie, Grand Bassam, and San Pedro were collection points for slaves. After abolition, some slave trading continued along the Ivorian coast. American missionaries arrived in Assinie, Grand Bassam, and San Pedro in 1840, relocating there after local hostility drove them away from a settlement on the Gabon River. Today, Adventist and Baptist missions from the United States have a significant presence in the country. Côte d’Ivoire’s first president, Felix Houphouët Boigny, who led the country to independence from France in 1960, spoke of the importance of promoting

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international cooperation between Côte d’Ivoire and the Americas. During his 1962 visit to the United States, he requested and received aid. Further contacts with American businessmen led to private investments in Côte d’Ivoire. In December 1999, the nation experienced political turmoil and a military coup. Because of its substantial involvement in Côte d’Ivoire, the United States supported UN intervention. Cultural influences from the Americas have been substantial. This has particularly been the case in music. Côte d’Ivoire’s Alpha Blondy, the African Rasta, who creates Jah-centered anthems, became the first African star of reggae with the recording Jah Glory (1983). More recently, hip-hop has been taken up by Ivoirian youth. Dozens of rap groups have emerged, including Parlement supreme posse, Negromuffin, Big Daddy Kane, Gangstarr, Alasko Deejay, and Ras Goody Brown. These groups claim as their influences Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, and other American pop musicians. The groups rhyme in Dioula, Baoule, French, and English. Philip A. Ojo See also: French Empire; Popular Music, American Influences on African References Collins, Edmund John. “Musical Feedback: African America’s Music in Africa.” A Journal of Opinion 24, no. 2 (1996): 26–27. Harbeson, John W. “Externally Assisted Democratization.” In Africa in World Politics: The African State System in Flux, edited by John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000. Whitaker, Jennifer Seymour. “Introduction: Africa and U.S. Interests.” In Africa and the United States— Vital Interests, edited by Jennifer Seymour Whitaker. New York: New York University Press, 1978. Woronoff, Jon. West African Wager: Houphouët versus Nkrumah. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972.

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CREOLE REVOLT The Creole Revolt was a rebellion of U.S. slaves that sparked a jurisdictional debate over the international slave trade. In November 1841 slaves being transported from Virginia to Louisiana staged a revolt on board the Creole. Expecting a smooth voyage, the harsh captain, Robert Ensor, did not shackle or otherwise restrain the slaves. The ship’s cook, Madison Washington, led the rebellion and, along with eighteen other men, stabbed Ensor and captured other men on board. However, they did not injure other passengers, including Ensor’s family. The rebels forced William Merritt, the ship’s overseer, to sail to the British port of Nassau in the Bahamas. Though British officials initially arrested the rebels, they subsequently freed them, ruling that since the revolt had occurred in their territory, the British Emancipation Act of 1833 applied to the American slaves. Americans had different responses to this sequence of events that illustrated the nation’s internal conflict over the issue of slavery and the slave trade. While the South responded with fury over British interference in what they considered to be legal trade, the northern abolitionists praised the rebels and called Madison Washington a hero. Out of the dispute came the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, signed by Secretary of State Daniel Webster and British representative Lord Ashburton. Agreeing that the slaves on the Creole should not be tried by American laws, Webster nonetheless used the revolt as an opportunity to negotiate America’s Northeast boundary disputes with Britain. To compensate the slaveholders who lost capital in the Creole affair, the British government paid them $110,330. The British ceased interference with American

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ships carrying slaves but worked with the U.S. Navy to encourage a unanimous enforcement of the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade. Merinda Simmons Dickens See also: Amistad Case, The; Slavery (History) References Hendrick, George, and Willene Hendrick. The Creole Mutiny: A Tale of Revolt Aboard a Slave Ship. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003. Harrold, Stanley. “Romanticizing Slave Revolt: Madison Washington, the Creole Mutiny, and Abolitionist Celebration of Violent Means.” In Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, edited by John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Sale, Maggie Montesinos. The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

CREOLE/CRIOLLO “Creole” (or criollo) is a term referring to mixture or something created through cultural convergence. One of the most misunderstood and most frequently misused words in American English, “Creole” derives its etymology from the Latin creare—“to beget” or “create.” The term “Creole,” whether used as a noun or an adjective, generally refers to a mixture of sorts—something created through cultural convergence. Although used in similar ways throughout the world, neither the definition nor application of the term is absolute or universal. The widespread use of “Creole” as an identifying term emerged mainly in the context of European colonization, when millions of Africans were enslaved and forcibly shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. France, Spain, Britain, and www.abc-clio.com

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Portugal were the principal agents in colonial expansion and as such their cultures, and particularly their languages, became ideologically dominant throughout the colonies. It is no wonder that the term finds its origin in Portuguese as crioulo, meaning a New World slave of African descent. The first Europeans to instigate the colonization and enslavement of African people, Portuguese merchants and settlers started to “mix” with African women almost immediately and to such an extent that miscegenation was a given in Portuguese colonies—which explains the large population of Creoles of Portuguese descent throughout the world. When borrowed by the Spanish, the term criollo, meaning a person native to a locality, identifies any person of mixed ancestry born in a Spanish colony. Likewise, the culture (music, food, language, etc.) of those people of mixed ancestry born into a colony is identified as Creole. In the United States, “Creole” refers almost exclusively to the people and culture of southeastern Louisiana, where African, Spanish, and French influences were deeply rooted throughout Louisiana history. Louisiana Creoles are a people of multiracial and multicultural heritage, usually any combination of African, French, and Spanish ancestries. While Creole culture is inclusive of language, music, and dance, Creoles are certainly best known for their food, which gains its popularity from its signature blending of West African, Caribbean, French, and Spanish cuisines. Because it is associated with colonialism throughout the African diaspora, however, “Creole” takes on variable meanings as the constituent elements of the cultural blend change according to particular location. More often, the term identifies a

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particular language that, although native to a specific locality, represents the multiple, layered languages that have existed in the history of that locality. In Senegal, the Creole language reflects a fusion of the native Wolof with the languages of European colonizers, specifically, the Portuguese and French; but in Cape Verde, each of the eleven islands with its own local language or languages, has its own distinct Creole, each influenced by centuries of Portuguese domination. While both the Senegalese and the Cape Verdean Creoles maintain linguistic vestiges of Portuguese, they are not mutually comprehensible, though some speakers may be able to understand each other fairly well. Because they emerged within the constraints of colonization and enslavement, Creole languages have been long stigmatized throughout history, often regarded as “primitive” and not worthy of academic consideration. However, current linguistic research shows that Creoles are languages of the same caliber as their African and European constituents and reflect linguistic properties common to most other languages. Yaba Amgborale Blay See also: Colonialism; Columbian Exchange; Diaspora; English, African American Vernacular References Dormon, James. H. Creoles of Color of the Gulf South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. Hall, Gwendolyn. M. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Kein, Sybil, ed. Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

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CRISIS,THE The Crisis is the official journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Originally subtitled “A Record of the Darker Races,” it was founded in 1910 by the organization’s new director of publicity and research, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who served as its editor until 1934, when Roy Wilkins succeeded him as its editor. The Crisis was more than simply “a record”; it became a powerful venue for relentless and biting criticism of racial injustice and race relations in the United States. The Crisis also sought to be mindful of global concerns, advocating suffrage for women and encouraging readers to learn about current events in other countries. The Crisis has also been notable for its support of African American writers and visual artists. Jessie Redmon Fauset joined the staff as literary editor in 1919 and was instrumental in encouraging many young writers featured in the journal, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen. The Crisis also awarded annual literary prizes for a number of years. Work of painters Aaron Douglas and Romare Bearden also was featured in the journal. Du Bois was particularly interested in the possibility of black art serving as propaganda in the struggle for racial justice, and literature and art from unknown as well as established artists has been featured. Now nearing one hundred years old, The Crisis remains committed to exploring issues of particular interest to minority populations in the United States. It is still the official organ for the NAACP but is currently produced by The Crisis

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Publishing Company, Inc., a separate organization. Kristina D. Bobo See also: Civil Rights Movement; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Harlem Renaissance; Hughes, Langston; Hurston, Zora Neale; Schomburg, Arthur Alfonso References Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. Lewis, David Levering. “Du Bois and the Challenge of the Black Press.” The Crisis Magazine On-Line: History. 2005. The Crisis Magazine On-line. http:// www.thecrisismagazine.com. Moon, Henry Lee. “History of The Crisis.” The Crisis Magazine On-Line: History. 2005. The Crisis Magazine On-Line. http:// www.thecrisismagazine.com. Cuban singer and songwriter Celia Cruz in 1962. (Library of Congress)

CRUZ, CELIA (1924–2003) Celia Cruz was a Grammy-winning, AfroCuban female vocalist. Blessed with a powerful contralto voice, a winning smile, and a radiant stage presence, Cruz rightfully earned the title Queen of Salsa. Born to poverty in Havana, Cuba, Cruz won amateur singing competitions that led to a career in music. Her first major break came with La Sonora Matancera (Mantacera Sound) in 1950, with whom she performed and recorded for over a decade. In the 1950s she traveled widely, and songs like “Yerbero Moderno,” “Sopita en Botella,” “Caramelo,” and “Burundanga” became known throughout all of Latin America. The latter song earned Cruz her first gold record in 1957 and her first trip to the United States. Cruz and La Sonora Matancera went on tour to Mexico after 1960 and stayed, expressing public disagreement with Fidel Castro’s revolution. She never returned to Cuba

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and was particularly bitter at Castro’s regime for denying her entry to attend her mother’s funeral in 1962. In that same year she married Pedro Knight, a trumpeter with La Sonora Matancera, who would become her most trusted adviser, manager, and companion until her death. Her anti-Castro politics probably cost her some support in the radical 1960s, but to view Cruz as a right-wing ideologue with a magnificent voice would be a gross simplification. Cruz was proud of her Afro-Cuban heritage, which she defended (and sang about) publicly, along with the rights of women and the need to preserve Latino-Latina culture in the United States, including the right to speak Spanish. Although Cruz teamed up with Tito Puente in 1966, their several recorded albums were not a huge commercial success. Cruz’s career renewed itself in the 1970s

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while working with New York–based salsa musicians, singing with the Fania All Stars in Zaire for the Foreman-Ali fight. She recorded several hit albums with bandleader and flutist Johnny Pacheco, then worked with Willie Colón, Ray Barreto, and Papo Lucca and his Sonora Ponceña. She was named best female vocalist by Billboard magazine in 1978. By then Cruz was able to sell out Madison Square Garden, as happened at a 1982 tribute concert to her career. In 1983 she won another gold record for Tremendo Trío (Tremendous Trio). In the mid-1980s Cruz frenetically recorded and toured, sometimes performing music based on Yoruba chants. In the 1990s she appeared in the feature films Mambo Kings and The Pérez Family and continued to tour Europe, Japan, Africa, and Latin America as the international icon of Latin music. By 2002, stricken with cancer, Cruz struggled to record her last album, Regalo del alma (A gift from my soul), a moving finale to her career that was released in 2003, just months before her death. Cruz won six Grammies and two Latin Grammies and has a star on the Hollywood street of fame. Also, Eighth Street in Miami’s Little Havana is now called Celia Cruz Way. Alan West-Durán See also: Cuban Music, African Influence in References Fernández, Raúl. “Arte y autonomía de Celia Cruz.” Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana 12, no.13 (Spring–Summer 1999): 45–51. Valverde, Umberto. Celia Cruz, Reina Rumba. 2nd ed. Bogotá, Columbia: Arango Editores, 1995.

CUBA Cuba is an island republic of the Caribbean, located south of Florida, that has been involved with slavery, abolition, and world politics and has helped to shape www.abc-clio.com

the culturally and politically significant concept of Afro-Cuban heritage. On October 27, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on the island of Cuba and originally named it Juana. In 1511 Diego Velásquez conquered Cuba, where he fought the Ciboney tribe, one of several indigenous people on the island. In 1513 four African slaves were brought to Cuba. Two years later Valásquez founded the city of Havana. Cuba was the home of many successful business ventures at the expense of the original inhabitants, who succumbed to the horrific treatment of their conquerors to the point of extinction; in 1520, the Spanish began the importation of more slaves to continue the economic development of the island. Spain maintained a firm hold on Cuba until 1763, when Havana was captured by the British, held as a bargaining tool, and returned to Spain in exchange for Florida. At this time, slaves were brought into Havana. Loosening its control of Cuba in the late eighteenth and early nineteen centuries, Spain deregulated the trade of tobacco, permitting it to be traded throughout the world in 1818. Black slaves were now the majority population and they managed to conduct numerous rebellions between 1823 and 1838, reacting to the repressive actions of Captain-General Miguel de Tacon. The rebellions for independence included not only blacks, but Creole participants as well. After one of the largest rebellions by slaves was quelled, a Ten-Year War (1868–1878) started against Spain. Led by the revolutionary Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, independence was the focus. Independence for Cuba, however, was seen as a threat to the United States, which blocked all moves for the island’s liberation from Spain.

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Between the years 1837 and 1839, 25,000 Africans were transported into Cuba, in violation of the 1817 treaty between Spain and Great Britain, which declared that it was illegal to transport slaves into Spanish colonies. The Spanish vessel La Amistad, which set sail from Havana for Puerto Principe loaded with slaves and gold, was one such vessel. The slaves—led by one of their number, named Cinque—staged a mutiny in July 1839 that left them in charge of the Amistad. They saved two of the crew, Ruiz and Montez, while killing Captain Ferrer, and demanded that the ship return to Africa. The slaves’ demand was not met; instead, the Amistad sailed to the United States, where the ship was apprehended by the USS Washington and remanded to stay in Connecticut for a trial concerning the property and territory rights of the enslaved Africans, the Spanish, and the American waters into which they had sailed. The slaves won their freedom in 1841 and returned to West Africa, while Spain continued to demand compensation for the loss of their property until 1860. In 1843 a black slave named Carlota was responsible for an uprising of slaves at a Matanzas sugar mill. A subsequent uprising in South Africa—the Battle of Crito Cuanavale—was named “Black Carlota” after her. In 1878 the Cubans and the Spaniards ended their war in a stalemate: both parties signed the treaty of Zanjon, which designated slaves who fought on either side as free, but slavery was not abolished and Cuba continued to be under Spanish rule. In 1886 slavery in Cuba was abolished by royal decree. Despite the abolition of slavery, blacks still suffered from racism and desired political independence from Spanish rule and the growing threat www.abc-clio.com

of Cuba’s annexation by the United States. In the push toward Cuban independence, the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (the Cuban Revolutionary Party), started by José Martí, was formed, which sought freedom for all, with total equality. A third party was formed after Independence, called Independientaes de Color (Independents of Color), which was led by Evaristo Estenoz. This party promoted a hierarchical approach to gaining equality based on color and caste and claimed to represent the interests of other minority groups in Cuba as well as blacks. Cubans expelled Spain with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898, but the United States effectively controlled Cuba before and after their independence, which was formally declared on May 20, 1902. Estenoz, who lobbied for the recognition of political and economic shares due black Cubans and other minority groups, was murdered when he ignored the warning of the United States that he would suffer consequences for promoting such agitation against Cuba. The Cuban army carried out a massacre of black Cubans, known as the Little Black War of 1912, in which it is estimated that between 3,000 and 6,000 were murdered, including Estenoz. This incident caused irreversible damage to the black population, from which it has never fully recovered. This race war is rarely mentioned in Cuban histories. In 1925 another party was created: the Partido Socialista Popular, better known as the first Communist Party. With the establishment of this party, blacks felt that they now had a chance for equality. Unfortunately, U.S. dominance in Cuba delayed the fruits of independence. Gerardo Machado y Morales (1871–1939) brought hope to the country in 1924 when

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he was elected president of Cuba. During Machado’s time in office, many AfroCubans became members of the Cuban Communist Party. The party’s founder, Julio Antonio Mella, was assassinated in 1929 by several agents of Machado. With Machado’s presidency failing on all fronts, he was exiled in 1933. Miguel Mariano Gomez (1889–1950) succeeded Machado, but he was soon impeached. After Gomez, Ramon Grau San Martin (1887–1969) ruled Cuba for a total of 120 days from 1933 to 1934. During his presidency, he gave women voting rights and advocated the eight-hour work day, among other programs. In 1940 Fulgencio Bastista y Zalvidar (1901–1973) won the presidential election and became Cuba’s official leader. Batista, a mulatto, was Cuba’s fourteenth president, and in 1943 he recognized and legalized the Communist Party. In May 1947 the Ortoxodos, or the Cuban People’s Party, was formed. In March 1952 the United States committed itself to giving financial support to Batista’s government. In 1959 the revolution led by Fidel Castro violently overthrew the government, forcing Batista to flee Cuba. Through all of these changes of government and upheavals, Afro-Cubans continue to struggle for full equality. AfroCubans comprise 80 percent of the Cuban population, including mulattos. Despite being the majority, they are still held back by racism and discrimination. Economically, they are and have been the lowest paid members of society. Despite living in poverty, Afro-Cubans have attempted to preserve their dignity by maintaining they are successful and productive members of society. Afro-Cuban religion is based on Santeria, which has been practiced since the sixteenth century. It is considered the www.abc-clio.com

street religion of Cuba. Today, Castro recognizes Santeria as an accepted religion. In response to the oppressions and hypocrisies in today’s Cuba, a number of the Afro-Cubans have attempted to leave for America, where, they have heard, a better life beckons. Some Afro-Cubans participated in the Mariel boat lift (April 15– October 31, 1980), but they experienced in the United States the same types of racism and discrimination as in their homeland. Despite their demonstrated talents in sports, especially baseball, Cuban athletes still have to endure racism. Rafael Almeida, Adolfo Luque, Roger Hernandez, and Esteben Bellan are some examples of Cuban baseball players who have experienced these problems. Prominent writers on the Afro-Cuban experience include Lydia Cabrera, who wrote El Monte (The hill) (1983); José Martí; and Nicolás Guillén, the poet. Music has been an essential element of Cuban tradition. Machito, the father of Afro-Cuban jazz; Jose Silvestra White, the Afro-Cuban composer and violinist; Tito Puente, referred to as the “Mambo King” or “El Rey” (The King); the Afro-Cuban All Stars; Don Ruben Gonzalez, pianist with the Afro-Cuban All Stars; and the Buena Vista Social Club have contributed to bringing generations of skilled musicians together to introduce Cuban music to the world. Dance combines with the music to express the Afro-Cuban experience. One popular type of Cuban dance music involves the son, which is a primary source of the salsa. Another favorite is the danzon, or ballroom dance music. With roots in both Africa and Spain, this art form is a living physical representation of AfroCubans’ heritage.

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With their strong traditions and tenacious pursuit of social change, Afro-Cubans are able to achieve success and even fame. But despite their successes, all Afro-Cubans are obstructed by the long history of slavery, social persecution, and a reluctance to recognize the existence of social injustices based on race. Karen E. Holleran References Amistad. VHS. Dreamworks, 1997. Bardach, Ann Louise. CUBA Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. New York: Vintage, 2002. Cable, Mary. Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship Amistad. New York: Penguin, 1998. Cameron, Sarah, and Ben Box, eds. 1994 Caribbean Islands Handbook. 5th ed. Chicago: Passport Books, 1993. Corbett, Ben. This Is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2004. Gimbel, Wendy. Havana Dreams: A Story of a Cuban Family. New York: Vintage, 1998. Gott, Richard. Cuba: A New History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Jones, Howard. Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Oppenheimer, Andres. Castro’s Final Hour: An Eyewitness Account of the Disintegration of Castro’s Cuba. New York: Touchstone, 1992. Paterson, Thomas G. Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

CUBAN MUSIC, AFRICAN INFLUENCE IN Cuban music demonstrates both African retention and the innovation of Cuban musical genres such as son, rumba, columbia, yambú, Latin Jazz, mambo, and the chacha-chá. For some, the term “Afro-Cuban music” is a redundancy, since virtually all of Cuba’s music seems to incorporate some degree of African influence. Conversely, www.abc-clio.com

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Cuba’s African influences have been so intertwined with Europe’s that the subsequent transculturation has made cultural purity exceedingly difficult to trace, if not suspect altogether. Music of African origins can be seen as a form of social and collective memory born of slavery, colonization, and neocolonial domination, as well as subtler forms of racism and discrimination that persist today, despite claims that differences of class, gender, and race have been eradicated. The powerful presence of African religions and music in Cuba has historical and demographic antecedents. First, more than three-quarters of all the slaves shipped to Cuba were brought in the nineteenth century, mostly due to the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 that created the first black republic of the Americas and made Cuba the Caribbean’s major sugar producer. Second, Cuba was the last country in the hemisphere, excepting Brazil, to abolish slavery—in 1880 formally, in 1886 in practice. From the ritual music of the Yoruba, Bantú-Congo, and Abakuá to son, rumba, Latin Jazz, and rap, Cuba’s musical genres are one of the most creative and profound examples of Afrodiasporic dialogue in history. In the United States there have been many Cuban musicians and performers, both black (Mario Bauzá, Machito, Mongo Santamaría, Chano Pozo, Celia Cruz, Dámaso Pérez Prado) and white (Don Azpiazú, Desi Arnaz, Chico O’Farrill, Gloria Estefan, Arturo Sandoval) who have played or made significant contributions to Afro-Cuban music. Even non-Cubans have been great disseminators of this music, including Dizzy Gillespie, Al McKibbon, Cal Tjader, Stan Kenton, Xavier Cougat, Tito Puente, Johnny Pacheco, and Poncho Sánchez.

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Cuban musical genres can be described through the increasing recognition and influence of Afro-Cuban forms and genres. The danzón was the first of these, and its public launching in 1879 is credited to Matanzas composer Miguel Faílde (1852–1921), though clearly danzones existed before that date. The danzón’s origins lie in the English country dance, which crossed the Channel and became the French contredanse, played on piano, flute, and violin. This in turn became the Spanish contradanza and influenced the Cuban habanera. Brought to Cuba by “French blacks” as a result of the Haitian independence struggle (1791–1804), both Haitian and Afro-Cuban rhythms were incorporated into the contradanza. Although banned by Spanish colonial authorities during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878) as a blatant symbol of Cuban nationalism, the danzón quickly became the musical-cultural emblem of the country from 1879 to 1920, when it was surpassed by the son. The traditional danzón has a marchlike introduction (A), followed by a clarinet or flute section (B), a return to the introduction (A), then a slow, songlike part dominated by the violins (C), a return again to the introduction (A), and finally a rapid section (D), yielding an overall structure of ABACAD, which was later simplified to ABAD or ABD. Danzones have often been called sound collages, because in either the (B) or (C) sections show tunes, opera arias, sones, and jazz melodies have been inserted. Danzones were originally only instrumental, but sung versions, called the danzonete, emerged in 1929. In the twentieth century the (D) sections often incorporated sones. Some of the great danzón composers were Antonio María Romeu (1876–1955) and the brothers Orestes López (1908–) and Israel López (1918–), nicknamed www.abc-clio.com

“Cachao,” creators of the danzón-mambo, which eventually led to the cha-cha-chá, the mambo, and the descarga (jam sessions).

The Son An Afro-European hybrid, the son gives more importance to the lyrics than does the danzón and was sometimes based on satirical guarachas of the nineteenth century and Congolese-derived rhythms. Although the son began in Oriente Province in the nineteenth century, it was not until it became popular in Havana (by the early 1920s) that it began to be considered the national musical genre. Originally, the son was played on guitar, tres, or both; marímbula (replaced by the bass); bongo; maracas; and claves (two wooden sticks). Trumpets were added in the 1920s and later other brass and piano. The son has an opening melodic part with fixed lyrics called the largo. The second section, called the montuno, has an improvising sonero (singer) answered by a chorus singing a repeated phrase. Four rhythmic planes characterize the son: (1) an ostinato and melody (played by the guitar, tres, or piano); (2) an improvisation section played by the bongos or congas; (3) a fixed pattern on clave and maracas; and (4) a syncopated figure (bass), which gives harmonic foundation for the vocal particle. The son, along with the rumba, are among the primary sources of salsa music. Some of the great son composers were Ignacio Piñero (1888–1969), Miguel Matamoros (1894–1971), and Arsenio Rodríguez (1911–1971).

The Rumba Rumba, which grew out of the tenements of Matanzas and Havana, is considered the most African of the island’s genres, yet it is in part derived from the rumba flamenca of

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Spain. It is a secular music and performed only with percussion. It is played with three drums or cajones (boxes), catá (a wooden cylindrical instrument played with two sticks), and claves. Other percussion can be added, such as chékeres and shakers. The voices follow a call-and-response format. There are three principle rumba genres. The first, and the most popular, is guaguancó. It is a reenactment of courtship and sexuality, with the male dancer pursuing the female, seeking the vacunao (vaccination, or pelvic thrust) of the female at the opportune moment. It usually begins with the clave and the “la-le-leo” syllabifications, as if to announce the party is about to begin (diana). There are three drums: the salidor, which sustains the basic rhythm, an intermediate one called los tres golpes (three beats), and the quinto, which improvises.

The Columbia The columbia is rurally derived and faster than the guaguancó rhythm. This variant is, for the most part, only danced by males. The movements are somewhat influenced by the íremes (little devils) of the Abakuá religion, but principally the columbia is defined by mimetic gestures of daily life: riding a bike, playing baseball, imitating a lame person, using a hat as a prop, and so on. It usually begins with rapid percussion; then the singing begins, with a lamentlike expression (lloraos).

The Yambú The third form is the oldest, the yambú. Some date it to the beginning of the nineteenth century. There is no vacunao in the yambú, and it is the slowest of the three genres. It begins with onomatopoeic singing (diana). The movements often imitate those of older people, but still the www.abc-clio.com

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dancing is sensual. It seems to have steps from the Spanish zapateo and other “couples dancing” of Hispanic tradition, but also from the calenda and other Africanbased dances. After 1959, the Cuban revolutionary government tried to make rumba the national dance for several reasons. Rumba was clearly associated with blacks; therefore, it was a way of affirming blackness within a nationalist and revolutionary project, but with the understanding that said blackness would not detract from social unity. Even though it was an African-based music, it was not religious, which was important since the Cuban government was building an atheist state. Rumba’s practitioners had a clear class background, since most blacks were poor, and rumba expressed a collective spirit, one of social solidarity. It was also a beautiful entertainment spectacle, lending itself to folkloric presentation and having a strong appeal to tourists. While rumba is widespread (the verb “rumbear” is synonymous with partying), it is difficult to dance to, making other dance forms (casino, salsa, timba) more popular.

Latin Jazz The 1940s and 1950s also saw new, hybrid genres emerge: Latin Jazz (Afro-Cuban jazz), the mambo and the cha-cha-chá. Afro-Cuban jazz drew from Afro-Cuban rhythms (rumba, son, ritual music) and U.S. jazz. The two major creative sources were Frank Grillo, or “Machito” (1909–1984), and his Afro-Cubans and the fortuitous collaboration between Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993) and legendary percussionist-composer Luciano “Chano” Pozo (1915–1948). Machito’s trumpeterarranger was Mario Bauzá, the creator of “Tanga” (1943), a seventeen-minute suite

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that features several genres from the mambo and the bolero to the rumba and is considered the first Latin Jazz composition. The Gillespie-Pozo partnership produced memorable work like “Manteca” and “Cubana Be/Cubana Bop.” Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill (1921–2001) was the other major Cuban composer-arranger who advanced Afro-Cuban jazz to new levels of sophistication. These traditions have been built upon since the 1970s by the likes of the group Irakere, Chucho Valdés, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Paquito D’Rivera, and Arturo Sandoval.

Mambo Though the word “mambo” had currency— and existed as a dance—before the 1950s, it was Dámaso Pérez Prado (1916–1989) who made mambo a worldwide craze. The López brothers (Orestes and Cachao) had written danzones with a new rhythm called danzón-mambo, but Pérez Prado took these new rhythms, added a second set of percussionists and an array of jabbing horn writing, and interesting piano riffs, not to mention his trademark grunts, and created a sound that was unmistakably his. In Cuba, however, the mambo was never as popular as it was abroad: the 1950s was dominated by the cha-cha-chá.

Cha-Cha-Chá The genre cha-cha-chá grew out of the danzón and danzón-mambo and was also influenced by the French charanga groups (flute, violin, piano, and percussion). Its creator was Enrique Jorrín (1926–1997), and the gentle tempo (compared to the furious and sometimes difficult mambo) and lack of syncopation (compared to the son) made it an easier genre for dancing. www.abc-clio.com

Although not at its ruling reign of the 1950s, the cha-cha-chá is still a popular genre kept alive by groups like Orquesta Aragón and Melodías del 40. Since the Revolution in 1959 that brought Fidel Castro to power, Afro-Cuban music has continued to thrive, although in its initial years the new government made greater efforts to support classical music and Nueva Trova, the New Song Movement, which offered ballads with a social message. Cuban dance music, still based on the son, rumba, and salsa, is now called timba, which has incorporated more aggressive horns, more jagged rhythms, and a singing style that has slight rap inflections and ever greater erotic and audacious dance moves. The Buena Vista Social Club craze of the late 1990s sparked world interest in Afro-Cuban music, music of a bygone era. Often ignored was the fact that excellent Cuban music was still being created by composers who are under eighty years old and by timba groups like Los Van Van, NG La Banda, and Charanga Habanera, as well as Cuban rappers. Cuban classical composers have also used Afro-Cuban rhythms and themes. Amadeo Roldán (1900–1939) and Alejandro García Caturla (1906–1940) often used the poetry of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. Also, Ernesto Lecuona (1895–1963) wrote exquisite piano pieces that reveal an intimate view of Afro-Cuban roots. In contrast to the United States, Cuba’s African heritage of music is central to defining Cuba’s national and cultural identity. This was not always so, but it certainly has been since 1920 as a result of the rise and consolidation of the son. Even so, in that period comparsas (which feature the conga rhythms and dances) were banned

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during carnival (from 1914 to 1936.) In the eastern part of Cuba the tumba francesa and the tajona, brought over by FrenchHaitian Mestizos, were important aspects of Afro-Haitian cultural contact with AfroCuban traditions. Equally significant is the fact that 1936 was the year in which the batá drums used in the sacred music of Regla de Ocha were first exhibited publicly in Cuba in a nonritual setting. Much has changed since then, and Afro-Cuban music, both ritual and secular, is now considered quintessentially Cuban. Alan West-Durán See also: Bauzá, Mario; Cruz, Celia; Cuban Ritual Music, African Influence in; HipHop, Cuban; Music (African); O’Farrill, Arturo “Chico”; Transculturation References Daniel, Yvonne. Rumba, Dance, and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995. Evora, Tony. Orígenes de la música cubana. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997. Fernández, Raúl. Latin Jazz. San Francisco: Chronicle Books and the Smithsonian, 2002. Moore, Robin. Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Ortiz, Fernando. La africanía de la música folklórica de Cuba. Havana, Cuba: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1993.

CUBAN RITUAL MUSIC, AFRICAN INFLUENCE IN Afro-Cuban ritual music falls broadly into three types: those of Yoruba, Bantu-Congo, and Abakuá origins, each corresponding demographically speaking to the three largest cultures of Africans brought to Cuba as slaves. www.abc-clio.com

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Yoruba From the area of what is known today as Nigeria and Benin, the Yoruba are the most numerous and influential, both musically and religiously. Their religion, Regla de Ocha, is also known as Santeria because of its syncretisms with Catholic saints over the centuries. Music and singing usually accompany different types of ceremonies, which range from giving thanks to the orishas (deities or guardian spirits), to commemorating an anniversary or the feast of a saint, and to an initiation or a tribute to an orisha that has requested it. The main instruments for liturgical purposes are the three double-sided batá drums, which are played on both sides, placed on the drummer’s lap. The iyá is the largest and mother drum, with the deepest tone. Its spoken rhythm is highly figurative, with a great variety of strokes, and it recreates the inflections of spoken Yoruba. The medium drum, or itótele, creates reiterative patterns that pertain to each orisha following the iyá’s lead, and the smallest, with the most acute sound, is the okónkolo, which performs the basic rhythmic pattern. Other percussion can be added, such as shakers, whistles, rattles, bells, and buzzing instruments. The batá drums in ritual ceremonies must be blessed and the drummers (males only) must be initiates as well. The batás hold a secret (añá ), also considered to be an orisha, and therefore the drums must be propitiated. The batás are central to ceremonies in which orichas come down and can mount a believer or initiate. Singing is performed by a soloist (akpwón), male or female, who can often begin without musical accompaniment by singing, praying, or both, but most often it proceeds in a call-and-response format, with the chorus echoing the soloist or

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repeating short phrases. Yoruba music of Cuba has been described as the building of two sonorous planes that sometimes intersect, but not always. One could view the music as a concatenation of motifs— but not necessarily one that is “resolved” in a typically Western musical fashion)— that builds in astonishingly layered ebbs and flows. The iyesá drums are played by Yoruba peoples from the Oyo region of southwestern Nigeria, near Benin. There are four sacred drums: the caja (the tallest); two drums of equal size called segundo (second) and tercero (third); and a fourth drum that was added in Cuba called the bajo (bass). Much smaller than the batás and barrelshaped, they are also double-sided, but only one side is played at any particular time. The drums are played with a stick, except the bajo, which is played with the hands. Two agogos, bell-like instruments played with a stick, add a timbre that is characteristic of iyesá music, and the güiro (a scraper) rounds out the ensemble. Like the batás, the iyesá drums need to be consecrated. They have the añá (secret) within and must be played by drummers who are also initiates. The bembé is a drumming party for the orishas. The drums can be of a different size, but they are not batá drums, rather, stave-barreled ones. The bembé is not a religious ceremony, strictly speaking, and the word has passed into the Cuban vernacular as a synonym of “to party” (as has the word rumba).

Bantu-Congo Music Compared to Yoruba music, Bantu music is based on briefer motifs, and melodic shifts are based on fixed sounds that end or signal an end. It is tied to various www.abc-clio.com

religious manifestations known as Regla de Palo Mayombe, Regla de Palo Briyumba, and Regla Kimbisa. Palo (stick) musical genres employ wooden percussive instruments like the guaguá or the catá. The music often begins with the wooden percussion, followed by the drums, called the ngoma, now known as conga drums. In addition, other metallic instruments, such as the plow, the hoe, and the cowbell are played. In remote rural areas yuka drums are used, made from the wood of fruit trees and ox hide (instead of the usual goat skin) for the head. The largest is the caja; the medium-sized drum is the mula, called so because its constant rhythm is reminiscent of a mule’s trot; and the smallest is the cachimbo. As in Yoruba music, the largest drum executes the widest variation of figures, while the two smaller ones maintain steadier or constant rhythms. The yuka were used for the maní dance, which is no longer practiced. A highly pugilistic dance, it had movements similar to Brazilian capoeira, with two dancers battling within a circle. Different plantations organized teams to compete with each other and bet heavily. Although for the most part a male activity, there were well-known women maniseras as well. Makuta drums, of which there are two, are rarely made anymore. The larger drum is called the caja, the smaller is the kimbandu. (In the past, three drums were often used.) The makuta is also a couples dance, with a key moment of pelvic contact among the dancers. The toque de garabatos substituted for the drums. The garabato is a branch from a tree in the form of a large check mark, with the shorter part used as a kind of hook to pick up small plants, which are

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then cut with a machete. When made from plants associated with magical powers they become a ritual symbol, and beating them on the ground becomes a way of attracting those powers. Several garabato players work in tandem to produce the rhythmic planes necessary for creating a song. The toques de garabatos have associations with death and are often used during funeral ceremonies. The kinfuiti, another drum used by the Congos, is played by applying internal friction. A string is played from within the drum. It is usually accompanied by three small drums. Kinfuiti drums are kept covered and played behind the curtain, and along with the makuta drums, they are the only drums used in ceremonies in which animal blood is offered in sacrifice. The kinfuiti is used to call the spirits of the dead (ndoki) that inhabit the nganga, an iron cauldron where sticks and ritual objects reside that house a spirit. The drummers for the kinfuiti and the makuta drums must be initiates (as with the batá and iyesá). Drummers moisten their hands with holy water before playing. Ritual songs are called cantos de fundamento and can be prayers to begin a ceremony, prayers to make the nganga work; events that can stimulate spirit possession; and managuas or makagua, which are satirical chants, often funny, or chants that describe incongruent or enigmatic situations. Soloist and chorus function in similar ways to singing in Yoruba music. The soloist is called gallo or insunsu, and the chorus vasallo or muana. Different from the Yoruba, the rhythmic structures remain the same for the different powers or divinities being invoked. Variation occurs in the words and intent of the song or chant. www.abc-clio.com

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Abakuá Music The Abakuá come from the Calabar region of southeastern Nigeria, near the Cross River, and are also known as carabalí in Cuba (Ejagham peoples help to form the larger Abakuá group, along with the Efut and Efik). The Abakuá society is an allmale secret society and has been described as a “confraternity and magical-religious esoteric society.” Their elaborate ritual and ceremonies, called plantes, have been compared to a religious drama, with processions, drumming, singing, mystical drawings on the ground (firmas), and the dancing of the íremes, an intriguing figure who represents a soul that has reincarnated (or a supernatural being) who assists with ceremonies. The Abakuá have two orders of drums, one that is symbolic and silent, and others that are played to accompanying songs and dances (biankomeko). The four symbolic drums are the empegó (a signal to come to order, pay attention, and be alert), the ekueñón (for matters related to sacrifice), the enkríkamo (to call and dominate the íremes), and the seseribó (to direct processions and marches). They are struck with a few symbolic strokes, but not played. The fundamental drum is the ekué, which is kept behind a curtain and is played by using friction; its sound imitates the magic voice Tanze (a sacred fish), central to Abakuá mythology. The second order of drums accompanies the songs and dances of the íremes. The biankomeko are also made up of four drums: the bonkó-enchemillá (the largest), the biankomé, the obí-apá, and the kuchiyeremá. Other percussion includes two percussive sticks (itones), a cowbell (ekón), and two sonajas (erí-kundí), a shaker-type instrument. The drums have feathers. The

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bonkó-enchemillá produces the talking rhythm, created by a wide variety of drumming techniques. Different rhythms are not played for different functions. There are two types of toque (beats), distinguished by the names of the two tribes divided by the Oddán River (Cross River). The Efó had the secret and so the stories tell of the struggles between them and the Efí for the voice of Tanze. The Efí, however, were the owners of the drum, of music. Efí drumming is faster, filled with figures, while Efó drumming is slower. The singing always alternates between a soloist and chorus. They tell the stories (or comment on them) that originated in Africa. They are passed on orally, but some old practitioners have written them down in notebooks. Many chants or songs are without musical accompaniment. The choral sections seem more isolated, and there is much that is sung without dance, since it is done among the initiates. Since the number of people who participate in the Abakuá ceremonies is severely circumscribed and since the religion functions with a strict hierarchy of officials, one could say that Abakuá music is carefully chosen and executed. The same people tend always to be the soloists and the chorus, with less being left to improvisation or for people to join in, as often happens in a toque of Regla de Ocha or Regla de Palo. Cuba has also been influenced significantly by the Arará (Fon) culture and music from Benin, mostly in the province of Matanzas. Arará religion is within the West African vodoun tradition. Finally, due to the presence of Haitians in Cuba, there are radá and gagá drums and www.abc-clio.com

music, linked to the Afro-Haitian religious practices. Alan West-Durán See also: Cuban Music, African Influence in; Kongo; Music (African); Nigeria; Religion (Africa); Yoruba References Eli Rodriguez, Victoria and Casanova, Ana Victoria Olivia, eds. Instrumentos de la música folclórico-popular de Cuba. 2 vols. Havana, Cuba: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1997. León, Argeliers. Del canto y el tiempo. Havana, Cuba: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1984. Ortiz, Fernando. La africanía de la música folklórica de Cuba. Havana, Cuba: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1993. Ortiz, Fernando. Los instrumentos de la música afrocubana. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Madrid: Editorial Música Mundana, 1996.

CUDJOE One of the greatest resistance leaders in African Jamaican history, Cudjoe (also spelled Cudjo and Cujo) was the leader of the Leeward Maroons. Undoubtedly Kromanti, his name represents the transliteration and anglicization of Kojo, meaning a male child born on Monday, consistent with the Akan practice of naming children according to the day of the week they were born. Cudjoe relied upon Akan spiritual practices (Obeah) and traditional Ashanti methods of warfare to help orchestrate the first Maroon War (1720–1738). With the assistance of his brothers, Johnny and Accompong (on the Leeward coast), and his “captains,” Queen Nanny, Quao, and Cuffee (on the Windward coast), Cudjoe’s army held the British at bay for over twenty years, defeating them on every occasion. Realizing defeat, British colonial leaders reportedly sought out Cudjoe and offered a peace treaty granting the Leeward Maroons

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sovereignty. Not only did the contract proffer their autonomy, but it also granted the Maroons 1,500 acres of land and freedom from taxation. In exchange, the Maroons agreed to end all resistance, decline refuge to escaped Africans and return them to their owners, and provide the British assistance in any future insurrections. Before signing the treaty, Cudjoe is said to have demanded that both sides, Maroon and British, drink a mixture of rum and blood drawn from the opposing leaders in order to seal the agreement. Today, a monument commemorating his life and victories stands in Accompong Town, home to hundreds of Maroon descendants, where each year, on January 6, they celebrate Cudjoe Day. Yaba Amgborale Blay See also: Akan; Jamaica; Obeah; Nanny; Slave Revolts/Maronnage Reference Campbell, M. C. The Maroons of Jamaica: 1655–1796. Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988.

CUFFE, CAPTAIN PAUL (1759–1817) Captain Paul Cuffe was a sailor, sea captain, shipowner, wealthy merchant, and a key figure of the Pan-African world. He was born on Cuttyhunk, one of the Elizabeth Islands, off the coast of Massachusetts. Cuffe visited Africa on whaling voyages as a teenager. He saw firsthand how Africans lived and began to understand the ways diasporic Africans were interconnected across geographical distances and national boundaries. Through his shrewd business acumen, Cuffe was able to build a trading network that earned him a large personal fortune and allowed him to travel to several www.abc-clio.com

Silhouette head-and-shoulders portrait of Paul Cuffe, a prosperous businessman and sea captain most commonly known for his work in helping free blacks immigrate to Sierra Leone with the help of his shipping company. (Library of Congress)

West African nations, forming business partnerships as he went. This experience convinced Cuffe that diasporic Africans might have a better future in Africa than they did in the Americas, and that establishing economic connections around the black Atlantic could provide diasporic Africans with a homeland where they might have room to gain the cultural and economic influence necessary for them to free themselves from slavery and racism. After establishing many of these cultural and economic connections himself, Cuffe proposed the first ever black-led back-toAfrica movement. Unfortunately, after he secured permission from England to repatriate Africans to Sierra Leone, his efforts were stalled by the War of 1812. Following the war, however, in 1816, Captain Paul Cuffe sailed his ship the Traveller to Sierra

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Leone with thirty-eight African Americans who were determined to make a new home in Africa. Matthew D. Brown References Harris, Sheldon. Paul Cuffe: Black American and the African Returns. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. Salvador, George. Paul Cuffe, the Black Yankee. New Bedford, MA: Reynolds-DeWalt Printing, 1969. Thomas, Lamont. Rise to Be a People: A Biography of Paul Cuffe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

CUSH KINGDOM Cush Kingdom was an ancient African kingdom, located in present-day Egypt, that lasted two thousand years. The Kingdom of Cush (Kush, Nubia) lay along the Nile River roughly between the first cataract above Aswan to the sixth cataract near the confluence of the Blue and White Nile Rivers at Khartoum. The Kingdom of Cush began around four thousand years ago. The first kingdom, dominated by Egypt, was centered near the second cataract. Biblical references to Cush are often to this first kingdom.

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However, power shifted to Napata, near the fourth cataract, as the capital of the Napatan (Cush) Kingdom. At the height of its power, Cush conquered Egypt. The kings of the period became the pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. This period lasted a brief hundred years, ending with the conquest of Egypt by the Assyrians. When the Cush Dynasty ended, Napatan was abandoned for a new center up the Nile at Meroe, about halfway between the confluence of the Atbara River and the Nile and the sixth cataract. There an iron forging and trading center with connections to the Red Sea was developed. The Meroite Kingdom of Cush went into permanent decline after it suffered military defeat at the hands of King Ezana of Axum (ancient Abyssinia) about 1,650 years ago. Ruins of magnificent pyramids, temples, public buildings, ironworks, and homes are located at Jebal Barkal and at many other places. Andrew J. Waskey

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See also: Egypt Reference Welsby, Derek A. The Kingdom of Kush: The Napatan and Merotic Empires. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1998.

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D DABYDEEN, DAVID (1956–) David Dabydeen is a British-Guyanese poet and novelist of East Indian descent. Born on a sugar plantation in Guyana, Dabydeen immigrated to England as a teenager and was educated at the University of Cambridge. His first volume of poetry, Slave Song (1984), awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, consists of a series of creole monologues remarkable for extending the boundaries of poetic expression, through their use of a creole idiom and what he describes as savage lyricism. Dabydeen’s next book of verse, Coolie Odyssey (1988), charts, as the title suggests, the odyssey that is the Indian Diaspora, the transportation of East Indian coolies to the plantations of Guyana and the Caribbean islands and subsequent migration to the British “Mother Land.” Here, Dabydeen continues his exploration of the psychosexual dimensions of slavery and colonialism in his redeployment of the archetypal figures of Miranda and Caliban, and in doing so he contributes to the many Caribbean reappropriations of Shakespeare’s New World play, The Tempest. His third collection of verse, Turner: New and Selected Poems (1994), prefaces a

selection from his earlier books with the long poem-sequence Turner, an extended meditation upon J. M. W. Turner’s painting, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying, Typhoon Coming On (1840), popularly known as The Slave Ship. In his preface to the poem, Dabydeen explains that Turner focuses upon the submerged head of the African in the foreground of the painting, and he defines his own response to the picture against that of John Ruskin, who consigned the subject of the artwork, the shackling and drowning of African slaves, to a brief footnote that “reads like an afterthought, something tossed overboard” (p. ix). The submerged African is symbolic, for Dabydeen, of the Western erasure or relegation to a footnote of black life and history and, by extension, black culture. Turner, then, is a poem of retrieval, and as such complements the other ways in which Dabydeen has sought to bring a black subtext to British cultural history to the surface of inquiry in his capacity as professor of British and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick and in texts such as Hogarth’s Blacks (1985) and Black Writers in Britain 1760–1890 (1991), co-edited with Paul Edwards. One of the

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black writers represented in the latter text is the former slave and author Olaudah Equiano, a figure with whom Dabydeen feels a close and even psychic kinship and whose presence is palpable in his 1999 novel, A Harlot’s Progress. This text, a reinvention of William Hogarth’s prints of 1732, revisits in the medium of fiction Dabydeen’s earlier academic analysis of Hogarth and the representation of race at the same time that it returns to and develops the themes of Africa, the Middle Passage, and fabulation that are central to Turner. Dabydeen’s rewriting of Turner as fiction is indicative of that transition from poetry to the novel that characterizes the careers of many writers from the Caribbean region, such as George Lamming and Wilson Harris. Dabydeen’s three earlier novels are The Intended (1991), in which various aspects of the Indian Diaspora are explored through the theme of adolescence; Disappearance (1993), Dabydeen’s “condition of England” novel; and The Counting House (1996), an imaginative exploration of Indian indentureship. Lee M. Jenkins See also: Caribbean Literature; Equiano, Olaudah

References Dabydeen, David. “On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today.” In The State of the Language, edited by Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Dabydeen, David. Turner: New and Selected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994. Dabydeen, David. A Harlot’s Progress. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. Grant, Kevin, ed. The Art of David Dabydeen. Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 1997. Jenkins, Lee M. “On Not Being Tony Harrison: Tradition and the Individual Talent of David Dabydeen.” Ariel 32, no. 2 (2001): 69–88.

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DADIÉ, BERNARD BINLIN (1916–) Bernard Binlin Dadié is a playwright, novelist, poet, journalist, and administrator who is regarded as the father and founder of Ivorian literature and modern African theater, being the first to propose a new concept of African theater inspired by traditional oral forms. Born in 1916 in Assinie, Côte d’Ivoire, he became, in the 1930s, the colony’s most prominent writer while pursuing a successful career as a journalist and a politician. His works include several volumes of poetry, traditional tales and legends, novels, and plays. Dadié received his higher education in Senegal where, in 1934, he entered the William Ponty School in Gorée, a center that prepared the black elite for careers in teaching and administration. He qualified as a civil servant in 1939 and then worked at Dakar’s Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (Foundational Institute of Black Africa) until 1947 before returning to his country and taking part in the independence movement. He had started writing as a journalist as early as 1928 and subsequently contributed under his own name and several pseudonyms to a number of newspapers, including The Young Senegal, Dakar-Jeunes, La Communauté, Le Réveil, and Le Démocrate. Dadié’s adult literary career began with the play, Assemien Dehylé, roi du Sanwi (1935), performed in 1936 in Dakar by fellow students and at the Colonial Exposition in Paris of 1937. Subsequently, for more than a decade, Dadié tried his hand at different genres: theater, tales, poetry, and short stories, using literature as both an informational tool to reach his audiences and as a powerful weapon to fight social injustice and promote human rights. Literary recognition came with

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Afrique debout (1950; Africa Upright), followed by the autobiographical novel Climbié (1956), listed in February 2002 as one of the hundred best African books of the twentieth century. In 1955 he reached an international audience with the publication of his first collection of African tales, Le pagne noir (Black Cloth). His novel Patron de New York (1964)—translated as One Way: Bernard Dadié Observes America in 1994—which was awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noire, looks at black communities and culture in the United States. While his father, himself a political activist, influenced Dadié’s nationalism and inspired his fight for social justice, the writer drew his inspiration from his traditional background, his appreciation of oral genres, and his vast literary culture in addition to his observation of the political scene. In particular, his personal witness of events like the 1938 DakarNiger strike and its subsequent repression and his prison experience as a political dissident in 1949–1950 left a mark on his writing. While he continued writing, Dadié pursued an administrative and political career, becoming one of the founding members of the Rassemblement democratique africain (RDA; Democratic African rally) in October 1946. He worked in UNESCO from 1964 to 1972 and served as Ivorian minister of culture from 1977 until his retirement in 1986. Dadié’s works have been translated into many languages. Today he is acclaimed, in the United States, as well as Africa, as a model writer who draws from African tradition to offer a critical viewpoint on a generation that came of age during the era of colonial and national struggle. Francoise Parent Ugochukwu www.abc-clio.com

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References Mayes, Janice. Critical Perspectives on Bernard Dadié. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995. Edebiri, Unionmwan, ed. Bernard Dadié: Hommages et etudes. Ivry-sur-Seine, France: Nouvelles du Sud, 1992.

D’AGUIAR, FRED (1960–) Fred D’Aguiar is a British Guyanese author of drama, poetry, and fiction. He was born and, as a teenager, grew up in London, yet he spent most of his childhood in Guyana in a small village near Georgetown. For D’Aguiar, therefore, there are three fundamental points of biographical reference, and seemingly incompatible ones: the openness of Guyana’s landscapes with its immeasurable sea, savannahs, and skies standing against London’s ordered, encroaching urbanity; the modulated rhythms of Guyanese English clashing with the received or less received dialects of the “center”; and, not least, the literary tradition of writers like Martin Carter and, above all, Wilson Harris confronting an English legacy from Wordsworth to Eliot. D’Aguiar’s work is often seen as a complex synthesis of voices driven by a quest for a crosscultural, and transethnic, understanding. Even though D’Aguiar also wrote dramatic texts for the stage (An Irish Airman Foresees His Death [1995]) as well as for the BBC, he is mainly known for his poetry and fiction. His volumes of poetry so far comprise Mama Dot (1985), Airy Hall (1989), British Subjects (1993), Bill of Rights (1998), Bloodlines (2000), and An English Sampler (2001). The epic, booklength poem Bloodlines may serve as a representative example to illustrate D’Aguiar’s negotiation of traditions. It lyrically evokes

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two love stories: that of two elderly fugitive slaves on their way to Canada and the relationship of a young slave with the son of a plantation owner. D’Aguiar celebrates a crosscultural dialogue both thematically and structurally; he combines the rigid formal requirements of the ottava rima (a verse form famously employed by Lord Byron in his Don Juan) with calypsonian rhythms through the poem’s speaker. D’Aguiar has also written four highly acclaimed novels. The Longest Memory (1994) is set on a North American plantation in the nineteenth century; sacrificing a singular narrative authority, it revolves around an instance of black and white romance in a polyphonic composition of many different voices. The memory of slavery is further pursued in Feeding the Ghosts (1997). It fictionalizes the historical incidences on the slave ship Zong in 1781, when 132 living slaves were thrown into the sea to secure the insurance money for “lost freight.” One slave, however, managed to climb back on board again. In his novel D’Aguiar gives her a name, a history, and a voice to tell her story. The novels Dear Future (1996) and Bethany Bettany (2003) are set in contemporary Guyana. D’Aguiar is very careful to note that his work on Atlantic slavery inevitably feeds into these narratives, in that the legacy of history has fundamental reverberations on the current political and social realities in the Caribbean. In both novels, these realities are largely filtered through the eyes of children. Through such an innovative perspective, uncommon in AngloCaribbean writing, D’Aguiar seeks to combine aesthetic innovation with a sensitivity to the common humanity of the people about whom he writes. Lars Eckstein www.abc-clio.com

See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Caribbean Literature References D’Aguiar, Fred. Bloodlines. London: Chatto and Windus, 2000. D’Aguiar, Fred. “Home Is Always Elsewhere: Individual and Communal Regenerative Capacities of Loss.” In Black British Culture and Society, edited by Kwesi Owusu. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Ledent, Bénédicte. “Remembering Slavery: History as Roots in the Fiction of Caryl Phillips and Fred D’Aguiar.” In The Contact and the Culmination: Essays in Honour of Hena Maes-Jelinek, edited by Marc Delrez and Bénédicte Ledent. Liège, Belgium: L3, 1997.

DAN FODIO, UTHMAN (1754–1817) Uthman Dan Fodio was an Islamic writer, scholar, teacher, and reformer of presentday Nigeria. As the first Sokoto Caliph, he successfully led the Fulani jihad (1804–1810) against the Hausa kingdoms. He built the largest empire in Africa until it fell to European colonization in 1903. Uthman is considered the most important figure in revitalizing Islamic faith in West Africa during the nineteenth century. Uthman was born in Maratta, Gobir, Hausaland, but moved with his family to Degel in his childhood. He learned the Qur’an from his father and Islamic sciences from various teachers. Under the influence of Jibril ibn Umar, Uthman became a Sufi Muslim and conceived the idea of establishing an ideal society based on Islamic principles. He earned the title of shaykh and, with the approval of Bawa, the sultan of Gobir, built a religious community in Degel. Bawa’s successor Yunfa, however, revoked the autonomy of Uthman’s community and sought to kill him. In 1804

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Uthman and his jihadists fled to the Fulani, where they allied with the Fulani nomads and Hausa peasants and launched attacks on oppressive Hausa rulers. After swiftly toppling the Hausa federation, Uthman founded the Fulani Empire and ruled it until 1815, when his son Muhammad Bello inherited the caliphate. John J. Han See also: Fulani; Hausa; Islam, African American; Sokoto Caliphate References Balogun, Ismail A. B. The Life and Works of Uthman dan Fodio: The Muslim Reformer of West Africa. Lagos, Nigeria: Islamic Publications Bureau, 1975. Last, Murray. The Sokoto Caliphate. New York: Humanities Press, 1967.

DANGAREMBGA,TSITSI (1959–) Tsitsi Dangarembga, author of the widely renowned Anglophone postcolonial African novel Nervous Conditions (1988), was born in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe in 1980, at full independence from Britain) in 1959, the year the United Nations denounced apartheid in Africa. Born around the time most African countries sought and received their independence from the British and the French, Dangarembga is preoccupied in her writing with not only the myriad of ways in which colonization impacted Africans, but also the degree to which postindependence Africans struggled to stabilize their newly liberated countries. While her novel Nervous Conditions generally receives the greatest amount of attention in terms of scholarly analysis, Dangarembga had published a play, She No Longer Weeps (1987), and had written other dramas for presentation by a university theater troupe as well as several www.abc-clio.com

short stories before the novel appeared. Later, one of her stories inspired the film Neria, which was released in 1992, and she directed and wrote the screenplay for her own film, Everybody’s Child, released in 1996. In their introduction to Negotiating the Postcolonial (2002), a collection of critical essays, Ann Elizabeth Willey and Jeanette Treiber situate the author’s works in terms of reception and influence and update readers specifically about the emerging success of her novel. They note that for many years, American students studying literature, history, or anthropology read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), an early standard of African literature in English, to get a glimpse of what life and culture in Africa were like. Willey and Treiber contend, however, that starting in the early 1990s, students read Dangarembga’s novel with increasing frequency instead of Achebe’s classic. To support their observation, they point to the variety of themes and issues the novel addresses—from women’s issues and the influence of the community on an individual’s life to the roles of education and colonization in the development of selfhood. Likewise, Willey and Treiber note that the novel was first published not in Zimbabwe but in England, where the author likely encountered sexism in the publishing arena. The first novel by a black Zimbabwean female to reach readers’ hands would not have done so if not for the British-run Women’s Press. In an interview with Jane Wilkinson published in Talking with African Writers (1992), Dangarembga states that at the time the manuscript was turned down, she remembers wondering if the rejection had more to do with her writing ability or with the content of the work,

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which most probably was construed by male publishers as negative criticism. In her article “Debunking Patriarchy” (1995), Pauline Ada Uwakweh reminds us that “patriarchal subordination of the female is reflected in the male domination of the literary arena” as well, which likely accounts for the initial rejection of Dangarembga’s text for publication and undoubtedly is responsible for so many skewed and unrealistic representations of females in African literature by males (p. 75). Testament to her influence not only on European readers but also on their American counterparts, Dangarembga’s text was published first by Seal Press in the United States in 1988, and remains in print today, with tens of thousands of copies sold. With Nervous Conditions alone, Dangarembga has contributed enormously to helping the world understand the cultural convolutions, crises of identity, and power struggles that are set into motion when one country decides to colonize another. Yet her multifaceted influence in Africa and the United States continues far beyond the novel as well, given her work in other literary genres of drama, short prose, and film. Walt Collins References Uwakweh, Pauline Ada. “Debunking Patriarchy: The Liberational Quality of Voicing in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.” Research in African Literatures 26, no. 1 (1995): 75–84. Wilkinson, Jane. Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights, and Novelists. London: James Currey, 1992. Willey, Ann Elizabeth, and Jeanette Treiber. Negotiating the Postcolonial: Emerging Perspectives on Tsitsi Dangarembga. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002.

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DANISH EMPIRE The kingdom of Denmark became involved in West African trade during the early seventeenth century and established settlements in what is now Ghana from 1658. In 1671 Danes occupied the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean and expanded their possessions in the region to include St. John in 1717 and St. Croix in 1733. Initially, these three Caribbean islands were owned by the Danish West India Company, but in 1754 the three islands were sold to the king of Denmark and became Danish colonies. They were occupied by the British in 1801 and again during 1807–1815. The Danes sold the last of their forts in West Africa to the British in 1852. In 1916 the Danish West Indies were sold to the American government, and Danish rule ended in 1917. These then became the U.S. Virgin Islands. In West Africa, the Danes expelled the Swedes from parts of the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) that the latter had controlled, located around their fort of Osu, near Accra, which had been built in 1661. The Danes renamed the post Christiansborg and used it as the center of their trading activities along the West African coast. They built or took over other posts at Ada (Fort Konigstein), Keta (Fort Prinzenstein), Ningo (Fort Friedensborg), and Teshi (Fort Augustaborg). Most of these quickly became centers for the slave trade, with Keta being enlarged in 1785. In 1792 the Danes announced the abolition of the slave trade at the end of 1802; there was a massive increase in slaves being shipped in the interim ten years, after which the bases had little purpose. In 1839, when Christian VIII became king, plans were drawn up to sell the Danish Gold Coast bases to the British. This

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took place in 1850, and the Danish possessions became parts of the British colony of the Gold Coast. Remains of some of the forts survive. By contrast, when the Danes decided to establish a colonial empire in the West Indies, many of the islands were already occupied by other European powers, and as a result, Denmark was only able to occupy two islands that were not already colonized: St. Thomas in 1671 and St. John in 1717. Both were important in the production of sugar, and the early Danish settlers planned for a large number of Danes, with a mix of free settlers and indentured servants and similar numbers of slaves. Certainly, in 1688 the numbers on St. Thomas were approaching parity: 317 whites and 422 African slaves. Some of these slaves came from Danish bases in West Africa, while others were acquired elsewhere in Africa or in the Caribbean. However in a census three years later, while the white population had risen to 389, there were 547 slaves. The numbers were even more disparate in 1715, when there were 555 whites as against 3,042 slaves. There were many reasons why only small numbers of Danes were keen to move to the West Indies. During that period the population of Denmark was less than 500,000, with a population density only half that in England, France, or the Netherlands. Gradually, other Europeans came to settle on the St. Thomas, and also on St. John, which was occupied by the Danes in 1733 by a total of 208 white settlers and indentured servants and 1,087 slaves. In that year there was a slave rebellion, and although it was put down, its occurrence was a discouragement to white settlement. Nevertheless, Danes tried to work out schemes to

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persuade more whites to move to the Danish Caribbean. The life of an indentured laborer, however, did not seem very promising, and one contemporary, J. L. Carstens, compared their treatment to that of the slaves. The indentured labor system was abandoned in the early eighteenth century. A plan to send convicts to the island was also shelved after a few shiploads of prisoners were transported because the authorities on St. John became terrified of a convict rebellion. With few Danes wanting to move to St. Thomas, other Europeans were welcomed, so that by 1715 the white population was largely non-Danish. Before the Danes occupied St. Thomas, it had been occupied by Prussians, and to boost the nonslave population, the Danish administrators encouraged Dutch settlers. Gradually, however, the white population of St. Thomas fell as the number of slaves rose to a peak of 2,302 in 1770. In 1733 the Danish West India Company bought the island of St. Croix from the French. It was much larger than the other two islands and in 1755 had a population of 1,303 whites and freedpersons and 8,897 slaves. The topography of this island lent itself far more easily to plantation agriculture, and there was a wellestablished elite of some fifty English families who had settled during the French period and were encouraged by the Danes to remain. The importance of the English population was reflected in the fact that when the first regular newspaper, the Royal Danish American Gazette, appeared in 1770 it was largely in English, except for government proclamations, which appeared in Danish. Under the Danes, the sugar industry on St. Croix expanded, and by 1770 the

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number of slaves had risen massively, to 18,884, as opposed to 1,515 whites. During the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark initially remained neutral. However, it was gradually brought into alliance with the French. On March 30, 1801, British ships appeared off the island of St. Croix, which quickly surrendered to the power of the Royal Navy. The authorities on the island, worried about a slave rebellion, were keen that the transfer of authority go smoothly. No Danish fleet was present to protect the islands, and on April 2, 1801, the British destroyed the Danish fleet at the First Battle of Copenhagen. The islands were, however, returned by the Treaty of Amiens in 1802. But in 1807 the British again seized the islands after the Second Battle of Copenhagen, and they held it until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Two years earlier the Danish state was declared bankrupt, and by a treaty of January 14, 1814, Denmark ceded Norway to Sweden. Since settlement began in the seventeenth century and as families prospered, property ownership in the Danish West Indies became more and more concentrated in a relatively small number of hands. In 1841 St. Croix was divided into 101 estates, 16 owned by the state, 60 by foreign creditors, and the remainder held by 25 proprietors. At the same time, the political and economic situation in Europe remained full of conflict. In 1848 Denmark abolished slavery and—being on the point of selling the Danish Gold Coast to the British—also considered selling the Danish West Indies to the United States. A treaty of sale was drawn up in 1867 but the U.S. Senate did not ratify it. The Danes remained in possession of the Danish West Indies until 1916. As American economic and political influence grew dramatically, www.abc-clio.com

however, it became clear that the US would remain the dominant force in the Western Hemisphere. In 1916 the islands were finally sold to the U.S. government for $25 million, with the official transfer taking place on March 31, 1917. Now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Danish West Indies became an outlying territory of the United States. Justin Corfield See also: British Empire References Hall, Neville A. T. Slave Society in the Danish West Indies. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Larsen, Kay. De Danske i Guinea. Copenhagen: Nordiske forfatteres forlag, 1918. Nørregard, Georg. Danish Settlements in West Africa, 1658–1850. Boston: Boston University Press, 1966. Reindorf, Joe. Scandinavians in Africa: Guide to Materials Relating to Ghana in the Danish National Archives. Oslo, Norway: Universitetsforlaget, 1980. Westergaard, Waldemar. The Danish West Indies under Company Rule, 1671–1754. New York: Macmillan, 1917.

DANTICAT, EDWIDGE (1969–) Edwidge Danticat’s long list of publications makes her, perhaps, the most prolific Haitian writer of international stature. The first Haitian writer to be widely published in English (she, like many others in the African Diaspora, learned English as a second language), Danticat has earned widespread critical acclaim by academics and general audiences. Danticat’s work offers a complex portrait of the African Diaspora, particularly the journey of African culture to Haiti and then her own journey from Haiti to the United States. While her writings fittingly take much of their inspiration from the author’s experiences in her native

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Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and by extension from her African ancestry, she refuses to be seen as the mouthpiece of her people, especially of Haitian Americans. In an interview with David Barsamian in the fall of 2003, she acknowledged that she has fought against that task: “I think I’ve been assigned that role [Haiti’s oracle], but I don’t really see myself as the voice of the Haitian American experience. . . . There are many; I’m just one” (Barsamian, 2004, p. 1). Much of her writing, though, processes her personal experiences with great insight and originality. And these experiences not only detail her Haitian upbringing, but recall larger experiences, influenced by African culture and traditions, of communal and extended family cohabitation and interaction, of myths and legends passed down orally through the generations, and of tension and conflict between Western and developing countries and between developing countries themselves. Danticat’s first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, published in 1994, relays the semi-veiled memories of the author’s childhood transformed for fictional protagonist Sophie Caco. Four years after its release, the novel was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club. This debut novel topped the Publishers Weekly paperback best-seller list, and Vintage Publishers increased its print run to 600,000. Focused on a troubled motherdaughter relationship and the pressure of the past on the present, the novel explores themes central to literature written across the African Diaspora. While her first novel reveals personal circumstances of the author, The Farming of Bones (1998), her third major project, depicts a key event in Haitian history. Winner of the American Book Award, The Farming of Bones chronicles the massacre of www.abc-clio.com

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Haitian-born harvesters of sugar cane (bones) at the hands of the violently antiimmigration movement of Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo Molina. For decades, Haitians found good work in the neighboring Dominican Republic, but in 1937 thousands of immigrant workers were killed. The story is told through Amabelle Desir, a Haitian working as a maid on a Dominican plantation who tries to escape as the violence erupts. She is injured, her lover killed. In Allegories of Desire (2004), M. M. Adjarian contends that “the writer’s concern for Haitian peasant women gives way to a more generalized concern for the peasant underclass . . . , by expanding the narrative focus to include consideration of both the women and the men of the dispossessed classes, the writer aligns herself with another Haitian literary tradition: that of the roman paysan, or peasant novel” (pp. 101–102). Recently, Danticat’s focus has shifted from texts based loosely on her own experiences to those embracing issues and events of greater Haitian interest. Since The Farming of Bones, Danticat has written After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel (2002), a nonfiction work of travel writing, and The Dew Breaker (2004), short stories that track a certain torturer’s wickedness under Duvalier. As her writing shifted its focus from personal experiences to tribulations facing the greater Haitian community, Danticat became more personally involved in facilitating gatherings of youth groups of Caribbean immigrants in New York. She also participated in the National Coalition for Haitian Rights. After spending years in New York, Edwidge Danticat currently lives in Florida, where she has taught creative writing at the University of Miami

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and continues to offer her perspective on the joys and hardships of life lived in the United States as well as in Haiti, and ultimately of life lived in the greater African community. Walt Collins See also: Caribbean Literature; Haiti References Adjarian, M. M. Allegories of Desire: Body, Nation, and Empire in Modern Caribbean Literature by Women. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Barsamian, David. Louder Than Bombs: Interviews from “The Progressive Magazine.” Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004.

Islands off the coast of South Carolina at the beginning of the twentieth century, exploring themes of family, heritage, and oral tradition. The Gullah people on those islands and their distinctive language, formed in isolation from the mainland, are seen in the film through a family that maintains a distinctive African culture half a century after the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Laura Madeline Wiseman See also: Film (Atlantic); Film (North America); Georgia’s Sea Islands; Gullah References Brouwer, Joel R. “Repositioning: Center and Margin in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust.” African American Review 29, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 5–16. Dash, Julie, director. Daughters of the Dust. New York: Kino International, 1992. Film. Dollar, Steve. “‘Daughters of the Dust’ Dances with the Dialect of Women’s Tales.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 6, 1991.

DASH, JULIE (1952–) Julie Dash is an African American producer, writer, and director. She was born and raised in New York City. She studied at Studio Museum of Harlem, the City College of New York, and the Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies of the American Film Institute. She earned a BA degree from the Leonard Davis Center for the Performing Arts in the David Picker Film Institute and a MFA degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. She produced the film Diary of an African Nun (1977) and directed the music video “Give Me One Reason” (1996), by Tracy Chapman. Dash has received many accolades, including the Jury Prize for Illusions (1989), Sundance Film Festival’s Best Cinematography for Daughters of the Dust (1990), and the NAACP Image Award for The Rosa Parks Story (2003). Illusions, a thirty-four-minute film, tells the story of two African American women struggling in the Hollywood film industry in the 1940s. Daughters of the Dust tells the story of an African American family living on the Sea www.abc-clio.com

DEBT CANCELLATION Debt cancellation refers to the movement to eliminate the massive governmental debt of African countries. Massive loans were made to African nations by international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank during the postcolonial period. Such large debts, and the poor prospects of their repayment, were caused by the financial mismanagement of Africa’s postcolonial leaders. Many African states also had a disadvantaged start because the decolonialization process often neglected long-term economic consequences. While colonial powers focused on maximizing their financial take in their withdrawals, revolutionary and independent forces were more focused on obtaining political autonomy regardless

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of the long-term costs. Most African states experienced considerable economic disadvantages because of their lack of infrastructure, educational and medical systems, general governmental services, cohesive national identity, and virtually every requirement and condition deemed necessary by economists to produce favorable economic development results. African debt cancellation is portrayed by some as a necessary step to push economic development forward. Some argue that interest paid to non-African banks represents funding that could be redirected to domestic social causes such as human development projects involving education, medicine, food, clean water, and housing. At independence, most significant existing private industries were foreigncontrolled export operations. For example, in Ghana, railroad lines were constructed for the sole purpose of transporting cocoa beans from an interior collection center to a coastal port designed for export. The export-driven infrastructure focused primarily on extracting resources rather than developing local economies. In the decades following African state independence, foreign-controlled industries maintained a minimal infrastructure to service their extraction-based operations. Africa’s debt crisis has multiple historical and political roots. Areas outside of direct foreign investment interests were neglected, ignored, and poorly managed by municipal and regional leaders who often lacked appropriate training to perform their responsibilities. Local infrastructure frequently lurked at preindustrial levels, retaining equipment and facilities dating to pre–World War II levels of technology. After colonial withdrawal, many places appeared abandoned by the forces of www.abc-clio.com

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modernization. Geography heavily influenced the degree of abandonment. Some regions, such as the Mediterranean, the Horn of Africa, and South Africa benefited from pre-independence trade routes to Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Africa’s noncoastal regions experienced significant disadvantages due to their geographic isolation. Such insulation hindered their ability to acquire independent capital resources or to secure development-oriented investments for their own welfare. Exploitive private interests and leaders who placed their own financial welfare ahead of their people compounded this discrepancy between more successful coastal regions and the less-connected landlocked states. Tribal warfare and unstable political factions heightened many African leaders’ sense of self-preservation; many seized much of their government’s borrowed money to maintain their power or to enrich themselves enough to live a wealthy life in retirement. The fact that many former African presidents and leaders reside in Europe or the Middle East on stolen funds untouched and unlikely to be extradited by their host governments is seen by many as a continued collusion between former colonial powers and former African leaders. Africa’s debt crisis exists because impoverished states have, in a sense, financed their former leaders’ retirement and paid the maintenance costs for longer-term political dictatorships rather than incur unstable and short-lived governmental regimes. African debt has been a means of keeping intact states with artificial boundaries drawn during colonialism and decolonization. After guaranteeing a stable business environment, the retiring or exiled former African leaders experience a close relationship with their European and other former

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colonial business interests while residing outside of Africa. In that regard, African debt represents continued economic imperialism or a variation of neocolonialism. Existing African states endure a heavy cost to cover past financial indiscrepencies and effectively continue to support those that mismanaged their funds and resources. Newly formed African states faced the challenge of nation building, of settling their own domestic and external disputes while simultaneously abiding by strict United Nations (UN) border guidelines and UN and African oversight. This awkward situation resulted in a shaky foundation that led foreign interests to intervene on their own behalf and to influence African leaders as they saw fit. Foreign pledges of military aid and logistical support manipulated Africa’s warring factions because they provided the means to obtain or maintain power. The need for assistance created an environment of dependence and indecisiveness in which successive governments were fixated on self-preservation and the destruction of opposition forces. Many investments intended to build African nations never found their intended target, but instead were lost in military conflicts or by various forms of embezzlement. The complex nature of African black market economies and the high cost of governmental stability, which is often reliant on military forces, means that borrowed money from the International Monetary Fund, the African Development Fund, and the World Bank typically fails to be used for building commercial, industrial, or municipal resources. Mixed with rising interest rates, African debt substantially inhibits domestic developmental projects. Stable governments must, in turn, endure the hardship of overcoming massive debt inherited from previous wasteful regimes. www.abc-clio.com

The desire to cancel debt arises from the argument African nations would be freed from debt repayment responsibilities to devote more financial resources to civil investments. In Africa there is considerable anger and frustration at having to contribute so much of present budgets to service debt owed to external parties, debt often produced by opposition forces previously in power. It is believed that canceling debt will allow more loans to develop a sustainable economy. People discouraged by the lack of current developmental progress hope that eradicating debt will remove Africa from a kind of debtor’s prison. Debt relief, some believe, would promote greater political stability. In the 1990s debt-relief groups, after failing to make progress on their own, found powerful public relation allies through supporters such as Bono of the Irish rock group U2. As Africa’s resources in food, labor, health, education, housing, and basic utilities failed to meet national needs, debt-canceling bodies argued that new revenues should only be spent on sustainable economic development and not on government salaries or military forces. However, Africa’s situation may be more difficult than suggested by debt-relief groups. Recent evidence indicates that eight of the twenty recipients of debt cancellation returned to indebted status within one year. Furthermore, a depressed African market is less appealing to investors than markets in other developing nations and regions, such as China, India and Eastern Europe. The effects of communicable diseases, such as AIDS/HIV, have also wreaked havoc on Africa’s social fabric and workforce. In some places the median age has fallen to under twenty, which has a chilling effect on the economy. Extreme poverty, plus the migration of the better

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educated to developed nations, further depletes the human resources of the already-taxed societies and economies. Violent crime, unchecked by corrupt police forces, poses a continuing problem. Eliminating the problem of African debt is not likely to be a sufficient solution for a continent under a multitude of stresses. Josiah Baker See also: Decolonization, African; Democracy, African; Health, Public; International Monetary Fund; Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Prevention; Neocolonialism; United Nations; World Bank References Blomstrom, Magnus, and Mats Lundahl, eds. Economic Crisis in Africa. London: Routledge, 1993. Herbst, Jeffrey. U.S. Economic Policy Toward Africa. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993. Lancaster, Carol. African Economic Reform. Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1991. Leonard, David K. Africa’s Stalled Development. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003. Nafziger, E. Wayne. Economic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. African Economic Outlook 2005/2006. Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006. Reno, William. Warlord Politics and African States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999. Whiteside, Alan. The Political Economy of AIDS in Africa. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004.

DECOLONIZATION, AFRICAN African decolonization refers to the process by which formerly colonized African nations became independent of European rule, from approximately 1920 to 1975. It www.abc-clio.com

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marks one of the most important transformations of the modern world. Three explanations are typically given for why African decolonization occurred: that it was a deliberate imperial policy of the colonizing European nations; that it was the result of pressures imposed by African nationalism; and that it was the result of a post–World War II international situation of powerful empires in rivalry with each other (predating and also including the cold war). The study of specific former colonies reveals a complex interaction among all three of these forces in the process of decolonization. In addition, differences in decolonization existed among the different regions of Africa—southern, northern, and sub-Saharan—as well as differences based on the colonial administration of each colony (French distinct from British, for example) and its interaction with the government of the metropole (Senegal with France, Nigeria with Britain, for example). During World War II, Africans fought on behalf of their colonial power’s interests, and the continent’s colonies provided key resources in raw goods. The stability of the world’s European colonial empires concluded with the close of World War II. Despite growing unrest in the colonies and a growing awareness at home of the unjustifiability of the Western imperial model, however, the major European empires of Britain and France, and also Portugal, held onto their colonies past 1945. The war had demonstrated the economic value and potential of Africa, and industries in African colonies entered an economic boom in which exports and revenue increased tremendously. Shaped by the Atlantic Charter, a 1941 agreement between Great Britain and the United States to avoid territorial conflict and to collaborate on

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international security and economic growth, and the concept of the United Nations, colonizing powers held onto their territories and devised ambitious development schemes for social and economic advancement through both education and crop production. At the same time, African national liberation movements had become influential after World War I and gained influence through the transnational meeting of leaders at the Pan-African Conference of 1945, attended by George Padmore, Kwame N’krumah, and Jomo Kenyatta, and the All-African Peoples’ Conference of 1958, held in Accra, Ghana, which was attended by delegates of the nationalist movements of twenty-eight African colonies and independent nations. This latter meeting demonstrated that decolonization in Africa, rather than being a phenomenon locally specific to the region surrounding Ghana, which had won independence the year before, would spread from West Africa to the rest of the continent. Influential African nationalists, including Kwame N’krumah (Ghana), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), and Leopold Senghor (Senegal), shaped anticolonial sentiment into a platform of political, aesthetic, and economic ideals addressing the needs of colonized peoples. These leaders presented themselves primarily as intellectuals and secondarily as politicians, shaping a position of intellectual and moral respectability from which to tackle colonial domination. Senghor, for example, as a poet helped to found the Négritude movement. These leaders addressed Europeans as much as they did Africans, in part to garner support for their ideas in Europe. They also forged a connection with the intellectual legacy of African American and West Indian scholars www.abc-clio.com

and activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. African nationalist ideas directed independence movements in Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Côte D’Ivoire, and elsewhere. Plans for an African-centered economy sometimes worked in tandem with socialist ideals (in Congo (Kinshasa), Tanzania, and Angola, for example). In the case of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere’s plan for African Unity (Umoja) was based on his unique vision of African socialism (Ujamaa). The socialist agendas and Soviet involvement behind some of the socialist movements inevitably prompted the interest of nations not formally involved in African colonization, namely the United States and Cuba. Through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States funded and provided arms to rebel groups that were selected often for their opposition to Communism. After the first wave of African decolonization in the 1950s, the United States established an embassy in every independent African nation. Cuba became involved with the independence movements of seventeen African colonies. Under the direction of Fidel Castro, Cuban interventions included aid to Algeria when it was under the leadership of Ahmed Ben Bella, to Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, and to Laurent Kabila in Congo. Cuba’s largest engagement was with Angola. In 1975 troops from Cuba and Angola fought on behalf of the Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MMPLA) against what was later revealed as Operation Savanna—a secret invasion of Angola using the combined forces of South African troops and Angola’s two local, anti-Communist groups, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and the U.S.-backed

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National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA). U.S. and South African involvement in Angola followed the ascendancy of the MMPLA after Portugal’s departure from its former colony. This covert invasion, occurring just one month before the formal date of decolonization, attempted to divert the Marxist quest for power. Significantly, Cuba acted independently in sending Cuban troops—special forces and artillery—to intervene in Angola, neglecting to consult first with the Soviet Union and demonstrating that in this decisive action, Cuba was not merely the puppet of the Soviets. The defeat of the CIA- and South African–backed operation may have influenced and empowered the anticolonial, anti-apartheid African National Congress of South Africa. Some scholars argue that decolonization has given way to the continued Western domination and exploitation of Africa through the continent’s dependency on global markets, international capital, and corporations based in developed nations, a situation often called neocolonialism. Financial institutions for development such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which exert a powerful influence on the domestic economy and international relations of African nations, are pointed to as signs of the continued economic and political domination of Africa by Western powers. In terms of a historical understanding of present-day realities, then, the study of decolonization allows one to understand the relations of Europe and North and South America to African nations, the transformation of imperial power in the twentieth century, and the way in which a global, transnational black intellectual heritage has been shaped by colonialism. Noelle Morrissette www.abc-clio.com

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See also: Cabral, Amilcar; Castro Ruz, Fidel; Central Intelligence Agency; Cold War; Colonialism; Congolese Independence; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Garvey, Marcus; International Monetary Fund; N’krumah, Kwame; Négritude; Neocolonialism; Pan-Africanism; Senghor, Leopold Sedar; United Nations; World War II References Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Oliver, Roland, and J. D. Fage. A Short History of Africa. New York: Penguin, 1990. Wilson, Henry S. African Decolonization. London: Oxford University Press, 1994.

DELANY, MARTIN ROBINSON (1812–1885) Martin Robinson Delany had a remarkable life as a political writer, physician, soldier, judge, businessman, husband, and father of eleven children. Throughout his life he lobbied for the resettlement of African Americans to Africa and for the formation of an independent national identity. Delany was born free in Charlestown, Virginia (now in West Virginia), on May 6, 1812. When he was ten years old, his mother moved the family to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and the father joined them after having bought his freedom. In 1831 Martin Delany moved to Pittsburgh, where he attended the Bethel African Methodist Church School, assisted a local physician, and offered paramedical services as a “cupper and lecher.” In 1843 Delany turned temporarily to journalism, first as the editor of his own abolitionist newsletter, The Mystery, then in 1847–1849 as co-editor of Frederick Douglass’s North Star. His attempt to study medicine at Harvard was thwarted when he

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Martin Robinson Delany, a physician, social reformer, and soldier, served as a surgeon with the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers in the Civil War. Delany was the first African American to be commissioned (Major) in the U.S. Army. (Getty Images)

was dismissed for racist reasons; he became a school principal instead and started writing Blake, or, The Huts of America (1862), an novel of early nationalist aspirations in opposition to the conciliatory tenor of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Earlier, in 1852, Delany published a treatise titled The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, which focused on the possibility of an African American nation outside the United States. He strongly advocated the flight of slaves to Canada and Mexico and discussed re-migration to African countries, favoring East Africa over the West African coast. He held in deep contempt the American Colonization Society and its efforts to resettle free African Americans, www.abc-clio.com

calling the supposedly independent republic of Liberia “a burlesque on a government.” Leading a National Emigration Convention in 1854, Delany addressed the delegates as representatives of a “Broken Nation.” He headed a commission that in 1859–1860 visited the Yoruba country on the lower Niger River to explore the viability of a settlement project in negotiations with the local rulers. However, the agreement reached in Abeokuta, and Delany’s hopes of return to his ancestral homeland, never materialized. Instead, Delany helped to recruit volunteers for the Union cause during the Civil War, and on February 26, 1865, he was appointed major in the 104th U.S. Colored Troops, making him the first African American staff officer in the U.S. Army. After the war, Delany worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina and ran for lieutenant governor in 1874. In the violent election campaign of 1876, Delany supported the Democratic candidate and former Confederate general Wade Hampton. Despite his earlier criticism of Liberia, he supported the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company in 1878 but returned to his initial vocation as a physician when that project failed and his political base in South Carolina eroded. On January 24, 1885, Delany, whom Abraham Lincoln had called “this most extraordinary and intelligent black man,” died in Ohio. Wolfgang Hochbruck

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See also: Abolitionism; American Colonization Society; Liberia References Levine, Robert S. Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Ullman, Victor. Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.

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DEMOCRACY, AFRICAN In contrast to most Latin American nations, which experienced political independence in the nineteenth century, African political autonomy and the democratization process arrived relatively late in the twentieth century. Democracy in much of Africa remains in its infancy. In the decades after obtaining independence, many African countries constructed democratic facades that did not long hide their regimes’ autocratic nature or that collapsed due to internal power struggles or the inefficient use of resources. African democratic movements are both beneficiaries and victims of the postcolonial era. That era, which began in the 1950s, is within the living population’s memory. Almost all of Africa, with the exception of a northwestern area called Western Sahara—which is in dispute between Morocco, Mauritania, and scattered tribal groups—is in the postcolonial era. In almost all cases, independence from European powers meant formal democracy, though few have created a long-term, viable democratic government. Africa’s preexisting political, historical, economic, and social structures harmed and delayed its democratic development. Most notably, the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–1885 shaped Africa’s modern political boundaries, European colonialization claims, and African trade. The conference, hosted by a recently independent and unified Germany under its first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), carved Africa into areas of control for mostly European imperial powers. Bismarck, who organized the event to promote German Central African trade interests, effectively supervised Europe’s formal acquisition of Africa. Only Ethiopia www.abc-clio.com

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and Liberia were spared from European political annexation. Since Liberia was a colony of freed African American slaves and their descendants, who voluntarily returned to Africa, the United States had a special interest to ensure its independence. In Berlin, Europeans drew Africa’s modern political boundaries by creating states largely without any consideration of ethnic composition, historical tribal boundaries, or ongoing tribal hostilities. These decisions were based primarily on European security and political needs and the distribution of African resources. Later, when African states obtained independence one at a time, a realignment of political borders appeared impractical. In almost all cases, these newly formed African states were identical in size and ethnic composition to the colonial states. In the past, the colonial powers had interceded and imposed their own will in almost all sizable tribal disputes. After imperial policing ended with independence, widespread violent tribalism erupted. The artificial political states inherited from the European colonial era aggravated tribal animosities. By default, enemies were frequently forced into cooperating in a fledgling political environment that lacked any genuine cultural or social unity. Multiple political complications hindered the solidification of national identity, including the unwillingness to forego tribalism in favor of national interests. In many cases, aside from the effort to expel a colonial power, there was no common political goal or interest to unify competing tribal groups. Inevitably, any credible democratic political order disintegrated under such enormous internal pressure. Often the strongest, most vicious tribal leader would emerge as the national leader. Those within

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the dominant tribe or tribes would benefit tremendously. For example, during Mobutu Sese Seko’s corrupt (often labeled “kleptocratic”) presidency in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), members of his tribe frequently drove their new Mercedes sedans around the capital city of Kinshasa while villagers in rival ethnic groups languished in extreme poverty, were imprisoned, and were periodically killed. In Uganda, Idi Amin (1924–2003), the president of Uganda in 1971–1979, seized control in a coup and became infamous for his atrocities, including the torture and murder of 300,000 to 500,000 Ugandans, targeting, among others, the Acholi, Lango, Indians, and Christians. Although many African political movements had used the idea of democracy as a battle cry to mobilize their independence movements, the term would later be used toward highly antidemocratic ends. The concept of democracy provided a moral justification for eradicating the nondemocratic, nonrepresentative, imperialistic institutions of the past. However, either by design, through perceived necessity, or by the unadulterated seduction of power, many postcolonial African political leaders emerged as “Big Men” or as possessed of a “Big Man Syndrome,” terms that refer to their corrupt and autocratic personal rule. These African Big Men often labeled their actions as democratic to justify their means of enforcing and consolidating their personal political power. Instead of exhibiting the behavior of elected presidents, these Big Men acted more as tribal chiefs or African monarchs. During the cold war years (1945–1991), the United States and its allies tolerated many autocratic African and Latin American presidents because they guaranteed government stability and www.abc-clio.com

assured foreign commercial interests access to cheap natural resources. For Africa and Latin America, the cold war meant an ongoing struggle between pro-Soviet and proAmerican factions. Most civil wars and other forms of unrest served as proxy battles between the superpowers as they wrestled to control the regions for their own geopolitical interests. International community leaders overlooked the many human atrocities committed by African presidents, fearing that calls for political reform would contribute to further regional destabilization. Since Marxist and Communist dialogue during the cold war decades focused on the conspicuous economic inequities throughout Africa, leftists argued that economic equality was as important as political equality; this became a central point of their rhetoric as they sought to spark revolutionary change. American and pro-American political interests suppressed most seemingly socialist projects of income and wealth redistribution in order to prevent Africa as a continent from falling under the Soviet sphere of control. Africa and Latin America share a common political history in that during these cold war decades, the desire of American and pro-American forces to keep these countries non-Communist by means of brutal nondemocratic dictators superseded noble political goals. Allowing fully functional representative democracies to emerge carried a very likely possibility that the disenchanted masses would elect a proCommunist or leftist leader. Illiteracy, poor communications, human rights violations by pro-Soviet groups, and concerns over the consequences of people’s desperation were common justifications for the United States and pro-U.S. groups to avoid the active advocacy of democracy.

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After the end of the cold war, pressures from Havana and Moscow on both Latin America and Africa lessened. With Soviet influence having vanished and Cuba’s minimized, non-Communist factions no longer had pressing reasons to interfere with left-leaning governments or to tolerate brutal nondemocratic regimes. For example, the cold war provided a political environment that tolerated South African apartheid, the government’s official system of racial segregation from 1948 to 1991. With the end of the cold war, the U.S. government’s willingness to tolerate apartheid ceased. In many cases, the cold war’s end positively contributed to African democracy. The end of the cold war also led to Namibia’s independence. South Africa had occupied its northwestern neighbor during the cold war to defend it from Communist insurgent activities and hostilities originating from its northern neighbor, Angola. As the cold war came to a close, Namibia received its independence in 1990. During the 1990s some dictatorships became rapidly unstable and were stricken by both internal and external power struggles. Weakened, many dictators were forced to resign and in some cases go into exile. A key example is the “Big Man” of Central Africa, Mobutu Sese Seko (1930–1997). The president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) from 1965 to 1997, he rose to power by overthrowing Patrice Lumumba, the elected president. However, after the CIA withdrew active support in the early 1990s, his power steadily eroded. In 1997 he lost control of his country and shortly after died in exile. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, nearly a decade after cold war geopolitical issues had vanished, African states were poised to seek more independent www.abc-clio.com

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political paths. No longer caught between competing imperial or cold war interests, for the first time in centuries, democracy in Africa has blossomed in recent years. Of Africa’s fifty-two sovereign nations, excluding Western Sahara, forty-five governments have some republican or democratic elements. All claim to have some manner of separation between the chief of state, a legislative body, and a judicial body. Nearly half of Africa’s nations possess a truly functional separation of this sort. However, beyond these, twenty-two countries have had leadership succession via coup, assassination, outright election fraud, voting irregularities, or other coercive means. Africa also still has examples of the Big Man phenomenon. Robert Mugabe (1924–) has been Zimbabwe’s head of government since 1980. Idriss Deby (1952–), president of Chad and the self-proclaimed head of the Patriotic Salvation Movement, represents an ethnocentric Zaghawa Islamist government and has a private presidential army formed from the Zaghawa. Lieutenant General Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo (1942–) has been president of Equatorial Guinea since 1979, when his 600 mercenaries killed his uncle, the former leader. Prior to becoming president, Obiang was head of the infamous Black Beach prison and leader of the National Guard. Umar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir, the field marshal and president of Sudan, came to power after a 1989 military coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister, Sadeq al-Mahdi; he immediately banned all political parties, cracked down on the press, and dissolved Parliament upon assuming absolute control of the nation. He remains Sudan’s Big Man as the chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation and as the de facto leader for all posts.

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Africa’s process of democratization is still in its early stages as African states have a mean constitutional age of seventeen years and an average tenure for chiefs of state of ten years. Excluding the Sudan and barring future troubles in Central Africa in such countries as Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo or in the previously troubled West African states of Liberia, Sierre Leone, and Guinea, Africa in 2007 has had fewer violent armed conflicts than the Africa of previous decades. Hopefully, Robert Mugabe and similar figures will be Africa’s last Big Men. While constitutional and state reform has progressed somewhat in recent years, many hurdles remain. The vast majority of sub-Saharan Africa lacks an infrastructure appropriate for sustenance, let alone economic growth. Governmental oversight of the capital invested in infrastructure remains weak. Because of inadequate infrastructure, foreign investment remains limited, except for the purchase and exploitation of minerals and other natural resources. The consequent persistence of a poor quality of life is likely to lead to the cyclical toppling of governments. The widespread presence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) represents another tremendous obstacle to Africa’s economic development and social stability. HIV and its consequent acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is poised to cripple the workforce of African nations and their leaderships by creating a glut of independent minors, often called AIDS orphans, in an already distressed economic environment. Religious forces in Africa, in particular the clash between Islamic and non-Islamic factions, are a substantial obstacle to www.abc-clio.com

democratization. Though much of Africa’s Islamic influence is indigenous—along the northern and eastern parts of Africa, Islam has been a part of the cultural fabric for many centuries—some foreign Islamic incursions have added to conflicts. Islam does not threaten political development so much as the cultural and political conflicts that embroil Islamic and non-Islamic leaders. In Uganda, Sudan, Egypt, and Algeria, Islam has often been used as a rallying point against a target political opposition, sometimes leading to violence. An example of a culturally embattled region is Darfur (which means “home of the fur” in Arabic) in western Sudan, where Islamic and non-Islamic forces regularly clash. Religious leadership has a sizable role in making political decisions in Africa. African parties sympathetic to Iran or to Osama bin Laden are attracted to the common culture that Islam offers. Islam offers authenticity to a way of life and counters the state of confusion, powerlessness, and alienation that is widespread in Africa. For many, it appears to offer a way to unify African states that without it lack a common culture. Determining the effectiveness and validity of many African democracies is difficult. Africa’s tainted history of Big Men and numerous developmental issues cloud the credibility of current governments. Future democratic reform is dependent upon continual and substantial economic and social development. Josiah Baker

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See also: Berlin West Africa Conference; Cold War; Congo (Kinshasa), Democratic Republic of the; Congolese Independence; Decolonization, African; Democracy, Latin American; Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Prevention; Lumumba, Patrice; South Africa, History and Politics; Uganda

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DEMOCRACY, LATIN AMERICAN References Ake, Claude. Democracy and Development in Africa. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1996. Berman, Bruce, Will Kymlicka, and Dickson Eyoh. Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa. Oxford: James Currey Publishers, 2004. Buijtenhuijs, Rob, and Celine Thiriot. Democratisation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Leiden, Netherlands: Africa Studies Centre, 1995. CASS Monograph. Democratisation of Disempowerment in Africa. Port Harcourt, Nigeria: Malthouse, 1994. Laidi, Zaki. The Superpowers and Africa: The Constraints of a Rivalry, 1960–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Marte, Fred. Political Cycles in International Relations: The Cold War and Africa, 1945–1990. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994. Ndegwa, Stephen N. A Decade of Democracy in Africa. Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2001.

DEMOCRACY, LATIN AMERICAN In the first decade of the twenty-first century, democratization has become a challenge and high priority for the diverse peoples and governments of Latin America. Although the majority of the region’s governments are formal democracies today, the process of democratization, in terms of democratic consolidation and deepening, continues. Citizens throughout the hemisphere, not unlike citizens across the Atlantic in Africa, are demanding greater accountability; transparency; civil, political, and human rights; community control and local participation; and socioeconomic reforms. The meaning of democracy has expanded from a narrow structural and institutional emphasis on elections, even free, fair, and competitive elections, or electoral democracy, to broad grassroots www.abc-clio.com

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participation and empowerment, or fully participatory democracy. Democracy has become integrally linked with legitimacy, or the belief that the majority of citizens hold that their political system and government has the right to function on their behalf. Various theories, such as the popular wave theory of Samuel P. Huntington, explain the worldwide diffusion of democracy as a historical process of ebb and flow. Generally, the period between 1828 and 1926 represents a “long wave” of democratic development, followed by the “reverse wave” of nondemocratic rule from 1922 to 1942. A “short wave” of progress between 1943 and 1962 is followed by another “reverse wave” spanning 1958 to 1975. The years 1974 to 1990 culminate in an advanced, or “third wave” of democratization. The wave theory remains a matter of continuing scholarly debate; critics of it observe that the wave theory applies more readily to Latin America, where independence from colonial rule occurred in the nineteenth century, than to Africa, where decolonization began a century later, after World War II. Historically, the authoritarian, elitist, and racist colonial legacy of Latin America—problems similar, in some respects, to those of Africa—impeded the process of democratization. From 1828, after most Latin American countries had achieved independence, the region suffered a half century of caudillo politics, or rule by ruthless and corrupt military dictators and strongmen. With the notable exceptions of Brazil, which remained under monarchical rule until 1889, and Cuba, Panama, and Puerto Rico, which did not achieve full independence or home rule until the early and mid-twentieth century, oligarchic republicanism characterized Latin American regimes between 1880 and 1939.

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The restricted suffrage of oligarchic regimes gave way by the 1930s as more voters, especially those of the laboring classes, were enfranchised and mobilized into politics. Populist, charismatic leaders, often with military backgrounds who initially seized power by military coup, like Argentina’s Juan Perón or Brazil’s Getulio Vargas, used mass electoral politics and nationalistic and populist agendas to legitimize their “semi-democratic” rule. Some populist military reformers who headed military coups, like David Toro, Germán Busch, and Gualberto Villarroel in Bolivia, never held elections and ran nondemocratic, although not overtly repressive, regimes. During these years most leaders, like Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Marcos Pérez Jímenez in Venezuela became entrenched, brutal dictators. In Latin America, as in Africa, oligarchical rule and dictatorship bred revolution. In 1952 the Bolivian National Revolution overthrew the civilian oligarchy and instituted major social and economic reforms. A universal suffrage law permitted the first free, fair, competitive, and participatory elections in the country’s history. In contrast, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 overthrew one dictatorship for another. The new socialist state was dominated by the authoritarian and personalistic rule (a type of rule often termed “sultanistic”) of Fidel Castro and his Cuban Communist Party, founded in 1965. Although the Cuban Revolution achieved a degree of socioeconomic equality, it did so at the expense of development and democracy. The Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979 was both inspired and cautioned by the Cuban Revolution. A decade-long guerrilla www.abc-clio.com

struggle overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the third ruler of a family dynasty that had dominated Nicaragua since 1933. Revolutionary struggles in El Salvador and Guatemala against repressive oligarchical and military regimes in the 1980s cost many lives but ended in stalemate. In the 1990s both countries achieved a gradual transition to civilian, semi- or full electoral democracy. In Haiti, the first independent black republic in the Americas, a revolution in 1986 successfully overthrew the dictatorial “Papa Doc” François Duvalier and “Baby Doc” Jean-Claude Duvalier dynasty. After some chaos and a series of military juntas, the country finally held its first democratic election in 1990. Despite a campaign of intimidation and terror, the populist reformer and Catholic priest, Father JeanBertrand Aristide, was elected president by a large majority. However, in less than a year Aristide, who was unpopular among some circles of the U.S. government, was overthrown by a military coup. Haiti soon disintegrated into internecine bloodshed and civil war. Only after a U.S. and a UN embargo, humanitarian intervention, and lengthy peacekeeping mission did Haiti finally achieve a fragile electoral stability in 2006. The role of the United States during the cold war decades (1945–1991) did not advance democratization in Latin America (or Africa). In the interests of regional stability and national security, U.S. administrations actively and tacitly supported the region’s friendly dictators. President John F. Kennedy, who advanced the Alliance for Progress and gradual socioeconomic development in the region as the best way to forestall radical revolution, believed that although the goal of U.S. policy should be

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democracy, dictatorship might be necessary to prevent Communist regimes from coming to power. In this era, covert action and intervention were employed to secure U.S. national security interests. Also, increased U.S. military assistance strengthened ties with the region’s militaries and helped establish national security states in the region, ostensibly to defend democracy against internal and external subversion. By the 1990s, however, U.S. policy was reoriented toward the aggressive promotion of democracy in Latin America and democratic enlargement globally. In Central America and the Caribbean, the post–cold war shift in U.S. foreign policy and postconflict reconstruction brought about a tentative and gradual transition to civilian and semidemocratic rule. Thus, by the 1990s, with the notable exception of Cuba, the majority of Latin American governments, which had been nondemocratic or authoritarian in previous decades, had established forms of electoral democracy. Nevertheless, across much of the region, comprehensive, participatory democratization remained an ongoing process despite some setbacks, as in Haiti, for example. The civil wars, drug wars, and guerrilla insurgencies, which had undermined democracy in the previous decades, had dissipated in Central America and Peru and were contained in Colombia with the reelection of President Alvaro Uribe in 2006. At the same time, fully representative and participatory democracy had not been achieved in most Latin American countries. In Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil, the “dirty wars” and “counterinsurgency wars” waged by military authoritarians against insurgents, indigenous peoples, leftists, and social activists had given way to truth and www.abc-clio.com

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reconciliation commissions similar to those in South Africa and Rwanda. As in much of Africa, the majority of human rights violators and perpetrators of genocide in Latin America received amnesty or remained sheltered by civilian governments. In many countries democracy was still new and fragile, and governments (Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Guatemala) feared that revisiting the horrors of the past would antagonize the military, invite political destabilization, and impede reconciliation. Still, across the region many egregious crimes came to light and were denounced as torture and genocide by publics at home and abroad. And although the armed forces remained influential across Central America and the Andes, the governments of both Argentina and Chile made significant strides in reducing the military’s role in politics. In Venezuela, however, the Bolivarian, populist revolution of Hugo Chávez, who was twice democratically elected, followed a distinct path of semidemocratic (or in the view of some, semiauthoritarian) rule, heavily reliant on a loyal military cadre and peoples’ militias. Since 2000, vigorous and effective grassroots activism has represented a significant development in the region’s progress toward comprehensive democratization. Popular social movements, assisted by European and North American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), have organized successful campaigns to expand socioeconomic, civil, and citizenship rights across the hemisphere. A stronger civil society has been able to challenge unpopular state policies, such as privatization and neoliberal reforms, and revitalize statedirected socioeconomic development and welfare programs.

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There have been impressive milestones in empowering indigenous peoples and women as well. In Ecuador a national indigenous movement—the strongest in Latin America—and its powerful indigenousbased political party mobilized some 80 percent of the country’s indigenous citizens to help elect a president in 2002 and win seats for indigenous party activists in the cabinet. In 2005 an unprecedented indigenous ascent to national power occurred in Bolivia, a change arguably akin to the historic election of Nelson Mandela in postapartheid South Africa. Bolivian voters elected the country’s and the Andean region’s first president of Indian heritage, Evo Morales Aima, in an overwhelming mandate for democratic reform and inclusion. In 2006, Chileans elected socialist Michelle Bachelet, their first woman president—a historical first, paralleling the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, the first woman president in all of Africa. Both women, who shared a legacy of bloodshed and oppression, had become symbols of national reconciliation and democratization. In Chile and Liberia, voters seemed to believe that a woman as president could best help heal the wounds of years of violence and dictatorship. Because these leaders represented underprivileged, subordinated, and marginalized groups, their elections advanced democratic participation at home and promised greater political and social inclusiveness in the region as a whole. Constitutional reforms and decentralization and municipalization laws, which were enacted in a number of countries across the region in the 1990s, have been indispensable to the ability of marginalized groups, especially in Ecuador and Bolivia, both to run candidates in local and national elections and to win office and www.abc-clio.com

cabinet seats. Decentralization has allowed financially limited political actors, such as women and indigenous organizations, to compete at the local and regional levels. In many cases new electoral laws facilitated the electoral participation of social movements and indigenous communities that were not official political parties and simplified the registration of those that were. Moreover, in many countries electoral reforms proportioned seats along ethnic and gender lines, guaranteeing a more diversified representation for the citizenry. Although the rise of indigenous movements in Latin America began in the 1970s and 1980s, only recently has indigenous identity been politicized and utilized to form political parties, win elections, and advance an indigenous rights agenda. Ethnic parties in Latin America are changing the face of democracy. Further political decentralization in the region will continue to challenge, redefine, and expand the meaning and practice of democratic citizenship. In turn, the steady empowerment of the underprivileged and subordinated groups of Latin America has served to make national and regional struggles for democracy and justice globally visible. The devolution of power to local and regional government and the reform of the central state’s relations with civil society, especially below the national level, continues to be important to the expansion of democratic governance in Latin America as well as a focus of contention. Proponents believe that decentralization will make government more accountable; equalize access to citizenship rights; increase citizen engagement in the political process; and reverse the traditional exclusion of women, minorities, and ethnic groups. However, decentralization can also undermine

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democratic governance by increasing the influence of regional elites, fragmenting the national political community, and introducing new inequalities in the distribution of revenues and resources. Today, the majority of Latin American countries have achieved minimal or partial civil liberties. A greater number of governments than in the past now guarantee extensive civil liberties or freedom from exploitation, social coercion, and violence, particularly from paramilitary groups and organized crime. The persistence and longevity of democratic governments have also increased in Latin America, in contrast to the African experience. None of the nineteen governments that were electoral democracies in 2000 have reverted to authoritarian rule. Of the region’s four older democracies— Costa Rica, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela—only Venezuela, in 1999, became a semidemocracy. In the more recent democracies—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay—respect for human rights and civil liberties have increased and more participatory elections have taken hold. However one defines democracy, there is more of it in Latin America today than there was two decades ago. As a region, Latin America’s peoples have embraced democracy and the majority of governments have continued along the challenging path of democratization. Elections, especially of populist, left-leaning, and socialist candidates across the region, have helped to diffuse some of the growing popular discontent and frustration at the lack of economic development and chronic poverty. In some countries—Argentina in 2001 and Bolivia in 2003 and 2004— various forms of “street” democracy and www.abc-clio.com

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“direct” democracy, such as mass demonstrations, protests, strikes, and roadblocks, have erupted into civil violence and brought down presidents. Generally, however, the frustration has been directed not at incumbent leaders alone, but at political parties, legislatures, political systems, and unpopular social and economic policies. Ironically, the expansion of democracy in the region, which has rapidly mobilized more groups into politics, has also increased the danger of political and social instability in the short term. Democratization also brought with it demands for greater national sovereignty and autonomy from external influences and pressures, primarily the United States and the International Monetary Fund. Indeed, as Latin America matures and develops a stronger and deeper democratic tradition, it becomes more likely that its relations with the United States will be contentious. Waltraud Q. Morales See also: Aristide, Jean-Bertrand; Bolivia; Cold War; Castro Ruz, Fidel; Cuba; Democracy, African; Duvalier, François; Duvalier, Jean-Claude; Ethnicity; Haiti; Insurgency and Counterinsurgency; International Monetary Fund; Mandela, Nelson; Socialism; Truth and Reconciliation Commissions References Blake, Charles H. Politics in Latin America: The Quest for Development, Liberty, and Governance. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Huntington, Samuel P. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Polgreen, Lydia, and Larry Rohter. “Where Political Clout Demands a Maternal Touch.” New York Times, January 22, 2006. Smith, Peter H. Democracy in Latin America: Political Change in Comparative Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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356 DENVER AFRICAN EXPEDITION Tulchin, Joseph S., and Andrew Selee, eds. Decentralization and Democratic Governance in Latin America. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 2004. Van Cott, Donna Lee. From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of Ethnic Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Yashar, Deborah J. Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

DENVER AFRICAN EXPEDITION The Denver African Expedition was an early-twentieth-century anthropological safari traveling from South Africa to the Mandated Territory of South West Africa to study the Bushmen. This 1925 expedition was typical of an emerging genre of “popular anthropology” safari expeditions. It traveled from Cape Town up to South West Africa. Inspired by the discovery of the 500,000-year-old Taung skull, the expedition planned to find the “missing link” and to “capture” some wild Bushmen and bring them back to the United States but eventually settled for attempting to make a film and taking many photographs. The expedition was organized by a self-styled “doctor,” C. Ernest Cadle, a South African who had gone to the United States to become a clergyman but found that showmanship was more lucrative. In this regard he was emulating other white South Africans who marketed themselves as Africa experts, including Fritz Duquesne (who advised Teddy Roosevelt on his African safari). Sponsored by some sixteen businessmen and the Denver Post, www.abc-clio.com

the expedition consisted of Cadle; Paul Hoefler, a cinematographer-journalist at the Denver Post; and Grant John, a wealthy Denver physician. In Cape Town they were joined by their guide, Donald Bain, and the pioneering professional archaeologist A. J. Goodwin, who accompanied them for the first part of their expedition. From Windhoek they traveled to Kaokveld, which did not produce much of interest except for some good hunting. In the Etosha Game Reserve they spent a few months filming the so-called Heikum, or Hei-om Bushmen or San. They arranged what they maintained was the largest group of Bushmen ever to assemble. These people, they claimed, had never seen or been seen by Europeans. However, later research showed that all these ostensibly “wild” Bushmen had a long history of rural proletarianization by Europeans. Hoefler took a series of some 500 sepia-tinted photographs while working on a movie entitled The Bushman, which premiered in May 1926, less than a month after the return of the Safari participants to Denver. It was not a striking success, and the relationship among them dissolved in a rancor of bickering, largely about finances and control of the images. Most of the footage was overexposed, and the “talkies,” sound film, had just made its appearance and had begun to replace the silent film market, which meant that Cadle had to resort to using the film on lecture tours. The significance of this minor expedition, however, lies elsewhere. It provides important insights into the zeitgeist of the era, and its still photographs, ostensibly of “wild” Bushmen, were slickly and successfully marketed and incorporated in some of the most popular social studies

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textbooks used in the United States, thus contributing to the stereotype of “wild” Bushmen skilled at camouflage and hunting. While Cadle vanished into obscurity, Hoefler launched into a successful career as an “educational” filmmaker, producing propaganda films for the South African regime. Bain achieved prominence in 1936, when he brought a troupe of the last surviving South Africa Bushmen to the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg. The Bushmen had been expelled from their domicile with the declaration of their land as a game reserve. His purpose was to focus attention on their plight and to move the public and government to support them. Regrettably, he failed. Robert Gordon See also: Exploration and Explorers, Africa; South Africa, History and Politics Reference Gordon, Robert J. Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997.

DESSALINES, JEAN JACQUES (1758–1806) Jean Jacques Dessalines was a participant in the Haitian Revolution and the first emperor of independent Haiti’s South. On January 1, 1804, he declared Saint Domingue independent of French rule and gave it the indigenous name Haiti. Dessalines was a complicated figure, historically both revered and reviled. He was born a slave in 1758 in Cormiers, Grande-Rivière-duNord, and fought under Toussaint Louverture; following the latter’s imprisonment by the French, Dessalines and the mulatto leader André Rigaud together secured independence. As Emperor Jacques I, the semiilliterate Dessalines set about establishing www.abc-clio.com

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Marble bust of Jean Jacques Dessalines, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution and the first ruler of an independent Haiti. (Library of Congress)

a new state: he instituted forced agricultural labor, forbade whites from owning property, taxed highly, and expropriated land from free blacks and the fleeing French. Dessalines soon undertook a systematic massacre of the French but spared a Polish regiment that had fought for independence as well as French priests, doctors, and artisans. These stayed on, sheltered by the 1805 constitution’s unprecedented step of proclaiming all Haitians black, regardless of skin color. Dessalines valued relations with other nations, both economic and political. He opened commerce with Britain, Jamaica, and the United States and, cognizant of Haiti’s example to other enslaved peoples, offered money to divert U.S.-bound slaves to his state. He invaded the neighboring Santo Domingo in 1805 to abolish slavery and voiced hope that “a spark” from Haiti

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would leap to nearby Martinique. Dessalines’s influence was felt in Cuba, too, where paintings of “Salinas” (Dessalines) circulated. However, fearing invasion, Dessalines warned Haitians against propagandizing abroad. Ultimately, his harsh rule and high taxes alienated many, especially southern mulattos, and en route to quash an 1806 insurrection, Dessalines was ambushed at Pont-Rouge and assassinated. Rachel Price See also: Christophe, Henri; Haiti; Louverture, Toussaint Bréda References Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Gaspar, David Barry, and David Patrick Geggus. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1963. Pascal-Trouillot, Ertha, and Ernst Trouillot. Encyclopédie Biographique d’Haïti. Montreal, QC: Editions SEMIS, 2001.

DIAMONDS Valued both as gemstones and for their industrial uses, including as drill bits, diamonds have long been mined and traded in Africa. When they are bought and sold in order to purchase arms and fund internal violent conflicts, such as civil wars in Sierra Leone and Libera, these diamonds have become known as “conflict diamonds.” Until the discovery of diamonds in Minas Gerais, Brazil (1720s), most diamonds had come from alluvial deposits in India and Kalimantan (Borneo). Brazil’s www.abc-clio.com

diamonds were discovered by the bandeirantes (explorers). The discovery changed Brazil, as people and economic power shifted away from the coast and to the southern and central parts of the country. African slaves were quickly put to work in diamond mining for the Portuguese government’s royal monopoly. The slaves who survived added an African flavor to Brazilian music, religion, and culture. From 1730 until 1870 Brazil supplied the world with gemstone quality diamonds. In the late 1800s diamonds were found in Venezuela and Guyana. Diamonds were found in 1867 in the Cape Colony of southern Africa. At first the diamonds were taken from alluvial deposits. However, they soon were mined from blue kimberlite, found in ancient volcanic pipes located near the mining town of Kimberly. In 1888 Cecil John Rhodes formed De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. to control the vast production flowing from the African diamond fields. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the growing supply of diamonds interacted with the rising prosperity of both Europe and the United States to stimulate the demand for diamonds both for industrial uses and for gemstones as gifts. The hunt for diamonds led to numerous discoveries across Africa. Diamonds were found in 1908 in the German colony of Kolmanskop (later South West Africa, now Namibia) and in the 1930s in Sierra Leone. Today the world’s richest diamond mine is in Botswana at the the Jwaneng mine. Major diamond-producing countries on the African continent are the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Botswana, South Africa, Angola, Namibia,

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Miners pan for diamonds near Koidu in northeastern Sierra Leone in 2004. During the country’s 1991–2001 civil war, civilians were used as slaves to mine the diamonds that funded the rebels’ wartime efforts. Even with the end of the civil war in 2001, the diamond industry continues to struggle toward reducing the number of so-called conflict diamonds that enter the foreign market. (AP/Wide World Photos)

Ghana, Central African Republic, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe. The instability and ethnic violence in Africa after the end of colonialism led, by the 1990s, to trafficking in conflict diamonds taken from mines, a trade dominated by criminal gangs and terrorist groups. Many innocent people in diamond-mining areas were killed or deliberately mutilated. The armed bands entered a diamond-producing area and deliberately chopped off a hand or a foot of men, women, and children to brutalize the people of the area so they would be psychologically as well as physically unable to resist or even to flee. The diamonds produced in these areas became blood or conflict diamonds. In Sierra Leone, the socalled Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was able to control much of the diamondproducing area, purchasing weapons with its diamond profits. www.abc-clio.com

Terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, became financially involved in the diamond trade. Great profits were made from rough diamonds transported by terrorists to diamond centers for cutting and polishing before emerging into legitimate market streams. The U.S. government, although aware of the fact of Islamic terrorist trafficking in conflict diamonds, did little about it until after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In November 2002 a global movement among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other activists pressured the diamond industry and the governments of diamond-producing countries to take action on conflict diamonds. After a meeting in Kimberly, South Africa, the Kimberley Certification Process Scheme was adopted. In August 2003 the Kimberly Process, a joint government, international diamond

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industry, and civil society initiative for stemming the flow of conflict diamonds, was instituted. The Kimberly Process has forty-three participants—including the European Community, Canada, Russia, and the African diamond producers. The participants in the Kimberly Process control an estimated 99.8 percent of the global production of rough diamonds. Part of the process is the development of a certification by diamond sellers that their diamonds are not conflict diamonds. Many NGOs charge that the Kimberly Process is not working because it depends too much upon self-regulation. By 2006 nearly four million Africans in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo had been killed because of conflict diamonds. The International Criminal Court is seeking to prosecute war lords, gunrunners, and corporate executives selling conflict diamonds as war criminals and purchasers with involvement in genocide. Andrew J. Waskey See also: Brazil; Ghana; Kongo; Sierra Leone; South Africa, History and Politics; Zimbabwe References Bernstein, Harry. The Brazilian Diamond in Contracts, Contraband, and Capital. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986. Campbell, Greg. Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2004. Farah, Douglas. Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror. New York: Broadway Books, 2004. Fry, Carolyn. “Conflict Diamonds.” Times Educational Supplement. May 27, 2005. Kanfer, Stefan. Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993.

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DIASPORA “Diaspora” is a term describing mass migrations of people, forced and voluntary. Africa and the Americas have each been defined by such mass migrations of both kinds. Both regions host as well as generate diasporas. Yet it is important to distinguish diasporas from other waves of migration. The original Greek term meant dispersion and described mainly voluntary colonization. However, it soon came to refer particularly to the scattering of Jews following exile from Babylon; only in the past century has “diaspora” been used to refer to a wider variety of dispersed populations. For centuries connoting forcible, even catastrophic exile, diaspora more recently has come to denote sizable communities of a given people outside their “homeland”; reasons for such emigration include not only political or religious persecution but also trade or labor demands and imperial expansions. Whatever the impetus for displacement, diasporas, as opposed to other forms of migration, tend to share the following characteristics: a sense of group identity, often reinforced by exclusion from, or inability to assimilate into, the host culture; a collective memory of the group’s past, particularly acute when dispersion follows a traumatic event; a desire to transmit the group’s identity and traditions; and, perhaps most crucially, a myth about a homeland, to which the diaspora maintains a connection and, frequently, an expectation of return. Diasporas often enjoy a vexed but crucial relation to their respective homelands. Committed to an abstract and often nostalgic idea or ideal of such a homeland, diasporic politics can be conservative, seeking to maintain a “pure,” unchanging, or archaic culture in their homeland, often to

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the dismay of those who still live there. Sometimes, too, as a reaction against discrimination, fears of assimilation, or the general struggles of adapting to a new culture, cultural practices felt to be traditional are emphasized in the diaspora to a degree they would not be in the homeland itself. Historical instances abound of diasporas aiding their homeland in times of crisis. But with the advent of globalization and augmented communication and travel between diasporic locales and homeland, diasporas increasingly wield significant and ongoing influence upon peoples and politics in the sending nations. Many sending nations respond accordingly, formally recognizing diasporas as having political and legal claims on the homeland as well. For instance, Mexico has passed several laws designed to facilitate the participation of U.S.-based Mexicans in Mexican politics. A number of nations allow for dual citizenship to facilitate participation by mobile members of their communities. Such legal and political responses are due in no small part to the role economically driven diasporas often play in sustaining the economies of the sending nations, where diasporic remittances (money sent back) in certain cases constitute the largest source of income for the homeland. Historically, numerous diasporic communities have settled in Africa and the Americas, from South Asians in Africa to Chinese in the Americas. The region has hosted diasporas of a both classic and more recent cast. For example, already diasporic Jews, banished from Spain in 1492, found a more tolerant climate in North Africa under the caliphate. A sizable number were also among the first colonists in both North and South America. Substantial Jewish communities were later established, www.abc-clio.com

particularly in Argentina, Uruguay, the United States, and Canada. Differing markedly in character, the forced migration of Africans to the Americas during the slave trade has bequeathed entire new communities of African Americans throughout the Caribbean and the Americas, but some debate exists as to whether these discrete communities together constitute a common, shared diaspora. The slave trade violently yoked together Africans from numerous ethnic groups, religions, and languages who would not have felt part of a single community, much less have identified “Africa” as their homeland (though the continent has represented a mythic homeland for twentieth-century American movements such as Pan-Africanism or Ethiopianism). In fact, multiple African diasporas exist. They began with a slave trade and forced migration across the Sahara and into the Persian Gulf area under Islamic rule in the seventh and eighth centuries. Later came the Atlantic slave trade, and today there is a more cosmopolitan, economically driven emigration to Europe and the Americas. Further, descendants of African slaves have historically engaged in little of the typically diasporic shuttling back and forth between homeland and host country, but instead have integrated, however uncomfortably, into the latter. Still, a shared history and the common experience of slavery and its aftermath in racialized cultures has generated what many scholars argue may indeed be considered a diaspora boasting certain shared cultural attributes. As slavery was abolished throughout the Atlantic, various groups of Asians and South Asians were recruited to labor in the place of African or African American slaves. In the second half of the nineteenth

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century, for example, some 800,000 Chinese are estimated to have migrated to the United States, the Commonwealth nations, the West Indies, and Latin America. Much of this emigration was organized in a manner akin to indentured servitude, based on contracts stipulating that workers reimburse the price of their tickets. Some of these subsequent American communities have, with time, lost their diasporic character and been assimilated into the respective national cultures. Japanese and Indians, however, are two examples of groups that made their way to the New World (principally to Brazil and the West Indies, respectively) and that have since maintained ethnic enclaves that preserve, to some degree, language and cultural practices, as well as ties with Japan and India. The late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century also saw massive waves of European migrants settling in the Americas, some of whom viewed themselves as members of a diasporic community; thus, one may find, for example, communities of Italian or German speakers today in Latin America. A majority, however, simply understood their transatlantic move as emigration and sought neither return to a homeland nor the upholding of religion, language, or customs, but instead assimilation to a new land. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed catastrophes of increasing magnitude that spawned newer diasporas, many with sizable communities in the Americas. Indeed, the bulk of recent diaspora scholarship has focused on these increased movements of peoples in the post-1945 era. Like earlier immigration spurred by natural or economic disaster, today’s immigrants may not exhibit all the classic criteria for diasporas but do underscore the increasing flexibility of the term. www.abc-clio.com

While clinging to myths of homeland, diasporas necessarily go beyond the confines of nation-states and invite a similarly changing definition. Rachel Price See also: Atlantic World; Diaspora, Demography of; Falasha (Beta Israel); PanAfricanism; Slavery (History) References Chaliand, Gérard, and Jean Pierre Rageau. Penguin Atlas of Diasporas. Translated by A. M. Berrett. New York: Penguin, 1997. Cohen, Robert. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. Evans Braziel, Jana Mannur, and Anita Mannur, eds. Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Harris, Joseph E., ed. Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993.

DIASPORA, DEMOGRAPHY OF The demography of diaspora deals with the human conditions of the African Diaspora in context. Understanding the contemporary lives of Africans and people of African descent around the Atlantic requires a detailed understanding of the demographic complexity of the African Diaspora. Overall, Africans in Africa have the lowest average life expectancy in the world and the highest death rates. However, there are some regions and countries on the continent, such as North Africa and Indian Ocean nations, that have relatively high life expectancy and low death rates. People of African descent in the Americas, on the other hand, have average life expectancy rates significantly higher than not only Africans in Africa, but also the world average. Their average death rates are also not only substantially lower

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than those in Africa, but also significantly lower than the world average or even the rates in developed nations. Among the many factors contributing to the low rates in life expectancy and high death rates in Africa are diseases, civil wars, hunger or famine, and lack of adequate education. As a result, the demographic data below show that geographic location might have contributed in influencing the different human conditions or well-being of the same group or race of people.

Life Expectancy and Death Rates in Africa Africa as a whole, on average, has the lowest life expectancy and the highest death rates in the world. However, there are regional and country variations, with certain parts or countries of the continent having relatively high rates of life expectancy and low death rates. As of 2005, out of fifty-six nations or territories in Africa, the average life expectancy at birth was 52.62 years, the lowest rate in the world. The world average in that same year was 64.33 years (males, 62.73 years, and females, 66.04 years). Of the five regions of the continent, Northern Africa had the highest rates of life expectancy, 70.77 years (68.85 years for males and 72.78 years for females), followed by Western Africa, with 52.09 years (50.51 for males and 53.73 for females); Eastern Africa, with 51.56 years (50.10 for males and 53.05 for females); 50.00 years for Middle Africa (48.59 years for males and 51.46 years for females); and Southern Africa, with 38.68 years (39.22 for males and 38.12 for females). Nine countries had average life expectancy rates of 70 years or more, with five of them being island nations. Twelve www.abc-clio.com

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countries had average life expectancy rates of 60 years or more, with eight of them being island nations (Cape Verde, Comoros, Mauritius, Mayottee, Reunion, Saint Helena, Sao Tome and Principe, and Seychelles). Thirty countries had life expectancy rates lower than 50 years. The ten African nations with the highest life expectancy rates in 2005 were Saint Helena (77.76 years), Libya (76.5 years), Tunisia (74.89 years), Reunion (73.95 years), Algeria (73 years), Mauritius (72.38 years), Egypt (71 years), Morocco (70.66 years), Cape Verde (70.45 years), and Sao Tome and Principe (66.99 years). The African nations with the lowest life expectancy rates in 2005 were Botswana (33.89 years), Swaziland (35.65 years), Angola (36:61 years), Zimbabwe (36.67 years), Lesotho (36.68 years), and Malawi (36.97 years). There are significant differences in death rates among the regions and nations in Africa. For example, the average death rate in Africa as of 2005 was 14.76 per 1,000. The average for Northern Africa was 5.54; 14.47 for Western Africa; 14.64 for Eastern Africa; 15.29 for Middle Africa; and 23.87 for Southern Africa. The world average in 2005 was 8.78. Of the fifty-six African nations, the life expectancy rate for females in 2005 was 75 years or more in seven of them. For another seven nations, the life expectancy rates for females were lower than 40 years. Of the fifty-six African nations, twelve had twenty deaths or more per every 1,000. Thirteen nations had lower than ten deaths per every 1,000. The six nations with the highest death rates were Botswana (29.36), Angola (25.90), Swaziland (25.26); Lesotho (25.03); Zimbabwe (24.66); and Malawi (23.39). The six nations in Africa with the

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lowest death rates in 2005 were Libya (3.48), Algeria (4.6), Tunisia (5.09), Egypt (5.26), Reunion (5.48), and Morocco (5.64).

Islands (4.28), British Virgin Islands (4.42), Cayman Islands (4.81), Saint Lucia (5.12), Jamaica (5.37), Anguilla (5.43), and Antigua and Barbuda (5.44).

Life Expectancy and Death Rates in the Caribbean Life expectancy rates are relatively higher in the twenty-four nations of the Caribbean than in African nations, while death rates there are relatively lower than in African nations, the world average, and a significant number of developed nations. For example, the average life expectancy in the Caribbean as of 2005 was 73.54 years (70.77 years for males and 76.04 years for females). Of the twenty-four nations in the Caribbean, only one country, Haiti, had life expectancy rates lower than 60 years (52.9 years). Twenty-two nations had life expectancy rates of 70 years or more. The six countries with the highest average rates of life expectancy in the Caribbean in 2005 were Cayman Islands (79.95 years), Aruba (79.14 years), Martinique (79.04 years), U.S. Virgin Islands (78.91 years), Montserrat (78.71 years), and Guadeloupe (77.9 years). In twelve of the nations in the Caribbean, the average life expectancy rates for females were 75 years or more. Seven nations had average life expectancy rates for females of 80 years or more, with one nation having average life expectancy rate of 79.65 years. The average death rate for the twentyfour nations of the Caribbean in 2005 was 6.85 per 1,000. Only one nation, Haiti, had death rates in double figures (12.34). Sixteen nations had death rates below 7.2. Three nations had death rates below 5 deaths per 1,000. The nations with the seven lowest death rates in the Caribbean in 2005 were Turks and Caicos www.abc-clio.com

Life Expectancy and Death Rates in Latin America The specific life expectancy and death rates for people of black African descent for each Latin American nation are not presented separately. Still, it is worth presenting the general figures for the nations in the region. The average life expectancy in the twenty-two nations that comprise Latin America was 71.80 years as of 2005 (69.10 years for males and 74.63 for females). Each of the countries in the region had an average life expectancy rate of at least 60 years in 2005. Seven nations had life expectancy rates of 75 years or more, with one nation having a rate of almost 75 years (74.89). In no nation was the rate for males 75 years or more. For females, two nations had rates of 80 years or more and six nations had rates of at least 79 years. Average death rates in Latin American countries are among the lowest in the world. In 2005 the average death rate for the twenty nations of Latin America was 6.08 per 1,000. No nation in the region had death rates in double figures. In fact, only five nations had death rates of 7 or more. Seven nations had death rates that were less than 5 deaths per 1,000.

Life Expectancy and Death Rates in North America In 2005 Bermuda’s population was estimated at 65,365. In 2000 blacks comprised 54.8 percent; whites, 34.1 percent; mixed, 6.4 percent; other, 4.3 percent; and those

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unspecified, 0.4 percent. The life expectancy in Bermuda in 2005 was 77.79 years (75.7 years for males and 79.91 years for females). The death rate in Bermuda in 2005 was 7.63 per 1,000. In Canada, although specific figures for blacks are not presented, average life expectancy in 2005 was estimated at 80.1 years (76.73 years for males and 83.63 years for females). Its death rate in 2005 was 7.73 years. In the United States, as of 2005, the average life expectancy for the general population was 77.71 years (74.89 years for males and 80.67 years for females). Its death rate in 2005 was 8.25 years. As for a breakdown of the average life expectancy of blacks in the United States, in 2002 their average life expectancy was 72.3 years (68.8 years for males and 75.6 years for females). For white Americans it was 77.7 years (75.1 years for males and 80.3 years for females) in 2002. The statistics on the life expectancy and death rates in the regions studied reveal that geographic location plays a crucial role in determining whether a person of black African descent has relatively high life expectancy or relatively low death rates. The data show that sub-Saharan Africa, especially on the mainland, has the lowest rates of life expectancy and high death rates. The data also show that the average death rates in the Caribbean, Latin America, and a number of African nations are actually lower than those of advanced nations such as the United States and Canada and, as well, France (9.08 deaths per 1,000); Germany (10.55); Japan (8.95); Italy (10.3); and the United Kingdom (10.18). There are many factors responsible for the unusually low life expectancy and www.abc-clio.com

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high death rates in Africa. These factors include famine, poverty, diseases, and civil wars. For example, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, scientists had found cures or medicines for many of the diseases that once killed millions of people all across the world. However, many of these same diseases that have been eradicated in developed nations are still taking away the lives of millions of Africans. For example, in Africa, malaria infects 1 in 2 people in Malawi; tuberculosis, 1 in 263 in Botswana; measles, 1 in 431 in Botswana; and leprosy, 1 in 6,481 in Malawi. From 1999 to 2005, HIV/AIDS has killed at least 2.2 million Africans a year. From 1990 to 2007, civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa killed millions of people from Sierra Leone to Liberia, from Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The diseases cited above also affect people of black African descent outside of sub-Saharan Africa (in the Americas), but not at such high rates as in Africa. So the data at least reveal that geography plays a crucial role in whether a black African has high life expectancy or low death rates. Amadu Jacky Kaba References Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): World Factbook. Pittsburgh, PA: Global Support Imaging and Publishing Support, 2005. Kochanek, Kenneth D., Sherry L. Murphy, Robert N. Anderson et al. “Deaths: Final Data for 2002.” National Vital Statistics Reports 53 (2004): 1–116. Pratt, Cornelius B., Louisa Ha, and Charlotte A. Pratt. “Setting the Public Health Agenda on Major Diseases in SubSaharan Africa: African Popular Magazines and Medical Journals, 1981–1997.” Journal of Communication 52 (2002): 889–904.

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DINKA With a population estimated at about two million, the Dinka are the largest ethnic group in the Sudan, comprising between 10 percent and 15 percent of the total population. Primarily cattle herders, the Dinka have traditionally controlled almost 40,000 square miles along the White Nile in the southern Sudan. At the center of this territory are the Bahr el Ghazal marshlands. The Dinka have never had a formal political structure. Instead, they have been organized into almost two dozen major clans defined by a complex system of kinship ties. This organization has served them well throughout most of their history. It has long enabled them to maintain their territories against the incursions of neighboring black African peoples, the Nuer and the Anuak, as well as those of the Nuba Arabic peoples that have dominated the northern Sudan. In the late nineteenth century, the Dinka fiercely resisted attempts by the Ottoman Turks to subjugate them as they had subjugated most of the rest of the Nile Valley. Traditional Dinka religious beliefs center on a supreme being named Nhialac, involve a complex hierarchy of other gods, and emphasize communication with one’s ancestors. The Dinka have resisted attempts to convert them to both Islam and Christianity, though Christian missionaries have made some inroads during the recent, extended civil war between the Dinka and the Sudanese government. In 1982 John Garang led a Dinka uprising against the Muslim-dominated, increasingly fundamentalist federal government of the Sudan. Over the subsequent quarter century, the Sudanese military has massacred thousands of Dinka in its attempt to crush the rebel Sudanese Liberation Army. Large segments of the www.abc-clio.com

Dinka population have been forced from their homeland into neighboring regions, and the conflict has been further complicated by the attempts of the Nuer to seize Dinka territories by force. Martin Kich See also: Religion (Africa); Sudan (Darfur Region) References Deng, Francis Mading. The Dinka of the Sudan. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972. Deng, Francis Mading. The Dinka and Their Songs. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. Deng, Francis Mading. Dinka Cosmology. London: Ithaca, 1980. Deng, Francis Mading. Tradition and Modernization: A Challenge for Law among the Dinka of the Sudan. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Ryle, John. Warriors of the White Nile: The Dinka. Amsterdam: Time-Life, 1982.

DIOP, CHEIKH ANTA (1923–1987) Cheikh Anta Diop was born in Caytu, Senegal, on December 29, 1923. As a scholar, Diop sought to restore the importance of Africans in the origins of human civilization and to counter Eurocentric historiography. His intellectual efforts were foundational to subsequent Afrocentric thought in the United States. In his early twenties Diop traveled to Paris, France, to study physics with Frederic Joliot-Curie at the College of France. After several years he became increasingly interested in the study of African culture, linguistics, and history. As a result he expanded his studies at the Sorbonne, focusing on the social sciences. For his doctorate of letters, he relied on Greek travel descriptions, historical analysis, and linguistic data to argue in his dissertation that ancient Egyptians were black. Further, he argued that Egyptians

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had a distinct, autonomous culture that was not part of a Eurasian identity but a Pan-African identity. In this and subsequent work, he would speak to the cultural exchange between Egypt and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. His steering committee did not support the validity of this thesis and rejected the work in 1951. Presence Africaine published his thesis under the title, Nations, nègres, et cultures (Negroes, nations, and cultures) in 1954. While studying in Paris, Diop was also heavily involved in political and intellectual endeavors. Between 1950 and 1953, he was the secretary of the political party, Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA; African Democratic Rally). In 1956 he participated in the Conference of Negro Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1960, the year Senegal would become independent, he published two more books, L’Unite Culturelle de l’Afrique Noire (Cultural Unity of Black Africa) and L’Afrique Noire Precoloniale (Precolonial Black Africa). That year he also established a center for radiocarbon testing at the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN; Foundational Institute of Black Africa) in Dakar, Senegal. At the radiocarbon laboratory, he self-developed a test to examine the level of melanin in Egyptian mummies. During the next decade he would publish several more books. In 1974, Antériorité des Civilisations Nègres (African Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality) was published in English. In subsequent years, several of his works would be published in English. The expanded accessibility of Diop’s writings increased his global visibility. With English translations of his works available, Diop’s audience expanded. The effort to restore blacks to African history and the intellectual and political importance of www.abc-clio.com

African-centered research attracted many new followers. In particular, one of his most fervent supporters is an African American scholar, Molefi Asante. Born Arthur Lee Smith in Georgia, Asante changed his name to reflect his African heritage. Asante, the former director of Temple University’s African American Studies Program, instituted, at Temple, the first doctoral program in African American Studies in 1987. He has published dozens of monographs and edited collections that often cite Cheikh Anta Diop. Cheikh Anta Diop died on February 7, 1987, but various components of his research agenda continue in the United States and Senegal. Other U.S. academic followers of Professor Diop are Runoko Rashidi, Leonard Jeffries, Ivan van Sertima, and Asa Hilliard. There is a Center for Diopian Inquiry and Research on Education as Culture Transmission (DIRECT Center) at Medgar Evers College in New York. During his lifetime, Cheikh Anta Diop received a mixed reception in Senegal. He was respected for his work at IFAN’s radiocarbon lab and some of his social science scholarship. He also attracted some enemies as a high-ranking member of an opposition political party. He maintained a local newspaper, printed in Wolof, which allowed him the opportunity to share some of his ideas with a larger audience. Soon after his death, the University of Dakar was renamed the University of Cheikh Anta Diop at Dakar. Donna A. Patterson See also: Afrocentrism References Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origin of Civilization. New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974. Diop, Cheikh Anta. Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991.

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368 DJEBAR, ASSIA Fauvelle-Aymar, François-Xavier, Jean-Pierre Chrétien, and Claude-Hélène Perrot. Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des africains entre Egypte et Amérique. Paris: Karthala, 2000. Van Sertima, Ivan. Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop. Somerset, NJ: Transaction Press, 1986.

DJEBAR, ASSIA (1936–) A leading French francophone novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, filmmaker, university-trained historian, and journalist, Assia Djebar was born Fatima Zohra Imalayen on June 30, 1936, in Cherchell, Algeria. Born and raised in French colonial Algeria in an Arabic-speaking household with Berber ancestors, she attended French colonial school, a decisive factor for her subsequent literary and academic career. Interestingly, all of her published works are written in French rather than Arabic—the language of the colonizer, or the enemy, which she refers to as the langue adverse (adversary language)—a fact that is widely discussed by critics as well as by the author herself. Imbued with several cultures and languages (French, North African, oral and literary Arabic, Berber, and English) and shuttling back and forth between North Africa, France, and, later on in her life and literary career, the United States (as well as Germany, where she gives readings of her books on a regular basis), Djebar is acutely aware of cultural, religious, linguistic, and gender differences, diversity, and nuances as well as the importance of history, poetry, structural rigidity, and musicality—key factors that inform her writing. Consequently, her multifaceted, hybrid, exilic literary works address topics that transcend time as well as geographical and linguistic boundaries. www.abc-clio.com

Clearly, Djebar’s influence and recognition, as a scholar and internationally acclaimed writer who considers herself not so much a “exilic subject” as rather a francophone voice, spans both sides of the Atlantic. Today, her work is widely read, discussed, and critiqued on both sides of the Atlantic. Djebar left her mark in the United States, where she headed the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge from 1995 until 2001 before moving on to New York University, where she was appointed Silver Chair and Professor for French and Francophone Literature in 2002. In the United States alone, where her work is generally included in the corpus of postcolonial literature or postcolonial French francophone literatures, over thirty doctoral dissertations focus on her literary works, which are taught at French and francophone literature departments and have been incorporated into the literary canon. Among numerous other literary honors, Djebar was awarded the Peace Prize at the Frankfurt book fair in 2000 and elected a member of the prestigious Académie Française in 2005 in recognition of her literary work. Her collection of essays, Ces voix qui m’assiègent (1999; These Voices that Besiege Me), stresses the importance of asserting and perpetuating a francophone voice in and outside of postcolonial Algeria and the need to ensure the survival and proliferation of French francophone literatures across the globe. Similarly, Le Blanc de l’Algérie (1995; Algerian White: A Narrative) represents not only a coming to terms with death—a homage to artists, writers, and intellectuals murdered by Algerian fundamentalists in the 1990s, many of whom were close friends of the author—but certainly also serves to

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raise international awareness of the rising insecurity, turmoil, and extreme violence in her native country. Similarly, the short stories in Oran, Langue morte (1997; Oran, Dead Language), set alternately in France or Algeria, are further testimony of violence in Algeria of the 1990s. After a decade of literary silence in the 1970s, which was spent filming La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenua (1979; The Spree of the Women of Mount Cenua) and La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli (1982; Zerda, or the Songs of Forgetting ), she published Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980; Women of Algiers in Their Apartment), a collection of short stories that describe the multifaceted emancipatory struggles of Algerian women to make their voices heard in a rigidly patriarchal, highly devout Muslim society, a topic she also tackles in Ombre Sultane (1987; A Sister to Scheherazade). Her predilection to intertwine fiction, autobiography, and history shines through in La Femme sans sépulture (2002; Unburied Woman), which tells the story of a female freedom fighter during the Algerian War of Liberation (1954–1962), as well as in Loin de Médine (1991; Far from Medina), a fictional history surrounding the life and death of the prophet Mohammed. Her early works, La Soif (1957; The Mischief ) and Les Impatients (1958), focus on domestic issues and gender relationships, describing the coming of age of young, educated Algerian bourgeois women, as do her subsequent novels, Les Enfants du nouveau monde (1962; Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War) and Les Alouettes naïves (1967; Foolish Birds) which describe women’s coming of age during the War of Liberation. Djebar crosses geographical and cultural borders in Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997; Strasbourg Nights), a love story about an Algerian www.abc-clio.com

woman and a Frenchman. Her later, more important works foreground the impact of colonial history on her native Algeria, showing how history—in particular colonialism, then postcolonialism—language, and religion shape definitions of selfhood, and in particular definitions of womanhood. Her later works are increasingly autobiographical, in particular Vaste est la prison (1995; So Vast the Prison: A Novel ) and her 1985 masterpiece, L’Amour, la fantasia (Fantasia: An Algerian Calvacade). L’Amour intermingles family history with colonial history and fiction by juxtaposing and alternating fragments taken from the author’s personal life and family history with accounts of the 1830 conquest of Algiers by the French and episodes from the Algerian War of Liberation. These key historic episodes are resurrected, recounted, and to a certain extent reinvented from an indigenous and feminine point of view that calls into question and undermines the “official” historiography, which is essentially a legacy of the French colonizer. Exile and the crossing of space and time are topics of her latest novel, La Disparition de la langue française (2003; The Disappearance of French), an account of a man’s return to his native Algeria in early the 1990s after twenty years spent in France. Christa Jones References Callegruber, Mireille, ed. Djebar, nomade entre les murs. Paris: Maisonneuve et la Rose, 2005. Donadey, Anne. Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing between Worlds. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001. Kelly, Debra. Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Mortimer, Mildred. Assia Djebar. Philadelphia, PA: Celfan Editions Monographs, 1988.

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DJIBOUTI Located on the east coast of Africa on the Red Sea, this small country of 9,000 square miles (23,310 square kilometers) has a population of about 467,000. The French acquired the territory in 1862 and occupied it twenty-two years later. Called Obock until 1892, it became Djibouti the following year and then became the Côte français des Somalis (French Somaliland) in 1902. In 1908 a Boston-born businessman and settler, William G. “Billy” Sewall, traveled through Djibouti on a reconnaissance safari with the aim of establishing U.S. business interests in the region. Not much trade with the United States, or indeed any other parts of the Americas, resulted, mainly because so much trade at the time went through the nearby port of Aden, controlled by the British. However, some French civil servants from Djibouti served in the West Indies. The most famous was Marie François Julien Pierre-Alype, who was governor of French Somaliland from 1937 until 1939 and was then posted to the Caribbean as governor of Guadeloupe from 1939 until 1940. Strategically located at the southern end of the Red Sea, opposite Aden, it was also an important coal bunkering station; for these reasons, it was occupied by the British in World War II. Djibouti was the major French military base in the region after World War II, its port being the mainstay of the Djibouti’s wealth. In a 1958 referendum, the people voted to become an overseas territory of the French Union rather than becoming autonomous. In 1967 it was named Territoire des Afars et Issas (Territory of Afars and Isas). It became independent as the Republic of Djibouti on June 27, 1977, taking its name after the city of Djibouti, the capital, where two-thirds of the population lived. The United States has recognized the www.abc-clio.com

country since independence, and its first ambassador was Jerrold Martin North, who was there from 1980 until 1982. Canada’s ambassador to Ethiopia was also accredited to Djibouti. Because of its very small size and its geographical position, the Republic of Djibouti has had few connections with the Americas. However, a number of Canadians and former U.S. residents, as well as a few others from Latin America and the Caribbean, have been based there as members of the French Foreign Legion. Antigovernment riots broke out in 1989, when many locals protested the affluence enjoyed by the small European and American population, in contrast to the poverty in much of the country; as a result, some American residents left the country. In the following year Djibouti was again in the news when it concluded a military pact with Saddam Hussein several months before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. As Djibouti also had a military pact with France and had just received $1.7 million from the United States, its criticisms of the U.S.-led military buildup in the Gulf caused pressure to be put on the country by the U.S. and its allies. Eventually, Djibouti allowed its port to be used by U.S. and Italian warships during the Gulf War. The situation had normalized by 2000, when Donald Yamamoto was appointed U.S. ambassador to Djibouti. Born in Seattle and of Japanese ancestry, he was a career foreign service employee and had been deputy director for East African affairs until his appointment to Djibouti. He was subsequently appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs under George W. Bush. Justin Corfield

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DOE, SAMUEL K. 371 Reference Alwan, Daoud A., and Yohanis Mibrathu. Historical Dictionary of Djibouti. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000.

DOE, SAMUEL K. (1951?–1990) Samuel Kanyon Doe was the president of Liberia from 1980 until his assassination in 1990. Born in Tuzon, a small town in southeastern Liberia on May 6, 1951 (possibly later changing the year to 1950 to meet the constitutional requirement that the president be thirty-five or older), Doe became a career soldier, eventually being promoted to master sergeant in the Liberian Army in 1979. On April 12, 1980, Doe seized power in a military coup, assassinated President William R. Tolbert Jr., and established military rule, for the first time in Liberia’s history, through the People’s Redemption

Council. The Doe regime was marked by mass executions and political repression. Doe, whose military experiences included training by the American Green Berets, developed a close connection with the U.S. government, especially during the Reagan administration. As a combative supporter of U.S. cold war foreign policy, Doe proved a temporarily useful ally for the United States and its interests in Africa. Liberian ports were opened to North American and European ships and Doe’s government enjoyed substantial foreign investment from shipping firms keen to take advantage of Liberia’s growing status as a tax haven. Despite the Doe government’s atrocious human rights record, Liberia, during the decade of Doe’s rule, received more political and military assistance than at any time previously in the country’s history.

A career soldier who seized power in a bloody coup in 1980, Samuel Doe was president of Liberia until his murder in 1990 by rebel forces. He appears during a state visit to Washington in 1982. (U.S. Department of Defense)

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With the thawing of the cold war in the late 1980s, the U.S. government began to view the blatantly corrupt Doe regime as a liability, eventually canceling the foreign aid that was so crucial for Doe’s capacity to maintain his rule. Already facing mounting opposition from growing popular movements of dissent, the withdrawal of aid left Doe without a primary pillar of support in the battles to come. On December 24, 1989, a former Doe ally, Charles Taylor, entered Liberia from Côte d’Ivoire to wage a guerilla war against the faltering government. The Liberian Army quickly lost ground, and within months Liberia was controlled by a variety of rebel factions. In August 1990 the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) sent a peacekeeping force of 4,000 to Liberia. On September 9, 1990, on a visit to the peacekeeping force’s headquarters in Monrovia, Doe was captured, tortured, and killed by Prince Y. Johnson, the leader of the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, which had previously split from Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia. Jeff Shantz References Brehun, Leonard. Liberia: The War of Horror. Accra, Ghana: Adwinsa Publications, 1991. Ellis, Stephen. The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimensions of an African Civil War. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Givens, Willie. The Road to Democracy under the Leadership of Samuel Kenyon Doe: The Policies and Public Statements of Dr. Samuel K. Doe. London: Bucks, 1986. Wonkeryor, Edward L. Liberia Military Dictatorship: A Fiasco Revolution. Chicago: S.C.P. Third World Literature Publishing House, 1985.

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DOMINICAN REPUBLIC,THE The Dominican Republic shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with the neighboring nation of Haiti. Hispaniola was the site of the first European colony in the Western Hemisphere as well as the location of the first enslaved Africans in the Americas. While the majority of the current population is of mixed African and European ancestry, African cultural elements are often minimized or attributed to foreign influences in Dominican nationalist discourse. After Christopher Columbus arrived on the Taino island of Ayti (also known as Quisqueya or Bohio) in 1492, he renamed it La Española (Hispaniola) in Spain’s honor. The Spanish colony on the island was named Santo Domingo. In the early sixteenth century, the Spanish monarchs, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, authorized Fray Nicolás de Ovando, the Spanish governor of Santo Domingo, to import enslaved people of African descent. In 1502 the first large group of enslaved Africans arrived in Santo Domingo, and by 1503 a number of them had managed to escape slavery and were living outside the colonial borders as fugitives. The majority of Africans brought to Santo Domingo came from Senegambia, Guinea, and Congo-Angolan (Bantu) areas. Escaped slaves often lived in selfsufficient Maroon communities called manieles or palenques, beyond the reach of Spanish authorities. The native Taino population had been essentially eliminated by the Spanish by 1513, and increasing numbers of enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to Santo Domingo to work in mines and later on sugar plantations. In 1522 the first documented slave insurrection in the Americas occurred at the Nueva Isabela plantation owned by Columbus’s brother Diego. By the end of

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the sixteenth century, gold and sugar production on the island had declined. While the plantation system that fueled the transatlantic slave trade spread to other areas in the hemisphere, Santo Domingo became a forgotten colony that depended on cattle and on contraband trade with the Dutch for economic subsistence. Many wealthy Spaniards left the island for the greener pastures of Mexico and Peru. In an effort to consolidate power after this economic devastation, the small, outlying settlements were burned to the ground and the colonial population was forced to relocate near the capital of Santo Domingo on the southern coast in the early seventeenth century. This scorched-earth strategy of colonial reorganization resulted in further economic hardship and ushered in an era known to Dominican historians as the Century of Misery. During this century the French established a permanent colony on the western side of the island. It was not until 1777, however, that the Treaty of Aranjuez divided the island between the French colony of Saint Domingue on the western third of the island and the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo on the island’s eastern twothirds. While the French abolished slavery in Saint Domingue in 1793, it was not until 1801 that Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture abolished slavery in Santo Domingo. After the French exiled Louverture to France, slavery was reestablished on the eastern side on the island, which remained officially under French rule from 1795 to 1809. In 1809 Spain regained political control of Santo Domingo only to lose power in 1821 to a group of wealthy Dominican elites that wished to make Santo Domingo part of Simon Bolívar’s Gran Colombia. After five weeks, a period known as the www.abc-clio.com

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Ephemeral Independence, Haitian leader Jean Pierre Boyer took control of Santo Domingo and again abolished slavery. A new independence movement named La Trinitaria and organized by Juan Pablo Duarte led to the establishment of the Dominican Republic as an independent nation on February 27, 1844. In 1861, however, the Dominican general Pedro Santana returned the country to its former colonial status by annexing it to Spain. The Afro-Dominican patriot Francisco Sánchez, who had been a member of Duarte’s independence movement, was executed in 1861 for rebelling against Santana. The Haitian government gave the Dominican rebels weapons, food, and other material support in their fight to reestablish Dominican independence and put an end to European rule on the island of Hispaniola. Unlike earlier independence movements, this struggle successfully mobilized popular support and Dominicans of all backgrounds joined forces to fight in what became known as the Restoration War (1863–1865). The most prominent figure of this period was the Afro-Dominican Gregorio Luperón, a poor man from the rural north who joined the military, defeated Santana, and later became a highly respected liberal politician. The Restoration War did not result in economic independence for the country, however. The Afro-Dominican dictator Ulises Heureaux, known as Lilís, borrowed heavily from other countries to maintain control of the government from 1886 to 1899. In 1905 the United States assumed financial control of the Dominican Republic, and from 1916 to 1924, U.S. Marines occupied the entire country. During the occupation the messianic Afro-Dominican spiritual leader Liborio was killed. Forty

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years after Liborio’s death in 1922, his followers regrouped as the Palma Sola Movement and were again violently repressed by military authorities. Following the departure of U.S. forces, General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, a recruit trained by the U.S. Marines during their occupation, assumed military control of the country and maintained an authoritarian rule either directly or through puppet presidents from 1930 to 1961. In 1937 Trujillo ordered the ethnic cleansing of Haitians living in the border region of the Dominican Republic near Haiti in an effort to whiten the Dominican Republic and rid it of African influences. Thousands of Haitians and many black Dominicans were murdered in what became an international scandal. Censorship and repression under the Trujillo dictatorship prevented reliable information about the massacre from circulating within the Dominican Republic. Trujillo promoted an erroneous official version of events in which Dominican peasants supposedly murdered Haitians in spontaneous acts of anger directed at Haitians for illegally crossing into the Dominican Republic. The racist campaign to whiten the nation and promote a Hispanic Dominican identity gave rise to the modern ideology of anti-Haitianism promoted by prominent Dominican intellectuals such as Joaquín Balaguer and Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle. After the assassination of Trujillo in 1961, Juan Bosch was elected president in the first democratic election held in decades. Seven months after his election, Bosch was forced into exile in a coup organized by a coalition of Dominican elites. A countercoup sought to bring him back to the presidency, but the U.S. military occupied the island in 1965, preventing Bosch from reassuming his position. www.abc-clio.com

From 1966 to 1974 and then again from 1986 to 1996, the country was governed by President Joaquín Balaguer. Balaguer, who had been a puppet president under Trujillo, was also one of the chief ideologues of anti-Haitianism. In 1996 Balaguer formed the National Patriotic Front (FPN), joining with former political enemies to prevent the black politician Francisco Peña Gomez from winning the presidency. The National Patriotic Front promoted the idea that blackness was foreign to Dominican identity and that the only patriotic way of voting was to oppose the supposedly foreign elements represented by Peña Gomez. The beneficiary of Balaguer’s Patriotic Front was the mixed race-candidate of the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), Leonel Fernández; he held the presidency from 1996 to 2000 and was reelected in 2004 for the term ending in 2008. Despite its troubled history of racial and ethnic prejudice, the Dominican Republic preserves considerable African influences. Musical instruments such as the palos and atabales, African rhythms, folklore, the syncretic religious practices of Dominican vodú (Voodoo), religious cofradías (brotherhoods), the gagá ceremonies in the bateyes (sugarcane settlements), and the creolization of language, cuisine, and musical styles all testify to a strongly African-influenced cultural heritage. Descendants of freed U.S. slaves, Haitians, and immigrants from Englishspeaking Caribbean islands have also contributed to African influences in the Dominican Republic, particularly on the eastern peninsula of Samaná. It is telling that the grounds of the Museo del Hombre Dominicano (Museum of the Dominican Man) originally had only

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two statues to symbolize the nation’s legacy of cultural encounter when the museum was established in 1973: a statue of the Spanish clergyman Bartolomé de las Casas and a statue of the Taino cacique, Enriquillo. Today, however, the museum also boasts a statue of the African leader of a slave insurrection, Sebastián Lemba. Heightened interest in Afro-Dominican history and its legacy is also visible in the work of contemporary scholars and artists. The writing of Afro-Dominican author Blas Jiménez and the music of Luis “Terror” Díaz and Xiomara Fortuna are examples of Dominican cultural production that incorporates Afro-Dominican elements. El Movimiento de Mujeres DominicoHatiana (MUDHA; The Dominican-Haitian Women’s Movement), a nongovernmental organization founded in 1995 and based in Santo Domingo, challenges ongoing racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination in the Dominican Republic. While the recent increase in attention to the rich legacy of African influences in the Dominican Republic bodes well for the future, this growing awareness of African contributions to Dominican history, culture, and society has not yet freed Dominican society of all prejudice. Sara Armengot References Brandon, George. “African Religious Influences in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola.” Journal of Caribbean Studies 7, nos. 2–3 (Winter 1989–Spring 1990): 201–231. Davis, Martha Ellen. “Music and Black Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic.” In Music and Black Ethnicity: The Caribbean and South America, edited by Gerard H. Béhague. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994. Howard, David John. Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001.

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Lipski, John M. “Creole-to-Creole Contacts in the Spanish Caribbean: The Genesis of Afro-Hispanic Language.” PALARA: Publication of the AfroLatin/American Research Association 3 (1999): 5–46. Sagás, Ernesto. Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Stinchcomb, Dawn F. The Development of Literary Blackness in the Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity” Callaloo 23, no. 3 (2000): 1086–1111.

DONGALA, EMMANUEL BOUNDZEKI (1941–) Congolese (Brazzaville) novelist, poet, and playwright, Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and leading chemistry scholar Emmanuel Boundzeki Dongala was born in Alindao on July 16, 1941. His father was a missionary-trained schoolteacher, and his mother was from the Central African Republic. Dongala went to study for a master of science degree at Oberlin College, Ohio, in the United States, with a Ford Foundation scholarship in 1959. There he discovered British and American literature and met the novelist Philip Roth. He later got a PhD degree from the University of Montpellier in France. In 1979 he returned to Congo, joined the staff of the University of Brazzaville, and was appointed head of the Chemistry Department in 1981, then dean of academic affairs in 1985. He founded the Théatre de l’éclair, one of the best-known theater companies in Congo, in 1981. In 1997 he left the country and relocated to the United States, where he is currently a professor of chemistry and francophone African literature at

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Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Dongala belongs to a new generation of novelists speaking for a war-torn continent, and he won the prestigious Fonlon-Nichols Prize in 2003 for literary excellence in the defense of human rights. In 1999 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to begin work on his fourth novel. His novels and short stories have received numerous awards, in addition to the Fonlon-Nichols Prize: the Ladislas-Dormandi Prize; the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire (1998); and the Prix RFI-Temoin du Monde (1999). His works have been translated into several languages, including Danish, Dutch, English, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Francoise Parent Ugochukwa See also: Goyemide, Etienne; Kongo References Dongala, Emmanuel Boundzeki. The Fires of Origins: A Novel. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003. Thomas, Dominic. Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

DOUGLASS, FREDERICK (1818–1895) Frederick Douglass was a leading African American abolitionist, orator, writer, and activist for women’s and African American rights. He was also a newspaper editor and diplomat. A race leader, Frederick Douglass rejected pseudoscientific concepts of racial hierarchy and purity and worked tirelessly throughout his life to promote social justice in the United States. Douglass also lectured on social justice in the United Kingdom,

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France, Italy, Egypt, and Greece and held diplomatic positions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on a plantation in Tuckahoe, Maryland, to Harriet Bailey, a slave, and an unidentified white man. Douglass was raised by his maternal grandparents and had little contact with his mother. After her death Douglass was sent to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1826 where he lived for seven years and worked at a shipyard. In 1838, under the assumed name Frederick Johnson, Douglass escaped from Maryland by taking a train to New York City, where he was assisted by members of the Underground Railroad. In the North, Douglass married his fiancée Anna Murray, whom he had met in Baltimore previously and with whom he would have five children. They moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he changed his surname from Bailey to Douglass. In 1841 Douglass spoke for the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, beginning a long and illustrious career as an orator. His first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), was an immediate success. Shortly after its publication, Douglass accepted an overseas speaking tour and began lecturing at abolitionist meetings in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. After returning to the United States, Douglass moved to Rochester, New York, where he founded his weekly newspaper, The North Star, in 1847. Douglass’s editorial efforts made his newspapers, including The North Star and later Douglass’ Monthly, the most successful black newspapers of the period. In 1854 Douglass argued in “Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Understood” that

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European and American civilization is derived from that of ancient Egyptians who had the same skin color as the black population of the United States. In this essay Douglass powerfully refuted popular racist claims that Africa and blackness were connected to backwardness and lack of culture. Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), again draws comparison between ancient Egyptians and black Americans. In this text, as well as in the first and second editions of his final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892), he identifies the physiognomy of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II, with that of his mother. In 1871 Douglass was named assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission by President Ulysses S. Grant. He accompanied three commissioners on their tour of the Dominican Republic and approved Grant’s plan to annex the Caribbean country before resigning his position later that year. After the death of his first wife and his subsequent marriage to Helen Pitts, Douglass toured England, France, Italy, Egypt, and Greece from 1886 to 1887. While his meeting with Haitian university students in Paris impressed him greatly, his autobiographies emphasize his experiences in Italy and Egypt. Through his travels he developed a narrative of the racially mixed origins of all civilizations and maintained the impossibility of adequately categorizing humanity into distinct biological races. In 1889 Douglass was appointed U.S. minister to Haiti and American chargé d’affaires for the Dominican Republic. He was criticized by white U.S. politicians for failing to obtain a lease from Haiti to use Mole St. Nicolas as a U.S. Navy coaling

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station. Douglass resigned his diplomatic positions in 1891, but he denied the claims that his loyalties were with the black nation of Haiti rather than the United States, asserting only that he wanted the best for both nations. While Douglass never held another diplomatic post for the United States, the appreciation of the Haitian government was demonstrated in 1893, when he was named commissioner in charge of the Haitian Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Chicago. Douglass died in 1895 of cardiac arrest. While the time Douglass spent in Africa was brief, his written accounts of experiences in Europe and the Caribbean as well as in Egypt demonstrate the increasingly prominent position Africa came to hold in his writing. For Douglass, Africa was not a place of essential blackness or racial purity, but a dynamic crossroad of civilizations offering ample support for his lifelong struggle to promote the idea that all humanity belongs to a common race. Sara Elizabeth Scott Armengot See also: Abolitionism; Slave Narratives References Brantley, Daniel. “Black Diplomacy and Frederick Douglass’ Caribbean Experiences, 1871 and 1889–1891: The Untold History.” Phlyon 45, no. 3 (1984): 197–209. Cheney, Michael A. “Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as Auto (bio) ethnography.” African American Review 35, no. 3 (2001): 391–408. Levine, Robert S. “Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass’s Rome.” African American Review 34, no. 2 (2000): 217–231. McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton, 1991. Sundquist, Eric J., ed. Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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DRAMA, AFRICAN AMERICAN African American drama incorporates social and literary practices that draw on the revaluation of African American identity and culture through racially defined cultural nationalism. The concept of Africanisms in African American art has evolved out of the pressing need for black artists to resist stereotypes and redefine artistic forms that would address the unique conditions and struggles of their people. The process emphasizes the celebration of black heroism and cultural values by tapping into ritual designs, musical and dance patterns, and themes influenced by an African worldview. Africanisms derive from the disenchantment and deprivation that distinguish black American history from other subhistories within America. From the folk theater of the 1920s and 1930s through the revolutionary drama of the 1960s, African American dramatists have responded differently to their collective history of oppression. But they remain connected by a shared experience and heritage, with Africa providing an important cultural and artistic resource. In this regard, W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1926 blueprint for black drama is timely, as it prescribed a genre that would be, “About us . . . By us . . . For us . . . Near us.” (1926, p. 134). African American drama continues to evolve around the need for, means to, and implications of achieving a theater about, by, for, and near black people. As far back as the 1800s, when black professional entertainers first appeared on the American stage, their curiosity about Africa was apparent. During this period slaves would gather in Congo Square, a large dusty space in New Orleans, where they sang, danced, and played African drums on Sundays and public holidays. www.abc-clio.com

Reference to the Square as “Congo”—a region in central Africa—illustrates the connection the slaves established with their ancestry. Also, in the early 1900s, when African American performers began to respond to their century-old typecasting, suppression, and prostitution by EuroAmerican prejudice, they showed a fascination with African themes. For this reason, some early-twentieth-century black musicals, like In Dahomey (1902) and Abyssinia (1906), by Bert Williams and George Walker, have been described as “back-toAfrica” musicals. When Euro-American playwrights displayed renewed interest in black themes from the end of World War I into World War II, they merely succeeded in reinscribing old stereotypes that depicted black characters as backward and ignorant. Prominent among plays that fall within this category are Ridgley Torrence’s Granny Maumee (1914) and The Rider of Dreams (1917); Eugene O’Neill’s The Dreamy Kid (1919), The Emperor Jones (1921), and All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1920); and Ernest Culbertson’s Goat Alley (1921). Others are DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy (1927), Jo Em Basshe’s Earth (1927), Marc Connelly’s Green Pastures (1930), and Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom (1924). African American dramatists were subsequently stirred to negate these false images and, as in the past, they looked to Africa as a valuable counteractive resource, both culturally and artistically. Africanisms in black drama have sometimes been realized in the re-creation of original African settings. Influenced by the revival and commemoration of African histories and traditions during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, such direct delineations of Africa appeared in early pageants

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like Dorothy C. Guinn’s Out of the Dark (1924) and Edward J. McCoo’s Ethiopia at the Bar of Justice (1924), and in plays like Maud Cuney-Hare’s Antar of Araby (1929) and Willis Richardson’s The Black Horseman (1929). The pattern continued in the 1930s with plays like Shirley Graham’s Tom-Tom (1932), Langston Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti (1936), and pageants like Frances Gunner’s The Light of the Women (1930). In later years the trend would be revisited in plays like William Branch’s A Wreath for Udomo (1961), which is set in South Africa and focuses on the rise and fall of an African prime minister. From pre– to post–civil rights eras (1950s to date), the increased participation of African Americans in all areas of America’s socioeconomic, political, industrial, and intellectual life compelled black artists to raise new questions about the role of Africa in creativity and in the quest for identity and freedom. Inspired by civil rights struggles and the emergence of movements like the Black Arts and Black Aesthetics, African American playwrights redefined forms that not only exposed their pain and resistance, but also venerated their cultural and artistic roots. The reliance on and portrayal of African symbols became an important aesthetic weapon in the hands of a number of playwrights, such as Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun [1959], Les Blancs [1970]), Amiri Baraka (Slave Ship [1967]), and Joseph A. Walker (Ododo [1968]). During the 1970s, the direct exploitation of African images continued to emerge in plays like Baraka’s Bloodrites (1971) and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls . . . (1975). Significant to the presence of Africanisms in African American drama is the utilization of ritual prototypes. As in African www.abc-clio.com

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ritual practice, this approach provides a cleansing and transformational role, uniting and strengthening African Americans in their struggles and solidarity. It is a trend that goes back to the early half of the twentieth century, when dramatists like Jean Toomer, Thelma Duncan, Frances Gunner, Dorothy Guinn, Hall Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois tapped into the concept of drama as ritual. Ritual has either been the main preserve of theater companies or has served as a fundamental aspect of plot development in traditional plays. Theater companies like Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre (NBT)—founded in 1968— emphasized participatory rituals and the promotion of spirituality as a pathway to healing, and they celebrated black values through workshops in movement, dance, meditation, and spiritual release. At Brown University in the fall of 1970, George Bass and some students established a theater troupe, Rites and Reason, which was committed to performing ritual dramas. The New Lafayette Theatre, established in 1966 at the original site of the Lafayette Theatre (established in New York in 1913), also produced improvisational ritual dramas. In black plays, ritual emerges as a sacrificial tool or as a basis for communal bonding, as is evident in the action of the freedom fighters in Hansberry’s Les Blancs, the participatory folk song session in Hansberry’s Drinking Gourd (1960), the women’s unanimity in Shange’s For Colored Girls, the illusionary musicians in Shange’s Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1981), the militant soldiers in Baraka’s Experimental Death Unit #1 (1965), and the black chorus in Baraka’s Police (1968). Similar group participation is nurtured in early pageants by Du Bois, Dorothy Guinn, and Frances Gunner and in the choral presence of

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religious devotees in plays by Hall Johnson, Langston Hughes, Ossie Davis, and James Baldwin. The reinvention of black and pro-black heroes and heroines is also fundamental to the preservation of Africanisms in African American drama and becomes a foil to stereotypical black characters. Through a reaffirmation of their historic achievements, Frederick Douglas and John Brown are honored in William Branch’s In Splendid Error (1953). Black heroes promoted in drama of the civil rights and post–civil rights periods compare with those extolled by Hughes, Randolph Edmonds, Theodore Browne, and May Miller as early as the 1930s. Such legitimate black heroes counteract characters like Othello—really a white hero in blackface—and replace submissive black characters like Uncle Tom in George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), written shortly after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel by the same name, and Emperor Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1921). They also replace the various Coon, Sambo, Topsy, and Dandy stereotypes that were popularized by minstrel shows and which have been reshaped and reused over the years. The African freedom fighters in Hansberry’s Les Blancs and Hannibal, the antislavery hero of Hansberry’s Drinking Gourd, resemble Baraka’s violent black revolutionaries of the 1960s, who are antiwhite, antiblack compliance, and antiblack bourgeoisie. They are also reminiscent of their forerunners: slaves who revolted on slave ships; Nat Turner, who carried out a bloody insurrection in 1831; and the slaves who took up arms with John Brown in 1859. Black heroines are portrayed in Mama in A Raisin, the woman dancer in Les Blancs, and several of Shange’s www.abc-clio.com

women. Symbolizing strength and defiance, like Ma Rainey in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982), these women refuse to be overcome by racism and sexism. Through Africanisms in African American drama, Africa becomes the cultural, geographical, and historical basis for the formulation of a theatrical genre that simultaneously belongs to and at the same time breaks away from mainstream American theater. Africanisms afford African American dramatists the opportunity to exemplify a commonality bound historically, culturally, and aesthetically to a shared history, myth, and theatrical legacy. They also provide a channel through which to enter into a theatrical heritage that exploits the richness of indigenous dance, song, music, history, myth, ritual, storytelling, and sermon traditions. But most of all, Africanisms allow African American dramatists to wage war against constraints imposed by European or Euro-American theatrical rules and models, which propose, define, and shape the values that are accepted as ideal and which fail to give sufficient attention to the cultural peculiarities and sociopolitical needs and concerns of African Americans. Philip Effiong

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References Asante, Molefi Kete. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987. Baldwin, Joseph A. “African Self-Consciousness and the Mental Health of African Americans.” Journal of Black Studies 15, no. 2 (December 1984): 177–194. Du Bois, W. E. B. “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement.” The Crisis, July 1926. Holloway, Joseph E., ed. Africanisms in American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

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Jahn, Janheinz. Muntu: An Outline of NeoAfrican Culture. Translated by Marjorie Grene. London: Faber and Faber, 1961. Molette, Barbara J., and Carlton W. Molette. Black Theatre: Premise and Presentation. Bristol, IN: Windham Hall Press, 1986.

DRED SCOTT V. SANDFORD (1857) Dred Scott v. Sandford was a U.S. Supreme Court case whose outcome in 1857 defined the legal status of blacks in antebellum America and challenged the role of Congress in restricting slavery in the American territories. The case was hotly disputed during the sectional crisis that led to the Civil War. Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri who moved with his owner, Dr. John Emerson, to Illinois and then the northern territories in the 1830s. After Emerson died in 1843, Scott sued for freedom on the grounds of having lived in a free state and free territory. For the next eleven years, Scott’s case bounced through the Missouri courts, where Scott won an appeal in 1850 only to have it overturned by the state supreme court in 1852. In 1854 Scott sued his new owner, the widow Emerson’s brother, John Sanford, for freedom in a federal court but lost. The appeal went to the United States Supreme Court in 1856 (with Sanford’s name misspelled due to a clerical error). The case gained political significance in the dispute over slavery in the territories. The decision, issued by a 7 to 2 vote, ruled against Scott. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s proslavery decision was far-reaching, as he wrote that Scott had no right to sue for freedom at all, since blacks were not, nor ever could be, U.S. citizens. Further, he ruled that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories—overturning decades of legislative compromises, www.abc-clio.com

Dred Scott v. Sandford pamphlet advertisement. (Library of Congress)

including the Missouri Compromise. The ruling sparked outrage among the many northerners who saw the decision as a great victory for proslavery interests. Far from settling the matter, the case increased the tension between proslavery and antislavery forces in the nation. Ian M. Spurgeon See also: Fugitive Slave Law

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382 DU BOIS, WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT References Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Zarefsky, David. Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

DU BOIS, WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT (1868–1963) An African American scholar, civil rights activist, writer, and editor, W. E. B. Du Bois was a renowned intellectual and perhaps the most important civil rights figure in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a fervent advocate of the oppressed—not only African Americans but also all colored people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He is also regarded as the father of Pan-Africanism— a belief in the unity among blacks in and outside Africa as well as an anticolonial movement to solidify all blacks in their fight for liberty. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868. He was valedictorian of his graduating class at—and the first black to graduate from— Great Barrington High School. Upon graduation from Fisk University as valedictorian with a BA degree in 1888, he earned a BA degree in philosophy, an MA degree in history, and a PhD degree in history at Harvard University. He was affiliated with Wilberforce University (1894–1896) and the University of Pennsylvania (1896–1897) before joining the faculty of Atlanta University as a professor of economics and history in 1897. From then onward he dedicated his life to the advancement of African Americans through his publications, speeches, and

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African American historian, W. E. B Du Bois was one of the leading intellectuals and civil rights figures of the twentieth century. His work examined the history and impact of slavery and race relations in the United States. (Library of Congress)

political activism. Du Bois’s book The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) was the pioneering sociological research study of an urban black community in the United States. He served as a leader of the first Pan-African Conference (1900), a transatlantic meeting designed to unify all blacks and discuss issues affecting their interests. The signers of the “Address to the Nations of the World by the Races Congress in London, 1900” included four leaders of the conference: Alexander Walters, president; Henry B. Brown, vice president; H. Sylvester Williams, general secretary; and W. E. B. Du Bois, chairman of the Committee on the Address. In The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903), Du Bois’s most celebrated

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book, the author theorized the doubleness of the African American identity and openly challenged the American educator Booker T. Washington concerning the road to advancement for African Americans. While Washington promoted racial accommodation, hard work, and education in improving the standing of blacks, Du Bois advocated a sustained protest against racial injustice. In the book, Du Bois also stressed the role of collegeeducated blacks in the struggle for civil rights. In the 1900s Du Bois was instrumental in the creation of the Niagara Movement (1905–1910) and of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP; 1909–). In 1910 Du Bois left Atlanta University to serve full time as the NAACP’s director of publicity and research. In 1910–1934 he also edited the NAACP magazine, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, which covered many Pan-African issues, recommending Africa-related books, announcing conferences on African studies, and condemning racial segregation in South Africa. As editor of The Crisis, Du Bois is credited with uncovering and promoting talented African American writers and artists. He advocated cultural nationalism for fellow blacks, encouraging the development of writing that is both uniquely African American and universally appealing. The early 1910s saw the publication of three books by Du Bois: The Quest of the Silver Fleece: A Novel (1911), a work of fiction set in Tooms County, Alabama; The Star of Ethiopia (1913), a theatrical production intended to promote African American history and civil rights; and The Negro (1915), an examination of race as a social construct. In 1919 he organized another

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Pan-African Congress held in Paris, France, intentionally to coincide with the Paris Peace Conference. The Pan-African Congress was part of the transatlantic movement to represent the political and economic interests of blacks in Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the Americas. (Du Bois was also the main organizer of the Pan-African Congresses in 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945.) In 1920 Du Bois published Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, which blended multiple literary types, including biographical essays, sketches, fiction, and lyrical poems. The author stressed the kinship of all humans in the world: they were different in appearances only; they were alike in their deep souls and in their potential for unlimited development. His next work, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (1924), highlighted the many contributions African Americans made toward the formation and development of the United States. In 1934 Du Bois returned to Atlanta University, where he chaired the Sociology Department until 1944. During this period he edited the university’s quarterly, Phylon and wrote three books: Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935), a Marxist approach to the Reconstruction Era; Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (1939), a historical and sociological study of the exploitation of blacks by slave traders; and Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), an exploration of race as the central issue of the United States and of the world.

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In 1944–1948, Du Bois directed the NAACP Department of Special Research. At the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945, he represented the NAACP in San Francisco, California. His book Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, in which he strongly denounced imperialism, appeared in 1945. Two years later Du Bois’s The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History was issued. Disillusioned with the conservative social positions of the NAACP and with the slow progress of race relations in the United States, Du Bois left the organization for the last time in 1948, embracing Communism as his central ideology. Du Bois’s later writings included In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday (1952), a memoir about his arraignment and trial involving the Peace Information Center, an antinuclear organization. The organization was, in 1950, labeled an agent of a foreign government by the U.S. Department of Justice and, in 1951, Du Bois was charged with being a Soviet agent. Although acquitted, Du Bois remained under suspicion by the U.S. government. The Black Flame: A Trilogy comprised three novels embodying his gradually more radical social philosophy: The Ordeal of Mansart (1957), Mansart Builds a School (1959), and Worlds of Color (1961). In the fall of 1961, at age ninety-three, Du Bois officially joined the Communist Party U.S.A. Later that year he moved to Ghana to serve as director of the Encyclopedia Africana, a government-sponsored project. Two years later the U.S. government refused to reissue a passport for him, alleging his Communist activities as the reason; he and his wife, Shirley Graham, renounced their American citizenship and became naturalized www.abc-clio.com

citizens of Ghana. Du Bois’s health declined beginning in 1962; on August 27, 1963 he died in Accra, Ghana, at age ninety-five. Du Bois was given a state funeral at Christianborg Castle in Accra and was buried outside the Castle; the Encyclopedia Africana remained unfinished at his death. In his lifetime, Du Bois regularly contributed essays to many periodicals, including the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Amsterdam News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His experimental creative works—such as the short story “The Coming of John” and the poem The Song of the Smoke—were published in the magazines he edited: the Moon Illustrated Weekly (1905) and the Horizon (1907–1910). The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its Final Century came out posthumously in 1968, and The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois was published in three volumes in 1976. Du Bois received many honors and awards. In addition to the International Lenin Peace Prize awarded by the Soviet Union, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, was made Knight Commander of the Liberian Humane Order of African Redemption, and had the rank of minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary conferred upon him by President Calvin Coolidge. Du Bois was the first African American to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and he served as a lifetime member and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. John J. Han

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See also: Crisis, The; Ghana; N’Krumah, Kwame; Niagara Movement; Pan-Africanism

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DUTCH EMPIRE References Byerman, Keith E. Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Horne, Gerald. Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois— Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: H. Holt, 1993. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. New York: H. Holt, 2000. Marable, Manning. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Radical Democrat. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Moore, Jack B. W. E. B. Du Bois. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Rampersad, Arnold. The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Reed, Adolph L., Jr. W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Rudwick, Elliott M. W. E. B. Du Bois: Propagandist of the Negro Protest. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968. Smith, Shawn Michelle. Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

DUTCH EMPIRE The Dutch Empire spanned the globe and included New Netherlands, the Dutch Caribbean islands (currently the Dutch “overseas countries” of the Netherlands Antilles comprised of Curaçao, Bonaire, Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Maarten, and Aruba), Dutch Brazil and Suriname, the Dutch East Indies, Cape Coast in southern Africa, and parts of West Africa. Beginning in the seventeenth century, much of the Dutch colonial world was founded and governed under the monopolies of the Dutch East India Company in the Cape of Good Hope www.abc-clio.com

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and the Pacific and the Dutch West India Company in the Americas and West Africa. Although acting on behalf of the Dutch government, these two companies exerted enormous influence over their colonial possessions. The history of the Dutch Empire is marked by its immersion in trade interests and competition with its Portuguese, Spanish, English, and other European colonial rivals over land, labor, resources, and power.

The Dutch Empire in Africa and the Americas The Dutch Empire’s links between Africa and the Americas consisted of varied historical, economic, political, and cultural connections. The Dutch presence on Cape Coast (in southern Africa) and the slave castles of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and other parts of West Africa was evident from the sixteenth century. One of the enduring memories of the brutalities of the transatlantic slave trade rests in the ruins of the once Dutch-held Elmina slave castle on the Gold Coast. The Dutch colony of Cape Colony (at the Cape of Good Hope) was initially established in 1652 as a transshipment point en route to Asia and soon became of vital importance because of the growing Dutch trade in the East Indies. Although Cape Coast eventually fell into the hands of the British, some historians note that the introduction of slavery into the multinational Cape Colony was the first time a sizable black population was brought into the Dutch consciousness. New Netherlands (later New York), the Dutch North American colony, originally came into existence because the Englishman Henry Hudson stumbled into New York Bay in 1609 while seeking a route to Asia for the

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Dutch East India Company. The West India Company purchased the island of Manhattan (New Amsterdam, within New Netherlands) from Native Americans for 60 guilders in 1626. The Dutch Caribbean islands of Curaçao and St. Eustatius initially were centers of legal and illegal trade and commerce that were used as transshipment points for African slaves to Dutch Brazil and elsewhere. Peter Stuyvesant departed from his garrison on Curaçao to become the governor of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1647. English naval superiority in the Americas resulted in the Breda Treaty of 1667, which formally granted the English possession of New Netherlands. In exchange, the Dutch took the colony of The Netherlands was among the first foreign powers to recognize the United States when it saluted the U.S. flag on St. Eustatius in 1776.

The Dutch Empire and the Transatlantic Slave Trade The initial involvement of the Dutch in the slave trade in the late sixteenth century was unlawful under the Dutch legal norms of the day. Christian religious and secular humanist ideas prevalent in the Netherlands during this period initially made slavery an disfavored practice, but this changed over the years with increased competition amongthe European powers for economic, political, and military dominance. Although the initial activities of the Dutch were illicit because they did not have the asiento, or license, of the Spanish monarchy that allowed shipment of African slaves to the Americas, illegal Dutch involvement in the slave trade did not cease. When the supply of indigenous labor in the Americas proved inadequate, the West India Company www.abc-clio.com

solved its labor problems there with the importation of African slaves. Soon the company began to challenge Portuguese as well as Danish, Swedish, and English competitors on the West African coast for slaves. In 1637 Johan Maurits, the West India Company’s governor in Dutch Brazil, captured Elmina, the Portuguese’s slave castle, on the Gold Coast, and the Dutch capture of Portuguese settlements in presentday Angola and other areas of Africa soon ensued. The Dutch trading colonies stretched along some 200 miles of West African coastline and were known as Dutch Establishments on the Guinea Coast. The English ultimately ousted the Dutch from this area in 1872. Major Dutch involvement in the slave trade began in the 1630s. The current Dutch Antillean islands of Curaçao and, later, St. Eustatius, became major slave depots for the entire Caribbean and the Americas. Most African captives in the Dutch slave trade originated from the Guinea Coast and the Bantu-speaking west-central coast of Africa and were bound for the main Dutch markets in Brazil and the Dutch Antilles. Although the Dutch lost control of their possessions in Brazil to the Portuguese in 1661, the Dutch competition with the Portuguese over sugar production had before that resulted in the West India Company’s control over parts of Brazil and the mass importation of African slave labor for a period of time. The Dutch soon were also able to supply the Spanish and French with slaves for their colonies and in 1675 were able to obtain the asiento from Spain, although by this point it was largely unnecessary due to Spain’s growing inability to control the flow of slaves into its empire. Although the Netherlands Antilles (then

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including Aruba) came under Dutch influence when placed under the direct authority of the West India Company in 1634, Dutch control of Suriname, as previously noted, was established with the Breda Treaty of 1667. Suriname would become the only real plantation economy under Dutch rule, with Curaçao as a main transshipment point for African slaves. Suriname and the Antilles, with the exception of Aruba, became actively involved in the slave trade. The Dutch are responsible for the transshipment of some 500,000 Africans to the Americas, approximately 5 percent of the total Atlantic slave trade. The Dutch slave trade waned and had virtually ended by 1780 because of English and French competition and lack of profitability. The final abolition of slavery was not enacted until the Emancipation of 1863, many years after abolition by Britain (1834) and France (1848) because of controversy over the compensation to be paid to former slave owners.

Dutch Colonial Administration in the Dutch Caribbean After the Napoleonic Wars ended, the previous Republic of the Unified Netherlands was succeeded in 1815 by a Dutch kingdom, with the former republic’s colonial possessions of Suriname and the Antilles in the Caribbean. Colonial rule came under the direct control of the first king, Willem I, who tried to make improvements over the previous Dutch colonial authority in the Caribbean, the West India Company. King Willem initiated a division of Dutch Caribbean colonial authority in which the Caribbean possessions were split into three divisions—Suriname, Curaçao, and the latter’s dependencies—but this did not www.abc-clio.com

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prove satisfactory, so in 1828 the Dutch colonies were reestablished in the form of a single administrative unit with a Surinamebased governor. As this did not prove effective due to the geographic distance between Suriname and the Dutch islands, in 1848 the islands of the Netherlands Antilles were separated from Suriname and, with this change, Curaçao became the administrative capital with the rest of the Dutch islands as its dependencies.

The Official End of Colonial Relations The relations between the Netherlands and the Dutch Caribbean to the 1940s have been characterized as colonialism without a clear focus because the Dutch were primarily concerned with their prosperous colony of Indonesia in the Dutch East Indies. All Dutch colonial islands were ruled in a centralized manner up until 1951. As a consequence of a devastating colonial war resulting in the loss of Indonesia, its most prized colony, in 1949, and with the process of decolonization going on around the world, the Netherlands initiated a model decolonization process that would lead to greater autonomy for the Netherlands Antilles and Suriname. The Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands of 1954 represented the official end of colonial relations. The charter of 1954 granted the Netherlands Antilles and Suriname the status of self-governing partners within the Dutch kingdom. Defense and foreign affairs remained the responsibility of the kingdom. These political arrangements have remained unchanged, except that Suriname achieved full independence in 1975, as a consequence of which, half of its population migrated to the Netherlands.

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A seventeenth-century map of Pernambuco, Brazil, with a vignette of a sugar plantation. In 1630, the Dutch West India Company seized Pernambuco to control the lucrative sugar district. (Library of Congress)

The Contemporary Kingdom of the Netherlands The remnants of the Dutch Empire with a legal connection to the Netherlands are Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles, which is a loose national construction of the five islands of Curaçao (the administrative capital), Bonaire, Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Maarten. The Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and the Netherlands comprise, in effect, a partnership that makes up the contemporary Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Netherlands Antilles and Aruba are Dutch overseas self-governing nations and their peoples have the right to Dutch nationality and citizenship. Defense and foreign affairs remain the kingdom’s responsibility. Although Aruba was once www.abc-clio.com

a part of the Netherlands Antilles, it obtained status aparte in 1986, which granted it independence from the Netherlands Antilles. Aruba’s scheduled full independence for 1996 was not implemented because a referendum in Aruba that year favored its remaining a part of the Dutch kingdom.

Oil in Aruba and Curaçao in the Twentieth Century Oil refineries had a significant role in the economies of Aruba and Curaçao during the twentieth century. After the end of slavery, the Dutch island of Curaçao received little attention from the Dutch, and both Aruba and Curaçao received little favor for a period of time due to their limited

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agricultural capacities. Then, however, the discovery of oil in Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, and the opening of the Panama Canal in the 1910s were the major catalysts for Aruba’s and Curaçao’s becoming economic successes. Both benefited from the establishment of oil refineries and tanker harbor installations. In the 1920s the Lago Oil Company (Esso/Exxon) and Isla Oil Company (Royal Dutch Shell) began to refine Venezuelan oil and ship it from Aruba and Curaçao to world markets. Aruba’s and Curaçao’s deep harbors, unlike the shallower harbors closer to the Venezuelan oil fields, were conducive to receiving large oil tankers. Additionally, the oil companies were concerned about the impact of the instability of several successive Venezuelan governments on the regional oil industry. This prompted the location of the oil refineries on the comparatively stable Dutch islands, where they were protected by the Dutch law and military. Aruba and Curaçao soon became areas of vital strategic importance. By the 1930s, they had once again become important to the Netherlands because of the wealth produced by their oil industries. Native Dutch were sent from the Netherlands to the colonies, and, by 1936, Dutch had become the only language of instruction in the schools. As the Caribbean has been characterized by labor migration since the end of slavery, many came to take advantage of this economic opportunity. Exxon and Shell actively recruited foreign labor, including Surinamese, Colombians, Venezuelans, and persons from the Dutch and British Windward Islands, as well as Portuguese and native Dutch from the Netherlands. During World War II, Lago became a primary source for fuel and eventually www.abc-clio.com

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the largest oil refinery in the world. Aruba and Curaçao’s close proximity to Venezuelan oil and their connection to the Netherlands produced prosperity and economic emancipation. The charter of 1954 coincided with the decline in the 1950s of the oil industry and the end of oil-sector expansion, which resulted in increasing unemployment in both Curaçao and Aruba. The majority black population of Curaçao regarded its racially segregated society and the government of the white, Protestant–led Democratic Party as a semi-dictatorship. This resulted in a revolt on May 30, 1969, in which the Netherlands intervened militarily under the terms of the charter. Although some view this as a labor revolt, others see it as a revolt against racism and oppression that resulted in Curaçao’s having a black mayor and governor. Automation of the refineries and reduced employment opportunities initiated some migration from Curaçao and Aruba; then, the closing in 1985 of the oil refineries prompted a massive outmigration to the Netherlands. Subsequently, tourism was developed as a principal industry on many of the Dutch islands. In 2002 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands made an unprecedented expression of deep regret and sorrow for the Antillean and Surinamese victims of the transatlantic slave trade at her commemoration of a national slavery monument in Oosterpark, Amsterdam. The irony is that, since authorities feared possible civil unrest or violence in the presence of the queen, only a select few people were allowed to participate in this historic event. Michael Orlando Sharpe See also: Caribbean Community and Common Market; Caribbean Literature; Colonialism; Oil; Slavery (History)

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390 DUTTY, BOUKMAN References “Dit is Onze Bevrijdingsdag.” Algemeen Dagblad (Caribbean ed., Willemstad, Curaçao), July 2, 2002. Baker, Randall, ed. Public Administration in Small and Island States.West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1992. Blakely, Allison. Blacks in the Dutch World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. Koulen, Ingrid, and Gert Oostindie. The Netherlands Antilles and Aruba: A Research Guide. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris Publications Holland, 1987. Oostindie, Gert, and Inge Klinkers. Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch Policies in a Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003. Postma, Johannes Menne. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Sizoo, Koen. The Netherlands and the United States: A Story of Old Friends. Translated by Liz Berkhof. The Hague: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1997. Van Hulst, Hans. “A Continuing Construction of Crisis: Antilleans, Especially Curacaoans, in the Netherlands.” In Immigrant Integration: The Dutch Case, edited by Hans Vermeulen and Rinus Penninx. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2000.

DUTTY, BOUKMAN (?–1791) Boukman Dutty, a Haitian slave, is bestknown for taking part in the events that sparked the Haitian War of Independence (1791–1804). Boukman, a Voodoo priest born in Jamaica, lived in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) when the island was still a colony of France. In August 1791 Boukman took part in a Voodoo ceremony held at Bois Caïman (Alligator Wood) in northern Haiti. Aside from Boukman, participants included fellow slaves Georges Biassou, Jeannot Billet, Jean-François Papillon, and possibly Toussaint Bréda Louverture. Cécile Fatiman, a mambo (female Voodoo priest) www.abc-clio.com

and mulatto slave, supposedly slit the throat of a black pig and shared the warm blood with the other slaves. Boukman made everyone vow that they would fight against the white slave owners, exact vengeance for slavery, and accept Boukman’s leadership. A tropical storm then broke out, and the participants dispersed. Haitians usually relate the Bois Caïman ceremony as a historical event that started their war of independence, but modern scholarship suggests that details about the episode might owe more to myth than to reality. There probably was not one, but two slave gatherings, one held at the Normand de Mézy plantation in Morne Rouge on August 14, which the French uncovered by torturing slave participants, and another one in Bois Caïman held a week later, about which very little is known. According to Léon-François Hoffmann’s Haitian Fiction Revisited (2000), details about the second meeting were invented by Antoine Dalmas in his Histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue (1793) in order to portray the slave gathering as a bloody, satanic assembly. This story was accepted unquestioningly by later historians. Some historians, with limited evidence, also argue that Boukman might have been a Muslim, not a Voodoo priest. Following the Bois-Caïman ceremony, the slave revolt started on August 21, when most plantations surrounding Cap Français (present-day Cap Haïtien) were burnt and a thousand white Frenchmen killed. During the ensuing fighting, the French managed to capture Boukman, who was beheaded at Cap Français in November 1791. (The body was burned and the head placed on a pike.) Philippe R. Girard

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References Dalmas, Antoine. Histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue, depuis le commencement des troubles, jusqu’à la prise de Jérémie et du Môle St. Nicolas par les Anglais. 2 vols. Paris: Mame Frères, 1814. Hoffmann, Léon-François. Haitian Fiction Revisited. Pueblo, CO: Passeggiata Press, 2000. James, C. L. R. Black Jacobins: Toussaint l’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Random House, 1963.

DUVALIER, FRANÇOIS (1907–1971) François Duvalier, nicknamed “Papa Doc” because he first served as a doctor, was dictator of Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971. Duvalier was born on April 14, 1907, to a middle-class family in Port-au-Prince. His father, Duval Duvalier, was a teacher, justice of the peace, and journalist; his mother, Uritia Abraham, worked in a bakery. He attended the Lycée Pétion and then studied medicine in Haiti and at the University of Michigan. He served as assistant to the U.S. Army medical mission that worked to eliminate yaws from 1943 to 1946, then as director-general of the national public health service and as minister of health and labor under President Dumarsais Estimé. Parallel to his medical career, Duvalier displayed growing interest in ethnology, Haitian culture, and Voodoo in particular. This reflected his and other black Haitian intellectuals’ anger at the U.S. occupation of their country (1915–1934), which grew into noirisme (from the French noir, or black), a political and intellectual movement emphasizing racial pride, Haiti’s African roots, and nationalism. During the 1930s he published articles on the question in the newspaper Action Nationale under www.abc-clio.com

As the president of Haiti for 14 years, François Duvalier stayed in power longer than any other Haitian president in history. He was an avid supporter of black nationalism and voodoo. (Hulton Archive/ Getty Images)

the pen name Aberrahman. In 1938 he founded the noiriste review, Les griots, with ethnologist Jean Price-Mars and Professor Lorimer Denis. Duvalier became politically active as well. In 1950 he denounced Paul Magloire’s coup d’état and was forced into internal exile as a country doctor for the next few years. When Magloire’s fall resulted in growing political instability—there were five separate governments in 1956–1957 alone—Duvalier came back into the public limelight. With the army’s support, he was elected president of Haiti on September 22, 1957 and was inaugurated a month later. The 1957 election, even though it was marked by various irregularities, was one of

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the most democratic in Haitian history, substantiating the claim that Duvalier enjoyed significant popular support during the early period of his tenure in office. His noiriste agenda had much to do with it, and Duvalier proceeded to name fellow black Haitians to prominent government jobs where mulattos had previously been overrepresented. To symbolize the black underclass’s new role, Duvalier changed the national flag’s colors from blue and red to black and red in 1964. Despite occasional protests over particularly gruesome murders, the United States supported Duvalier’s government for fear that his departure might spark a Communist takeover. Although staunchly nationalistic in theory, Duvalier welcomed U.S. support; a marine training mission was sent to Haiti in 1959, and Duvalier repeatedly offered to sell the country’s best natural port, Mole St. Nicolas, to the U.S. Navy. During his first few years in office, Duvalier encountered determined opposition to his rule. Aerial bombing runs and terrorist attacks regularly spread panic in Haiti. In July 1958 a filibustering expedition led by three Haitian exiles and five U.S. adventurers temporarily took over the capital’s main army barracks. When Duvalier suffered a crippling heart attack on May 24, 1959, many surmised, wrongly as it turned out, that he would lose his grip on power. Cuban-trained Communists landed their own unsuccessful operation in August 1959. It took two months for the Haitian army to repulse a force of thirteen expatriates that landed near Jérémie in August 1964. Always dressed in a conservative black suit and wearing bookish, thick-rimmed glasses, Duvalier was initially perceived as a weak, soft-spoken, timid country doctor. He emerged, however, as a resilient dictator www.abc-clio.com

who ruled Haiti with an iron hand. Elected for a nonrenewable six-year term in 1957, he had himself reelected in a fraudulent 1961 election, then elected president-forlife in an equally fraudulent 1964 plebiscite. (His regime was the longest-lasting in Haiti at that point.) Political repression increased following the succession of coup attempts in 1957–1959. Bypassing the Haitian army, Duvalier expanded his private security detail into a monstrous police force, nicknamed Tontons Macoutes after the bogeymen of the Voodoo pantheon. These henchmen, who eventually elbowed out the Haitian army as the main enforcing arm of the government, enjoyed complete immunity as they arrested, tortured, and summarily executed Duvalier’s opponents. One of the torture chambers was located next to Duvalier’s private apartments, allowing him to oversee the proceedings through a hole pierced in one of the apartment’s walls. Madame Max Adolphe, a “fillette Lalo” (female Macoute leader), made a gruesome reputation for herself as she designed inventive sexual tortures in the regime’s main prison, Fort Dimanche. An avid student of Voodoo and most likely a houngan (Voodoo priest) himself, Duvalier was rumored to hold supernatural powers and to rely on the regime’s magical number, 22. Always clad in black, he reminded Haitians of Baron Samedi, the Voodoo god (loa) in charge of guarding graves. Political repression from 1957 onward sparked several waves of Haitian emigration. In the subsequent decades, until the end of Duvalier’s regime in 1971, an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Haiti’s skilled citizens fled into exile to escape repression. As the regime focused on political control

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at the expense of economic development, the economy’s downward spiral accelerated. Duvalier died on April 21, 1971. Married on December 27, 1939, to Simone Ovide Faine, Duvalier had four children: Marie-Denise, Simone, Nicole, and JeanClaude. Jean-Claude became dictator of Haiti upon his father’s death and ruled until he was forced into exile in February 1986. Philippe R. Girard See also: Duvalier, Jean-Claude; Haiti; Noirisme; Voodoo References Abbott, Elizabeth. Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy. 1988. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Diederich, Bernard, and Al Burt. Papa Doc: Haiti and its Dictator. 1969. Reprint, Maplewood, NJ: Waterfront Press, 1991.

DUVALIER, JEAN-CLAUDE (1951–) Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed “Bébé Doc” after his father, “Papa Doc,” ruled as dictator of Haiti from 1971 to 1986. Duvalier was born on July 3, 1951, of dictator François Duvalier and Simone Ovide Faine. On January 22, 1971, sensing that his health was rapidly deteriorating, an aging François Duvalier announced that his son would replace him upon his death. (François Duvalier had been in power since October 1957.) The decision was ratified unanimously in a sham plebiscite, and Jean-Claude became president-for-life of Haiti when his father passed away on April 21, 1971. When Jean-Claude Duvalier was inaugurated, many observers surmised that his tenure in office would be short—his forceful sister, Marie-Denise, seemed better equipped for the task. Duvalier had www.abc-clio.com

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inherited little of his father’s extreme cruelty and keen appetite for power. Young, overweight, round-faced, he seemed living proof that his popular nickname, Bébé (baby), was well suited. He boasted that he fell asleep every night with his textbooks, but the renowned professors whom François Duvalier had hired as private tutors for his son rectified such claims: Jean-Claude had little taste for learning and literally slept through his classes. His father had been an avid student of Haitian folklore and Voodoo. Cars, motorcycles, and women monopolized Jean-Claude’s attention throughout his presidency. Despite his personal shortcomings, Jean-Claude remained in power even longer than his father had. The police apparatus he inherited from his father, the Tontons Macoutes, remained in place, and various attempts to overthrow Jean-Claude ended in failure. A force of thirty-nine men led by exile Bernard Sansaricq failed to gain a foothold on the Haitian mainland during a January 1981 invasion; eight survivors isolated on the island of La Tortue were rounded up and executed. By slightly lessening the political repression prevalent in his father’s days, JeanClaude was able to secure increased foreign aid, totaling $1 billion during the 1970s, much of it from the United States. Little economic growth ensued, however, for much of the aid was spirited away by the regime’s top henchmen. By the late 1970s, emigration, mostly involving the skilled middle-class during François’s rule, spread to the poorest segments of the population; from 1972 to 1981, the favorite destinations of the “boat people,” as they were called, were Florida, Québec, the Bahamas, and the French West Indies. From May 1982 on, Haiti’s pigs, central to Haiti’s

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peasant economy, were slaughtered for fear that an epidemic of African swine fever might spread to pigs in the United States. Land erosion worsened as peasants cut down trees to sell as charcoal. An AIDS scare in the 1980s dramatically reduced tourism income. Foreign aid, representing 70 percent of the state’s budget, finally declined in the 1980s because of corruption and human rights concerns. A March 1983 visit by Pope John Paul II backfired when he declared that “things have got to change here.” Initially seen as a congenial, compassionate alternative to François Duvalier, faithful to the father’s popular slogans of nationalism and racial pride, Jean-Claude saw his popularity decline as the economic situation worsened and the regime displayed little sympathy for the population’s woes. In 1982 Jean-Claude married Michèle Bennett in a sumptuous wedding ceremony. (Michèle, the mother of two children from a previous marriage, delivered Jean-Claude’s son Nicolas on January 31, 1983.) Duvalier admirers complained that marrying a wealthy mulatto was a betrayal of the official black nationalist agenda. Since she was the daughter of one of François’s enemies, Ernst Bennett, observers concluded that the regime had lost its iron touch. Most importantly, Michèle’s taste for furs, diamonds, and million-dollar shopping sprees in Miami,

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Paris, and New York led her and her relatives to increase dramatically the size of the embezzlement schemes that had always characterized the regime. (Michèle’s brother also dabbled in the cocaine trade.) The vast gap between impoverished peasants and slum dwellers and a spoiled elite that flaunted its wealth became offensive. Strikes multiplied, while critics such as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a popular priest, delivered disparaging sermons. The U.S. government, long supportive, curtailed aid, and Secretary of State George Shultz announced that a switch to a more democratic regime would be welcome. Bowing to internal and international pressures, Duvalier fled into exile on February 7, 1986. He first lived on the French Riviera. After his savings ran out and his wife divorced him, he moved to a less expensive abode in the Paris suburbs. There were rumors in the late 1990s that he was planning a return to power in a context of continued political instability in Haiti, but they proved unfounded. Philippe R. Girard

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See also: Aristide, Jean-Bertrand; Duvalier, François; Haiti References Abbott, Elizabeth. Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy. 1988. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Wilentz, Amy. The Rainy Season: Haiti since Duvalier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

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Africa and the Americas

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Africa and the Americas Culture, Politics, and History A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia VOLUME II EDITED BY

Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette Melissa Fullmer Editorial Assistant

Transatlantic Relations Series Will Kaufman, Series Editor

Santa Barbara, California Denver, Colorado Oxford, England

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Copyright © 2008 by ABC-CLIO, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Africa and the Americas : culture, politics, and history : a multidisciplinary encyclopedia / edited by Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette. p. cm. — (Translatlantic relations series) 3 v. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-85109-441-7 (hard copy : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-85109-446-2 (ebook : alk. paper) 1. America—Relations— Africa—Encyclopedias. 2. Africa—Relations—America—Encyclopedias. DT31.A43 2008 303.48'2706—dc22 2007035154 12

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Production Editor: Kristine Swift Production Manager: Don Schmidt Media Editor: Jason Kniser Media Production Coordinator: Ellen Brenna Dougherty Media Resources Manager: Caroline Price File Management Coordinator: Paula Gerard ABC-CLIO, Inc. 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an ebook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. This book is printed on acid-free paper ∞ Manufactured in the United States of America

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CONTENTS Series Editor’s Preface, xiii Editor’s Preface, xv Topic Finder, xxi Chronology of Africa and the Americas, xxix Introductory Essays, 1 Demography, Diaspora, and International Relations, 3 Culture and Religion, 11 Economics and Trade, 19 Arts, Literature, and Sport, 29 American Revolution, 96 Amistad Case, The, 99 Ananse, 100 Ancestor Worship, 102 Angola, 104 Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela, 106 Annan, Kofi, 107 Anthropology, 108 Antigua and Barbuda, 111 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 112 Apprenticeship (British Empire), 113 Architecture, 116 Architecture, Plantation, 118 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 122 Arms Trafficking, 124 Art, African, 126 Atlantic World, 132 Attucks, Crispus, 137 Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de, 137 Aviation, 139

Abolitionism, 39 Abolitionism, British, 43 Achebe, Chinua, 46 Africa, North, 48 Africa, Precolonial, 50 Africa, West, 57 African Institution, The, 64 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 65 African Squadrons, 68 African Union, 69 Afrocentrism, 71 Afrofuturism, 72 Agriculture, 73 Agriculture, Sustainable, 77 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 79 Akan, 81 Akram, Wali, 82 Algeria, 82 ‘Ali Pasha, Muhammad, 83 Ali, Muhammad, 84 Ali, Noble Drew, 86 America, Central, 87 American Colonization Society, 93 American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, 95 American Missionary Association, 96

Bahamas, 141 Bakhita, Josephine, Saint, 144 Baraka, Amiri, 146 Barbados, 149 v

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vi CONTENTS Barnet, Miguel, 150 Barotseland, 151 Bauzá, Mario, 152 BBC Caribbean Service and Caribbean Voices, 153 Benin, Republic of, 155 Bennett, Louise, 157 Berlin West Africa Conference, 157 Bermuda, 159 Beyala, Calixthe, 160 Biafra, 161 Biotechnology, 162 Birchtown (Birch Town), 165 Black Arts Movement, 165 Black Athena, 167 Black Classical Singers, 169 Black Panther Party, 171 Black Power Movement, 175 Black Star Line, 177 Blucke or Bleucke or Bluck, Stephen, 177 Blyden, Edward Wilmot, 179 Boatbuilding, 181 Bolivia, 182 Brand, Dionne, 185 Brathwaite, Kamau, 186 Brazil, 188 Brazilian Carnival, 191 Brazilian Culture, 193 Brindis de Salas, Virginia, 195 Britain: People of African Origin and Descent, 196 British Empire, 200 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 205 Brouwer, Leo, 206 Brown, William, 207 Brussels Act, 208 Bunche, Ralph, 209 Burial Ground (New York City), African, 210 Burial, African Practices in the Americas, 211 Burkina Faso, 214 Burundi, 216 Cabral, Amilcar, 219 Cabral, Cristina Rodríguez, 220 Calabar, 221 Calypso, 223 Cameroon, 225 Canada (Africadian Culture), 228 Candomblé, 231 Cape Coast Castle, 231 www.abc-clio.com

Cape Verde, 233 Caribbean Artists Movement, 234 Caribbean Community and Common Market, 235 Caribbean Literature, 237 Carnival, Latin American, 241 Carver, George Washington, 242 Casas, Bartolomé De Las, 243 Castas Paintings, 244 Castro Ruz, Fidel, 246 Catholicism, 249 Ceddo, 251 Central African Republic, 251 Central Intelligence Agency, 253 Césaire, Aimé, 255 Chad, 257 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 258 Chikaba (Venerable Therese Juliana of Saint Dominic), 259 Chile, 261 Christianity (African American), 262 Christophe, Henri, 263 Cities, 264 Civil Rights Movement, 267 Civil War, American, 272 Clemente Walker, Roberto, 274 Cliff, Michelle, 276 Code Noir, 277 Coetzee, John Maxwell, 279 Coffee, 282 Cold War, 282 Colombia, 286 Colonial Armies in Africa, 290 Colonialism, 293 Colored Farmers National Alliance, 300 Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 300 Columbian Exchange, 301 Columbus, Christopher, 303 Comoros, 304 Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, 305 Condé, Maryse, 306 Congo (Brazzaville), 308 Congo (Kinshasa), Democratic Republic of the, 309 Congolese Independence, 312 Côte d’Ivoire, 313 Creole Revolt, 314 Creole/Criollo, 315 Crisis, The, 316 Cruz, Celia, 317

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CONTENTS Cuba, 318 Cuban Music, African Influence in, 321 Cuban Ritual Music, African Influence in, 325 Cudjoe, 328 Cuffe, Captain Paul, 329 Cush Kingdom, 330 Dabydeen, David, 331 Dadié, Bernard Binlin, 332 D’Aguiar, Fred, 333 Dan Fodio, Uthman, 334 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 335 Danish Empire, 336 Danticat, Edwidge, 338 Dash, Julie, 340 Debt Cancellation, 340 Decolonization, African, 343 Delany, Martin Robinson, 345 Democracy, African, 347 Democracy, Latin American, 351 Denver African Expedition, 356 Dessalines, Jean Jacques, 357 Diamonds, 358 Diaspora, 360 Diaspora, Demography of, 362 Dinka, 366 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 366 Djebar, Assia, 368 Djibouti, 370 Doe, Samuel K., 371 Dominican Republic, The, 372 Dongala, Emmanuel Boundzeki, 375 Douglass, Frederick, 376 Drama, African American, 378 Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), 381 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 382 Dutch Empire, 385 Dutty, Boukman, 390 Duvalier, François, 391 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 393 EBONY, 395 Ecology, 397 Economic Community of West African States, 400 Ecuador, 401 Efik, 403 Egypt, 404 Egypt, American Mercenaries in, 409 Egyptian Soldiers in Mexico, 410 www.abc-clio.com

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Ekwensi, Cyprian Odiatu Duaka, 411 Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 412 Emancipation Proclamation, 413 Emecheta, Buchi, 414 English, African American Vernacular, 415 Enlightenment Philosophy, 416 Environmentalism, 419 Equatorial Guinea, 421 Equiano, Olaudah, 423 Eritrea, 424 Ethiopia, 427 Ethnicity, 430 Evolution, Human, 434 Exodus, 436 Exploration and Explorers, Africa, 439 Falasha (Beta Israel), 443 Fanon, Frantz, 444 Farrakhan, Louis, 446 Fauset, Jessie, 447 Fédeon Rebellion, 448 Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, African, 449 Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic, 453 Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, U.S., 457 Fetu of Cape Coast, 465 Film (Africa), 466 Film (Atlantic), 468 Film (Caribbean), 470 Film (Latin America), 472 Film (North America), 475 Film (South America), 477 Five Percent Nation, 479 Flying Africans, 479 Folklore, African, 482 French Empire, 485 Fugitive Slave Law, 490 Fulani, 492 Gabon, Republic of, 493 Gabriel, 495 Gambia, The, 497 Garvey, Amy Jacques, 499 Garvey, Marcus, 500 Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 502 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Movements, Africa and African Diasporic, 503

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viii CONTENTS Genocide, 510 Georgia’s Sea Islands, 515 Ghana, 516 Ghana Empire, 522 Gilroy, Beryl Agatha, 523 Glissant, Edouard, 525 Globalization, 526 Good Neighbor Policy, 528 Goyemide, Etienne, 529 Green Revolution, 530 Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw, 532 Guillén, Nicolás, 532 Guinea, 533 Guinea Dance, 535 Guinea-Bissau, 540 Gullah, 542 Guyana, 543

Jamaica, Women’s Role in, 641 James, Cyril Lionel Robert, 645 Jazz and the Blues, 646 Jazz, African, 651 Johnson, Charles R., 652 Johnson, James Weldon, 653 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 655 Jones, Claudia, 657 Journal of Negro History, 658 Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sor, 659 Judaism, 660 Juneteenth, 663 Kanem-Bornu Empire, 665 Kaunda, Kenneth, 665 Kente Cloth, 666 Kenya, 667 Khoisan, 668 Kincaid, Jamaica, 669 King Jr., Martin Luther, 671 Kongo, 673 Kru Sailors, 674

Hair, 545 Haiti, 546 Haley, Alex, 548 Hansberry, Lorraine, 549 Harlem Renaissance, 552 Hausa (People), 554 Head, Bessie, 555 Health, Public, 556 Hip-Hop, 563 Hip-Hop, Cuban, 567 Hip-Hop, Women in, 568 Hughes, Langston, 572 Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Prevention, 573 Human Rights, 582 Humanitarian Assistance, 588 Hurston, Zora Neale, 593 Hutu, 595 Igbo, 597 Ike, Vincent Chukwuemeka, 598 Imbuga, Francis D., 599 Immigration, United States, 601 Imperial Germany, Black Entertainers in, 610 Industrialization, 613 Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, 618 International Development, 624 International Monetary Fund, 625 Ironworking, 627 Islam, African American, 628 Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 637 Jamaica, 638 www.abc-clio.com

Laing, Kojo, 677 Latin American Literature, 678 League of Coloured Peoples, 682 League of Nations, 683 Lesotho, 685 Lewis, Mary Edmonia, 686 Liberation Theology, 687 Liberia, 692 Libya, 695 Literature, African, 695 Literature, African American, 698 Locke, Alain LeRoy, 703 Long Island: African Americans and Native Peoples, 704 Lopes, Henri, 706 Lorde, Audre, 708 Lost Boys of Sudan, 709 Louverture, Toussaint Bréda, 710 Lumumba, Patrice, 713 Mad Mullah, 717 Madagascar, 717 Madhi, 719 Malawi, 719 Malcolm X, 721 Male Revolt, 723 Mali, 724 Mandela, Nelson, 726

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CONTENTS Manzano, Juan Francisco, 727 Marley, Robert Nesta, 729 Marrant, John, 731 Marshall, Paule, 732 Marson, Una, 735 Martí, José, 736 Masai, 737 Mauritania, 739 Mauritius, 740 Mays, Willie Howard, 741 McKay, Claude, 743 Médecins Sans Frontières, 745 Mercantilism, 746 MERCOSUR, 748 Mexico, 750 Mexico (Afro-Mexican Identity), 753 Microfinance, 755 Middle Passage, 758 Military Forces, 760 Miller, Samuel T., 763 Mohammad, Warith Deen, 764 Monroe Doctrine, 765 Montaigne, Michel de, 767 Monuments and Memorials, Slavery, 769 Moody, Harold, 770 Morant Bay Rebellion, 771 Morejón, Nancy, 773 Morocco, 774 Morris, Mervyn, 776 Morrison, Toni, 777 Movimento Negro Unificado, 779 Mozambique, 780 Mullen, Harryette, 782 Museums and Transatlantic Slavery, 783 Music, African, 786 Music, African Popular, 790 Mutabaruka, 796 N’Krumah, Kwame, 797 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad, 798 Namibia, 799 Nanny, 802 Nation of Islam, 803 Ndebele, 807 Négritude, 809 Negro Leagues, 811 Neocolonialism, 813 Netherlands Antilles, 815 Niagara Movement, 818 Nicaragua, 818 Niger, 822 www.abc-clio.com

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Nigeria, 822 Nigeria, Drama in, 826 Nigerian Traditional Dances, 828 Noirisme, 830 Non-Aligned Movement, 832 Notting Hill Carnival in London, 834 Nova Scotia, African American Diaspora in, 836 Nova Scotia, Black Refugees in, 837 Nwapa, Flora, 838 Obeah, 841 O’Farrill, Arturo “Chico”, 842 Ogun, 843 Oil, 844 Okigbo, Christopher, 845 Okri, Ben, 847 Organization of American States, 848 Orisha, 850 Oroonoko, 852 Ousmane, Sembene, 852 Pageant, The African American, 855 Paige, Leroy Robert, 858 Palm Oil, 859 Pan-African Conference, 861 Pan-Africanism, 862 Paraguay, 865 Peace Corps, 868 Peacekeeping and Military Interventions, 870 Pentecostalism, 875 Péralte, Charlemagne Masséna, 877 Peru, 879 Pétion, Alexandre Sabès, 881 Philip, Marlene Nourbese, 882 Phillips, Caryl, 883 Plantations and Plantation Systems, 884 Popular Music, American Influences on African, 887 Portuguese Empire, 894 Postcolonial Studies, 895 Pre-Columbian America, 898 Price-Mars, Jean, 902 Prince, Mary, 904 Puerto Rico, 906 Qaddafi, Muammar al-, 909 Quakers, 910 Quaque, Philip, 912 Quilombo, 913 ABC-CLIO

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x CONTENTS Race, History of, 915 Radio Martí, 918 Rastafari, 918 Reggae, 921 Reggae, African, 922 Religion (Africa), 924 Religion in Africa and the Americas, Demography of, 929 Reparations (Slavery and Colonialism), 932 Reproductive Health and Family Planning in Africa, U.S. Influence on, 938 Restavek, 946 Rice in the African Diaspora, 947 Robinson, Jack Roosevelt, 952 Rosas de Oquendo, Mateo, 954 Royal African Company, 955 Rwanda, 956

Socialism, 1011 Sokoto Caliphate, 1015 Somalia, 1016 Songhay (Medieval Empire), 1017 Soukous, 1020 Soulouque, Faustin, 1021 South Africa, History and Politics, 1023 Soyinka, Wole, 1026 Spanish Empire, 1027 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1032 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1033 Sudan (Darfur Region), 1034 Sundiata, 1036 Sundiata Keita and Sundiata Epic, 1037 Suriname, 1038 Swaziland, 1039

Sadat, Muhammad Anwar el-, 959 Sailors, 961 Saint Kitts and Nevis, 963 Saint Kitts and Nevis Revolt, 966 Sambo’s Grave, 967 Sanchez, Sonia, 968 Santos Arrascaeta, Beatriz, 968 São Tomé e Príncipe, 970 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 971 Schomburg, Arthur Alfonso, 972 Selassie I, Haile, 973 Selvon, Samuel Dickson, 974 Senegal, 975 Senghor, Leopold Sedar, 979 Seychelles, 980 Shabazz, Betty, 981 Shakur, Assatta, 983 Shakur, Tupac Amaru, 983 Shange, Ntozake, 984 Sharpeville Massacre, 987 Sierra Leone, 988 Sierra Leone Company, 990 Sisulu, Walter, 991 Slave Forts, 992 Slave Narratives, 994 Slave Revolts/Maronnage, 997 Slavery (Economics), 1000 Slavery (History), 1004 Smalls, Robert, 1007 Smith, Mikey, 1008 Smithsonian African Art Museum, 1009 Soccer, 1010

Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 1041 Tanzania, 1042 Taylor, Charles, 1043 Tchicaya U Tam’si, 1044 Technology Transfers, 1046 Television in Africa, American Influence on, 1049 Terrorism, 1052 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 1058 Titanic, 1059 Togo, 1060 Toomer, Jean, 1061 Trade, Fair, 1062 Trade Zones, African, 1065 Transculturation, 1066 Travel Writing, 1068 Trinidad and Tobago, 1070 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, 1072 Truth, Sojourner, 1075 Tubman, Harriet, 1076 Tunisia, 1077 Turner, Nat, 1078 Tuskegee Airmen, 1079 Tuskegee Institute, 1080 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, 1080 Tutsi, 1081 Tutu, Desmond, 1082

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CONTENTS United States Colored Troops, 1094 Universal Negro Improvement Association, The, 1095 Uruguay, 1096 Urbanization, 1100 United States Agency for International Development, 1105 Vesey, Denmark, 1107 Voice of America, 1109 Voodoo, 1109 Walcott, Derek, 1113 Walker, Alice, 1114 Warner-Vieyra, Myriam, 1114 Washington, Booker T., 1115 Wedderburn, Robert, 1117 Weimar Republic, Black Entertainers in the, 1118 West Indies Federation, 1121 West, Cornel, 1123

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Wheatley, Phillis, 1124 Wideman, John Edgar, 1126 Wilberforce, William, 1127 Williams, Francis, 1129 Williams, Henry Sylvester, 1130 Williams, James, 1132 Williams, John A., 1134 Wolof, 1136 World Antislavery Conventions, 1840, 1843, 1137 World Bank, 1139 World Health Organization, 1141 World Trade Organization, 1142 World War I, 1143 World War II, 1146 Wright, Richard, 1150 Yoruba, 1155 Zambia, 1157 Zimbabwe, 1158

Index, 1163 About the Editors, 1215

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E EBONY The African American magazine EBONY celebrated its sixtieth anniversary in November 2005. Its success story began shortly after World War II, when thousands of black GIs returned from their military service and the fight for democracy. Once again they had to come to terms with the harsh reality of segregation; racial inequality; cultural misrepresentation; and, overall, with the denial of their democratic rights in their home country. John H. Johnson, a twenty-seven-year-old black businessman from Chicago, set out to counterbalance journalistic misrepresentations of African Americans by the largely white-controlled media industry. In the autumn of 1945, he launched EBONY magazine, whose credo included providing positive black images by highlighting political, social, economic, and cultural achievements of African Americans. The magazine presents “model” African Americans who have not only triumphed over poverty, but who have also overcome racial and ideological barriers. Johnson’s journalistic vision of reporting on success, however, tends to ignore radical dissenters in black communities and fails to address critically aspects of violence, especially surrounding the Black Power Movement, to overcome racial barriers.

EBONY writers cover a broad spectrum of topics ranging from the civil rights movement, religion, and politics to sports, music, television, films, fashion, and the arts. The articles are designed to generate a

Former EBONY magazine model Joanna LaShane displays an old cover of EBONY. The EBONY covers are part of a new exhibition at the African American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey featuring 500 covers of national black magazines dating back to the 1940s. (Corbis)

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new sense of self-respect among readers. Reports on the freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s culminated in the magazine’s coverage of the famous March on Washington on August 28, 1963, when Johnson activated his entire editorial force of writers and photographers to document the historic event. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s prayerlike proclamation, “I Have a Dream,” also represented the dream of EBONY. Johnson formulated a metaphoric declaration of independence for African American media, calling for what Lerone Bennet called the “EBONY revolution.” This led the magazine to become a close observer of the freedom movement in Africa. Together with its sister magazine, Jet, EBONY started to cover regularly African independence ceremonies, starting with Ghana in 1957. It remained for a long time the only major American magazine to report extensively on the progress of African struggles for independence. Among the many talented writers were executive editors Herbert Nipson and later Era Bell Thompson and historian Lerone Bennett Jr. The latter produced an impressive series of influential articles on African American cultural history. In addition, Bennett published more than twenty books, among them seven editions of Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (2003), which appeared originally in 1962; The Shaping of Black America (1975); Pioneers in Protest (1968); and Confrontation: Black or White (1965). Many of his books evolved from articles he contributed to EBONY. A special transatlantic connection was forged by Hans J. Massaquoi, whose career path from staff writer to managing editor built on his tricultural background. Born in Hamburg, Germany, the son of Al-Haj Massaquoi, a Liberian businessman who www.abc-clio.com

served as first consul general to Germany, and Bertha Baetz, a German domestic worker and nurse, Hans Massaquoi emigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s. Massaquoi’s prime concerns focused on aspects of ethnic relations, subtle forms of exploitation, racism, sociopolitical inequality, and the promise of democracy inside and outside the United States. He interviewed leading politicians around the world and wrote against racial stereotypes in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. His diverse assignments included interviews with presidents of Nigeria, Botswana, Liberia, and Namibia; civil rights activists like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Malcolm X; and icons of American culture such as singer Diana Ross, actor Richard Roundtree, writer Alex Haley, and boxer Muhammad Ali. His experience as a black child within a basically all-white environment and with the racism of the Nazis fostered a lifelong concern for ethnic minorities all over the world. In Liberia Massaquoi encountered colonial racism under French and British rule, and he confronted what he called “the ugly side of America.” His transcultural perspective on issues regarding human rights became an important source of inspiration for other colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to its staff writers, EBONY has provided a platform for internationally renowned poets and novelists such as Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Alex Haley. Other leading figures in African American culture who have written for EBONY include U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Complementing the

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informative texts, visual representation plays a crucial role in the magazine’s aesthetic design. For his photo of the grieving Coretta Scott King and her youngest daughter, Bernice, at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral, EBONY photographer Moneta Sleet Jr. was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Over its six decades of existence, EBONY’s circulation has risen from 25,000 to 1.7 million, reaching now possibly more than 12.5 million readers. At the beginning of the new millennium, the magazine continues to exert a strong influence both within the American media market and upon the ongoing struggle for equality and ethnic tolerance. Frank Mehring References Bennett, Lerone, Jr. “The Ebony Revolution: Magazine Sparked Major Changes in Perceptions and Practice.” EBONY, November 2005. Massaquoi, Hans J. “A Journey into the Past, Parts I and II.” EBONY, February and March, 1966. Sleet, Moneta, Jr. Special Moments in African American History 1955–1996: The Photographs of Moneta Sleet, Jr. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1998. Thompson, Era Bell, and Herbert Nipson, eds. White on Black: The Views of Twenty-Two White Americans on the Negro. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1963. Vann, Kimberly R. Black Music in EBONY: An Annotated Guide to the Articles on Music in EBONY Magazine, 1945–1985. Chicago: Center for Black Music Research, 1990.

ECOLOGY Ecology here deals with the impact of plants, animals, and disease on Africa and the Americas as a consequence of human migration. In their migrations, humans have carried plants, animals, and, unintentionally, microbes and parasites with them, www.abc-clio.com

altering the biotas of the lands they settled. From their home in Africa, humans radiated throughout the world during the last 100,000 years. Perhaps 12,000 years ago they crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America. As they settled North America they helped extirpate the mammoth, mastodon, and other large animals, including the horse. Humans hunted these animals, though this activity alone may not have brought these mammals to extinction. Rather, the pathogens and parasites that piggybacked on humans as they trod North America may have helped kill off the great mammals. Humans may also have altered the ecology of North America, setting fire to grasslands, for example, in ways that limited the resources available for the mammoth and its ilk. If humans hastened the extinction of the horse in the Americas, they encouraged its spread in Africa, taking it from Morocco across the Sahara to West Africa around 3000 BCE and thereafter throughout subSaharan Africa. At about the same time the people of southern Mexico set corn on its long trek north. A tropical plant, corn took millennia to adapt to the cooler climes northward, and only around 1000 CE did humans transplant it in the lands around the Great Lakes. During these millennia humans in Africa acquired crops along the fledgling trade routes of Asia, adapting yams and taro by way of Madagascar around 3000 BCE and the banana in the first millennium CE. The trade routes between Africa and Asia carried not merely plants but pathogens. Around 165 CE, smallpox and measles made their way via human-to-human transmission from Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) to North Africa. Plague was another peripatetic disease. Byzantine historian

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Procopius traced the plague of 534 CE to central Africa. Between the sixth and eight centuries North Africa suffered repeated outbreaks of the disease. From its haunts in North Africa, plague tagged along with merchants to Central Asia, from where it doubled back to North Africa in the fourteenth century, engulfing the region in the Black Death. As humans carried the pathogens of death along the trade routes, they also brought sugar, rice, cotton, and citrus from India to Egypt between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Sugar cane, rice, and cotton remade the biotas of the Americas after 1492, the year Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean on his way to India. He never found passage to Asia but instead did something much greater. Columbus was part of a band of explorers who turned the Atlantic Ocean into a trade route between Africa and Europe on one side of the Atlantic and the Americas on the other side and so interconnected the biotas of the Old and New Worlds. In 1493 Columbus brought sugar cane to the Caribbean, where Europeans replaced the indigenous plants with sugar cane monoculture. At the same time the smallpox that Europeans carried with them from the Old World depopulated the New. Desperate for labor to work the plantations amid the dying of the Amerindians, Europeans settled Africans in the New World. Europeans and Africans came to outnumber Native Americans in perhaps the starkest ecological turnabout in history. Once the dominant large mammal in the Americas, the Amerindians retreated to the fringes of European and African settlement in the Western Hemisphere. In exchange for smallpox, the Americas may have given Africa syphilis around 1498, though the

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evidence remains unclear. The syphilis that afflicted Africans may have come from intercourse with the Amerindians or it may simply have been a mutant type of yaws, an ancient disease of Africa. Whatever its origins, Africans spread syphilis throughout the African continent in the sixteenth century. From Africa came the anopheles mosquito, which carries malaria, and the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the carrier of yellow fever. In the seventeenth century the anopheles mosquito became endemic in the tropics and subtropics of North America, South America, and the Caribbean. In 1648 an outbreak of yellow fever in Havana, Cuba, signaled the Aedes aegypti mosquito’s arrival in the Americas. Like the anopheles mosquito, Aedes aegypti thrived in hot, moist areas of the Americas. Malaria and yellow fever made the marshlands uninhabitable and reduced human population. Some Africans had partial immunity to malaria because of their long contact with the disease and so, unlike Europeans and Amerindians, could inhabit the tropics and subtropics of the Americas without high mortality from malaria. The ecology of death in tropical and subtropical America favored Africans over Amerindians and Europeans. The ships that crossed the Atlantic with syphilis and malaria brought smallpox to Capetown, South Africa, in 1713, killing the indigenous Khoikhoi, who, unlike Europeans, had not been in contact with smallpox for millennia and so had no immunity to the disease. The Khoikhoi blamed the Dutch for casting spells against them, but a British merchant ship rather than Dutch magic had brought this ecological calamity to South Africa. Across the Indian Ocean came cholera, which in

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1819 killed one-tenth the population of Cairo. From Egypt, Arab pilgrims carried cholera in 1831 to Mecca, from where it returned along the trade routes to bedevil Morocco with outbreaks until 1912. As had plague, cholera took a circuitous route in spreading throughout Africa. Before then the potato had left its seclusion in the Andes Mountains. Having conquered the Inca of Peru, the Spanish in the sixteenth century carried the potato back to Spain, from where it spread throughout northern Europe. The Europeans who came to the American colonies in the eighteenth century brought the potato back across the Atlantic. As had plague and as would cholera in Africa, the potato took a circuitous route in colonizing the Americas. By then two other plants had made their way from Africa to the Americas. The English introduced rice, probably from Madagascar, around 1690 to coastal South Carolina and Georgia. As had sugar cane, rice monoculture replaced the diversity of flora in these lands and Africans replaced Amerindians, as in the Caribbean, as the most numerous large mammal. Around Charleston, South Carolina, Africans outnumbered even Europeans by the early eighteenth century. Under the direction of Europeans, Africans and cotton swept aside the native people and plants from Georgia to Texas in the nineteenth century. Europeans transplanted coffee from Africa to Central and South America; sorghum to North America, where it remained in cultivation in the Midwest until the 1970s, when soybeans, an Asian cultigen, replaced it; and the horse, extinct 10,000 years in the Americas, everywhere. The Amerindians rode the horse across the Great Plains of North America and the grasslands of

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Argentina. Free from predators in South America and reproducing in numbers that strained the capacity of humans to control it, the horse went feral throughout the American West and South America. Europeans imported cattle and sheep into the Americas, and their encroachment on the Great Plains disrupted its ecology. Cattle and sheep cropped the native grasses to the roots. Humans accompanied their livestock, massacring bison nearly to extinction after the American Civil War and transforming the Great Plains into vast tracts of rangeland. Plants also migrated from the Americas to Africa. Around 1500, Europeans brought corn to sub-Saharan Africa and, in the sixteenth century, came cassava, tobacco, peanuts, beans, and the tomato. Variants of these plants crossed the Atlantic a second time as science remade the biotas of Africa and the Americas. In the twentieth century new varieties of corn spread in North America and sub-Saharan Africa; wheat in Mexico, Canada, the American West, and North Africa; cotton throughout the Americas and Africa; and rice in North America and Africa. In the mid-twentieth century, Brazil imported the African honeybee, which hybridized with indigenous bees. Offspring from these matings have since 1950 spread throughout the Americas. In 1982 physicians reported the first case of AIDS in the United States. The disease had arisen in Africa, first among monkeys and then in humans. Its spread, the latest ecological catastrophe to befall humans, underscores how closely are intertwined the fates of Africa and the Americas. The aquaculture of transgenic salmon in Canada may mark a new era in ecology, one in which humans enrich or imperil, depending on one’s perspective, the biotas of Africa

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and the Americas with genetically modified organisms. Christopher Cumo See also: Agriculture; Columbian Exchange; Green Revolution; Rice in the African Diaspora References Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Curtin, Philip. “Disease Exchange across the Tropical Atlantic.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 15 (1993): 169–196. Mooney, Harold A., and Richard J. Hobbs, eds. Invasive Species in a Changing World. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000.

ECONOMIC COMMUNITY OF WEST AFRICAN STATES The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is a West African regional economic community, founded in 1975 and modeled on the European Economic Community. After Nigeria and Togo signed an economic agreement in 1972, Nigeria’s minister of economic development, Professor Adekeye Adebajo, proposed the creation of a regional economic community modeled after the European Economic Community. He and the Togolese trade minister, Henri Dogo, set out to promote the idea of a regional economic community for West Africa. As a result of their efforts, representatives from fifteen West African states met in Lomé, Nigeria, in February 1975 to discuss the possibility of such a venture: nine francophone states (Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, www.abc-clio.com

Niger, Senegal, and Togo), five anglophone states (The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone) and one lusophone state (Guinea-Bissau) sent representatives. As a result, ECOWAS was formally created with the signing of the Treaty of Lagos on May 28, 1975 (ratified December 1975). The lusophone state of Cape Verde joined in 1976, while Mauritania withdrew in 2002. The original goal of ECOWAS was to integrate the smaller national markets of member states into a single large regional market to attract foreign investors. This consolidation, it was believed, would lead to industrial development, increased exports, and greater economic and political stability for the region as a whole as well as for the individual member states. The member states established five protocols to promote these goals: the elimination of customs duties and all other restrictions to trade; the establishment of a common customs; the promotion of open borders among member states for the free movement of persons, labor, and capital; the standardization of agricultural, industrial, and monetary policies; and, finally, the establishment of a fund to compensate poorer members for the loss of tariff revenue. The organization faced serious challenges to regional economic integration, including an extremely diverse membership, unequal levels of development and resource allocation, and high levels of informal economic activity as well as political corruption. By 1978 most member states had invested more rhetoric than resources, resulting in Nigeria’s and Côte d’Ivoire’s subsidizing of the organization. At the time of ECOWAS’s founding, its goals focused solely upon economic development issues. Increasing military

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conflict and political instability in the region, however, led to concerns over regional security issues and resulted in two defense protocols. To facilitate military cooperation and to support the democratic rule of law in the region, ECOWAS members signed the Protocol on NonAggression in 1978 and the Protocol of Mutual Assistance and Defense in 1981. Article 4 of the latter agreement contains a unique element that essentially legitimizes the entry of ECOWAS into the internal affairs of member states. To facilitate such action, the Economic Community of West African States Cease-fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) was formed. ECOWAS’s goals were expanded again in the early 1990s when the original treaty was revised, adding increased political cooperation as an objective. In 1999 the security protocols were bolstered when the heads of ECOWAS states signed a further protocol establishing a Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peacekeeping, and Security. Heather Thiessen-Reily See also: Ghana; Liberia; Nigeria; Sierra Leone

References Adebajo, Adekeye. Building Peace in West Africa: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and GuineaBissau. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Laverge, Real, ed. Regional Integration and Cooperation in West Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1997. Masson, Paul, and Catherine Pattillo. Monetary Union in West Africa (ECOWAS): Is It Desirable and How Could It Be Achieved? Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, February 1, 2004. Mohammed, Amos. The Role of the Economic Community of the West African States: ECOWAS–Conflict Management in Liberia. Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2003.

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ECUADOR Ecuador is located on the northwest coast of South America and is one of the smallest nations on that continent at less than 110,000 square miles. Historically, a substantial percentage of the population has been of African descent and the nation maintains a number of trade ties to Africa. In earlier times the country’s accepted boundaries covered an area over twice as large as the current borders. Disputes with surrounding countries, especially Peru, have been resolved in such a manner that considerable territory has been lost by Ecuador. The continental portion of the country’s terrain consists of three distinct areas: the coastal area on the west, bounded by a coastline of over 400 miles in length; two ranges of the Andes Mountains running roughly northeast to southwest with a high valley between them forming the sierra in the center; and the lowland jungle area on the east. The Galápagos Islands are also part of Ecuador. Ecuador’s major natural resources include iron, copper, and coal; agricultural exports include sugar cane, coffee, bananas, citrus fruits, and cacao. The current most valuable export is oil. Ecuador has been a member of OPEC since the 1970s. During a brief period in the mid-1900s, the country’s chief export was bananas; for nearly a century before that it was coffee. Some of Ecuador’s mountain villages have become major exporters of native crafts and music. The trade is carried on by means of villagers who move to the United States for most of the year, taking with them the products of their own areas as well as those of other Latin American countries. Others have become exporters of labor; in the late twentieth century Ecuador was one of several South American

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countries providing undocumented immigrants to New York City and other northeastern states. Ecuador’s conversion of its currency base to the U.S. dollar in January 2000, at a time of extreme inflation, may alter this pattern, although economic stability has not yet been demonstrated. The dollarization, expected by experts to benefit only the well-to-do, was accompanied by an indigenous revolt on January 21, 2000, that temporarily replaced the president with an indigenous leader, who was, on the following day, replaced by the vice president as the result of a military coup. The political history of Ecuador is similar to that of other Latin American countries, with democratic governments, military rule, and nonmilitary dictatorships taking turns in power throughout most of the twentieth century. Land distribution in Ecuador is skewed in favor of large estates, although not as severely as in some other Latin American countries. There are some moderate-sized farms, but many of the poorer farmers have very small plots of land, and many other people who live off the land have never been able to obtain formal title to it and are labeled squatters. According to a report produced in 2004 by Ecuador’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the bulk of the country’s trade with Africa takes place with Algeria, the Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, and South Africa. Ecuador has also recently traded with Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, the Seychelles, Kenya, Libya, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic. From 1995 through 2002 the trade balance was in favor of the African countries. The balance shifted toward Ecuador in 2003 and 2004 due to increased exports by Ecuador to Egypt, Ghana, Madagascar, www.abc-clio.com

Equatorial Guinea, and South Africa and to a gradual elimination over a span of several years of liquefied petroleum gas imports from Algeria and Congo. The year 2004 saw reduced trade with Algeria, Egypt, and Ghana but increased trade with Congo, Madagascar, and South Africa. Ecuador’s exports to African countries include a wide variety of items, including bananas, palm hearts, passion fruit, sardines, tuna and other fish, coffee, roses, and scopolamine, a drug used in nonprescription sedatives. Ecuador’s imports from Africa include liquefied petroleum gas, hydrocarbons, butane, propane, laminated iron products, wire, and acrylics. There are also historical ties between Ecuador and Africa resulting from the slave trade, which brought Africans to Ecuador and other Latin American countries during and after Spanish colonial times. Although the government does not track the country’s population by ethnicity, scholars estimate that from 5 to 13 percent of the population is of African descent. The failure to acknowledge openly racial differences while persisting in racial discrimination results in the economic and political invisibility of people mostly of indigenous or African heritage. Most of the current black population lives in Esmeraldas province, Imbabura province, and Carchi province. Blacks constitute the largest ethnic group in Esmeraldas, a remote northwestern area where very little infrastructure is provided by the state. Blacks have lived in the northwestern part of the country since the mid-1500s. During the late 1500s, fortified villages called palenques were built in that area by runaway slaves. Communities of blacks and Chachi Indians are still referred to by blacks as palenques. In the late 1990s, blacks and Chachis began to organize with the goal of demanding

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autonomy for San Lorenzo and Eloy Alfaro cantons, located in the far northern portion of Esmeraldas. The autonomous area would be called the Gran Comarca, meaning “great territory.” The groups’ claim is based on historical occupation and is similar to arguments used by indigenous peoples in other areas; what makes this case unusual is the inclusion of a traditional indigenous group, that is, a group that is living in the same area as at the time of colonization, and a group that was indigenous to another continent but was uprooted and forcibly transported to Latin America. Sharon Lunsford See also: Congo (Kinshasa), Democratic Republic of the; Egypt; Equatorial Guinea; Ghana; Madagascar; South Africa, History and Politics References Busey, James L. Latin American Political Guide: A Quarter Century of Latin American Politics. New York: Robert Schalkenback Foundation, 1985. Halpern, Adam, and France Winddance Twine. “Antiracist Activism in Ecuador: BlackIndian Community Alliances.” Race & Class 42, no. 2 (October 2000): 19–31. Kyle, David. Transnational Peasants: Migrations, Networks, and Ethnicity in Andean Ecuador. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ecuador. General Exports and Investment Promotion Office. Trade Relations Ecuador-Africa. 2004. http://www.mmrree.gov.ec/mre/ documentos/promocion/comercio/ trade_ecuador_africa.pdf.

EFIK The Efik people are an ethnic group, located in present-day southeastern Nigeria, whose origins go back to the fourteenth century; they have lived in the Cross River region since that time and have been involved in international trade, including the transatlantic slave trade, since the fifteenth century. www.abc-clio.com

The Efik migrated from the hinterland to the coastal region to work as fishermen. During the migration, settlements were formed among the Ibibio and Igbo people inland. Twelve Efik clans migrated from Ibom, an Igbo area, to the Ibibio area of Uruan, where they first became known as the Efik people. The name “Efik” is said to derive from the Ibibio word fik (to oppress). When the Efik left Uruan, seven clans formed the first Efik settlement at Ikpaene; they moved to found Creek Town on the Cross River several generations later. The Efik people were early inhabitants of the town of Calabar, alongside the Qua and the Efut peoples. Early Efik fishing communities consisted of patriarchal family units based around minor lineage segments of the clans. Each family was headed by the etinyin, the oldest male in the paternal line, and families were grouped into obio (towns) based upon clans. From the fifteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade transformed Efik economic and social organization, and “houses” (ufok) emerged as important social institutions. Houses were corporate groups organized around a major lineage segment, which traded independently with the Europeans. Each house was headed by an etubom, who was selected according to skills in coordinating the canoe system of transport and trade networks that brought slaves and palm oil from inland areas. Houses were grouped into obio (towns), each headed by an obong (king). In the nineteenth century, European shippers, missionaries, and the British consul came to influence the appointment of kings, with the consul crowning King Archibong III as the obong of Duke Town in 1878. The ekpe (leopard) secret society first appeared among the Efik in the seventeenth century, and it became the highest authority

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of law and order. Efik traders and kings, and European traders as well, could join the society for a fee. By the nineteenth century, a small group of wealthy Efik traders had centralized political and economic power through their control of trade and the higher grades of ekpe. In the colonial era, the Presbyterian mission and the British consul coopted the authority of the ekpe society to impose colonial edicts. Holding high ekpe grades remains prestigious within Efik society; members take part in rituals associated with traditional kingship, and their land and other property are safeguarded by the society. Centuries of international trade meant that many Efik people were literate, with some proficient in several European languages, when a Presbyterian mission reached Calabar in 1846. The mission published an Efik translation of the Bible in 1868 and an Efik-English dictionary in 1888. The indigenous cosmology encountered by the mission continues to have importance in contemporary Efik society. Efik cosmology is centered around a supreme being, Abasi Ibom. Ndem are intermediaries between Abasi Ibom and the human world, and are examples of the mami wata spirits found along the West African coast. Each Efik town continues to be associated with a Ndem, and the unity of all Efik people is represented by the tutelary deity, Ndem Efik. The Efik diaspora includes people living in Europe, North America, Angola, and Cuba and reflects the long history of Calabar as an international port. In the twentieth century, Efik people have made many important contributions to Nigerian literature, music, and politics. The playwright James Ene Henshaw dramatized the colonial era in This Is Our Chance (1956) www.abc-clio.com

and A Man of Character (1956), while the educator, Dr. Ekpo Amaku, was the author of school texts and poetry. Adebayo Martins, whose mother was Efik, was a pioneer of Afro-jazz in the 1950s and 1960s, predating the music of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Margaret Ekpo, from Creek Town, was a leading trade unionist and politician during the last decades of the colonial era and in the early postcolonial era, and in 1961 she became the first woman member to be elected to the Eastern Assembly. Philippa Hall See also: Nigeria; Religion (Africa) References Aye, Efiong U. Old Calabar through the Centuries. Calabar, Nigeria: Hope Waddell Press, 1967. Jaja, Solomon, Erim O. Erim, and Bassey W. Andah. Old Calabar Revisited. Enugu, Nigeria: Harris Press, 1990. Noah, Monday Efiong. Old Calabar: The City States and the Europeans, 1880–1885. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1980. Oku, Ekei. Essien. Kings and Chiefs of Old Calabar, 1785–1925. Calabar, Nigeria: Glad Tidings Press. 1989.

EGYPT Egypt is a republic of northeast Africa and southwest Asia. It has played an important role in shaping the concept of African civilization’s origins in antiquity as well as having an impact on international and transatlantic politics.

Geography Egypt, described by the Greek historian Herodotus as the gift of the Nile, is officially known as the Arab Republic of Egypt. It has the second largest economy in the Arab Middle East. Its capital, Cairo (in Arabic, al-Qahira, or the victorious), is the largest

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Arab, Middle Eastern, and African city. Alexandria, Port Said (Egypt’s chief port), Luxor, Aswan, and Assiut number among its major cities. About a tenth of the total area of the United States of America (nearly 400,000 square miles [over one million square kilometers]), Egypt has a strategic location in the extreme northeast corner of Africa coupled with a small area of southwest Asia called the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Sudan to the south, the Red Sea and Palestine on the east, and a desert border shared with Libya on the west. Both the Eastern (Arabian) Desert and Sinai Peninsula have picturesque mountains (some of them are more than 8,600 feet [over 2,600 meters] above Red Sea level), and the Western (Libyan) Desert enjoys several oases. In 1859 the French began constructing the Suez Canal—a watercourse linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. It has since become the most used shipping canal in the world. The Mediterranean coast enjoys a mild and rainy climate, while the rest of Egypt is generally hot and dry. The Egyptian spring brings a severe and dusty wind called the Khamasin. The river Nile, 6,695 kilometers long, flows through Egypt from the south to the north, splitting into branches and creating a fan-shaped area, the Delta, before meeting the Mediterranean Sea, irrigating Egypt’s agricultural land. Hence, most of the inhabitants are centered in and around the Nile Valley and Delta, leaving two-thirds of the Egyptian land, the Western and Eastern deserts almost empty. The Nile has always been the source of life for Egyptians; ancient Egyptians showed their respect by worshipping it, while modern-day Egyptians still refer to it as “the sea.” The construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s on Lake www.abc-clio.com

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Nasser, on the southern part of the Egyptian Nile, helped contain the annual floods caused by the African rainy seasons. Papyrus, the water plant that was used for making paper in ancient times, together with the lotus flower, are the symbols of Egypt. However, palm trees, cypress, sycamore, mango, lily, acacia, and many other trees enrich Egyptian flora. Egyptian fauna is characterized by domestic camels, gazelles, and hyenas as well as crocodiles, hippopotamuses, and, although they are becoming rare, ostriches; numerous kinds of lizards and snakes, many of which are poisonous; and hundreds of kinds of fish and migratory and native birds.

History While recorded American history is no older than 500 years, Egyptian history dates back to around 3000 BCE, when Egypt gave rise to one of the world’s greatest and most ancient civilizations. Today, Egypt is one of the most visited countries in the world, mainly because of its historic past. The Egyptian Delta witnessed the Kingdom of Lower Egypt, whereas the Kingdom of Upper Egypt prospered in the Nile Valley over 5000 years ago. Around 3100 BCE the first pharaoh, Menes, united the two kingdoms, making Memphis (very close to the Cairo of today) their capital. Pharaonic Egyptian history, which lasted about thirty centuries, can be divided into three main kingdoms, the Old, Middle, and New, and thirty-one dynasties. The biblical story of the Israelites, the Jewish Exodus, and the prophet Joseph is said to have occurred under King Amenemhat III (around 1662 BCE, the Middle Kingdom), who appointed Joseph as his vizier. For 200 years (ca. 525–332 BCE) Egypt was under the grip of the then-greatest

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empire in the region, the Persian Empire, whose rule ended when Alexander the Great invaded Egypt. Upon his death in 323 BC, the local Ptolemaic dynasties ruled Egypt until 54 BCE, when Julius Caesar forcefully took over Alexandria, a city built by Alexander and hence named after him. The famous Egyptian queen, Cleopatra VII (51–30 BCE), immortalized in Shakespeare’s play, ruled Egypt under Caesar’s protection after marrying him. On Caesar’s death, Cleopatra made an alliance with Mark Antony, who also married her. Upon their suicide after being defeated by Octavian (later known as Emperor Augustus), Egypt lost its independence and became a Roman province until 395 CE. During the reign of Nero (the Roman emperor known for burning Rome), St. Mark is said to have brought Christianity to Egypt around 61 CE. Egyptian Christians are still known as Copts. For the 300 years after the Roman Empire split, Egypt was ruled by the Byzantine (the Eastern Roman) Empire. From 640 CE on, Egypt became part of the newly expanding Arab Islamic nation. After ten centuries, however, the Ottomans tightened their Turkish, though Islamic, grip over Egypt for the next three centuries. When Western Europe regained power over the Ottomans in the eighteenth century, Egypt fell to the French after an invasion in 1798 by Napoleon Bonaparte, who sought to threaten British trade with East Asia. Only three years later, upon Napoleon’s defeat by the British, Egypt was ruled by Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha (1805–1848), who although originally Albanian, became a viceroy to the Ottoman sultan Salim III and his heir, Sultan Mahmud II. The Turkish influence continued to be very strong in Egypt under Ali’s successors (known as www.abc-clio.com

Khedives, or Lords), who, although of Ottoman origin, rebelled against the authority of Istanbul. They were also very enamored of the Europeans and, hence, the process of westernization was intensified, giving Egypt a more European touch. The Khedives supplied Europe with Egyptian cotton when American cotton failed to reach Europe due to the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s. While technically the Khedives ruled Egypt, their extravagant way of living forced them to seek British intervention to help them control the country. The British, who together with the French built the Suez Canal (opened in 1869), continued to consolidate their presence in Egypt. In 1882 the British took the Egyptian government by military force.

Politics Twentieth-century Egyptian politics is very complex; however, the main occurrence, as in many developing countries, was a rise of nationalism that resulted in Egypt becoming the independent republic it is today in June 1953. When Turkey sided with Germany in World War I, Egypt formally became a British Protectorate. The Nationalist Revolution of Saad Zaghlul in 1919 finally brought formal British rule to an end in 1922; Egypt, however, continued to be part of the British Empire as British troops remained and a puppet king, Fuad, was installed. He ruled until his death in 1936, leaving the throne to his son, King Faruq. In World War II the British defeated the Germans, who attempted to capture the Suez Canal during that conflict. Egypt became a founding member of the United Nations in 1945 and played an active role in establishing the Arab League. The rise of various political factions—liberals, nationalists, and Islamists—in the twentieth century

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resulted in the Revolution of 1952. A military coup by Gamal Abdel Nasser toppled the monarchy. Under Nasser, Egypt went through large-scale changes: nationalization of the Suez Canal; industrial and agricultural reforms; guaranteed employment for all college students; introduction of a social security scheme; and the building of the Aswan Dam, financed by the Soviet Union. In spite of close political and economic ties with the Soviet Union, Nasser joined the Non-Aligned Movement (an organization, founded in April 1955, of mainly Asian and African states that sought to distinguish themselves from both the capitalist and Communist camps). He ruled Egypt under a one-party socialist system. Nasser’s era was also characterized by antagonistic relations with Israel, the newly created state in Palestine, which invaded Egypt in 1956. At the same time, both Britain and France intervened in the Canal Zone, capturing Port Said. International and local pressures, however, forced the Europeans out of Egypt. Nasser had a vision of creating a unified Arab state, and in 1958 Egypt and Syria did establish what would be a two-year union, called the United Arab Republic, which made Nasser a national hero to all Arabs. Anwar Al-Sadat ruled Egypt after Nasser died in 1970. Sadat gradually liberalized Egypt, both politically and economically. He allowed other political parties to form, but they had to function under his immediate control. Rather than Russian, Sadat sought British and American goods and arms. Improving relations with the United States culminated in the signing of the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty (known as the Camp David treaty) in 1979, which led to Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai www.abc-clio.com

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Peninsula. Many Arab countries broke off diplomatic relations with Egypt as a result. Hosni Mubarak has been the president of Egypt since Sadat’s assassination in 1981 by Islamic extremists. Politically and economically, Mubarak followed in the footsteps of his predecessor. Egypt’s relationship with the United States became stronger than ever before. He joined the U.S. military forces in Iraq in 1991 and the “war on terrorism” that began in 2001. Many Egyptians see Mubarak as a traitor rather than as a liberator. Although the “cold peace” with Israel has held, Mubarark has also tried to improve Egypt’s relationships with other Arab countries. More recently, under increasing pressure from the United States and human rights activists, Egypt is undergoing changes toward greater democracy.

Culture Egyptian culture is as hybrid as that of Brazil. With an annual population growth rate of 1.8 percent, Egypt has over 77 million people, most of who are Arab Muslims. Christian Copts make up about 6 percent of the population. Both Islamic and Christian festivities and holidays are observed. There are other minorities: Berbers (who speak Berber) in the Siwa oases in the Western Desert; Bedouins (desert nomads who have settled in villages); Nubians (who speak northern African and Berber-related languages) in the south; and tiny minorities of Greeks, Italians, and Armenians, who speak Arabic as well as their own languages. Written or classical Arabic is more or less the same formal language used throughout the Arab countries; however, spoken Egyptian Arabic is better-known than any other Arabic dialect thanks to the fact that Egyptian films and soap operas are shown on most Arabic screens.

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Like Egypt’s history and geography, Egyptian culture has always been unique and complex. The Pyramids still testify to Egypt’s early miraculous architecture. Early Egyptians also used our modern 365-day calendar and their own hieroglyphic writing almost 5,000 or 6,000 years ago. In the nineteenth century, Egypt was the first country in the Middle East to become westernized. Cairo became both the economic and intellectual capital of the entire Middle East. Writers, artists, and scientists left other Arab countries such as Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq (where the Ottoman grip was much tighter) and settled in Egypt, developing modern Arab journalism and theater. A women’s rights movement was also initiated in Egypt by such people as Qassem Amin and Huda Shaarawi (both Egyptian), Zainab Fawaz (Syrian), and May Ziada (Lebanese) in Cairo. Even today, three-fifths of Egyptians make their living from agriculture-related work. For these people, life in the Nile Valley and Delta is very challenging. Egypt still has to import food to sustain its growing population. City dwellers have a completely different life from that in the villages. They are more westernized in their lifestyles in comparison to very basic lifestyle of the fallahin (villagers). Although the Egyptian government provides free education, the illiteracy rate in Egypt is still 42 percent. As in many other countries, unemployment is a problem. Many Egyptians seek work overseas, especially in the Gulf countries. Egypt has a long tradition in the arts. Modern Western artistic forms are fused with local ancient traditions and folklore in literature, music, moviemaking, and the fine arts. Cairo is known as the Hollywood of Arabia, and Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz is the only Arab writer to have won the Nobel www.abc-clio.com

Prize in Literature, which he received in 1988. He was followed by Ahmad Zewail, an Egyptian who won the same prize for chemistry in 1999. Like Brazil, Egypt is a soccer-loving nation, but it is in music and dance that Egypt has excelled. Egypt produced the legendary singer Umm Kulthum, whose death was mourned by millions of Arabs in 1975. Sayed Darwish (1892–1923) and Mohammad Abd el-Wahab (1907–1991), two enormously gifted musicians, championed Arabic music with their innovative styles combining Western and Egyptian music. For Muslims, Al-Azhar Mosque/ University is still one of the most respected Islamic centers in the world. And even though Egypt, especially under Nasser, championed pan-Arabism (Arab nationalism), Pharaonic history, preserved through the pyramids, the buried treasures, and the unique technique of mummification, makes all Egyptians, regardless of their religion, language, or ethnic origin, very proud of being Egyptian. Egyptians are known for their friendliness, love of music and dance, and a special sense of humor. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley

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See also: ‘Ali Pasha, Muhammad; Cush Kingdom; Exodus; Religion (Africa) References Aldred, Cyril. The Egyptians. London: Thames & Hudson, 1998. Al-Hassan Golley, Nawar. Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies: Shahrazad Tells Her Story. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Allen, James P. Middle Egyptian. An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Assmann, Jan. The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

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EGYPT, AMERICAN MERCENARIES IN Fahmy, Ninette S. The Politics of Egypt: State-Society Relationship. London: Routledge Curzon, 2002. Goldschmidt, Arthur, Jr. A Concise History of the Middle East. 7th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002. Goldschmidt, Arthur, Jr. Modern Egypt: The Formation of a Nation State. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004. Hopwood, Derek. Egypt: Politics and Society 1945–1984. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985. Moret, Alexandre. The Nile and Egyptian Civilization. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001. Pateman, Robert. Cultures of the World: Egypt. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1999. Perry, Glenn E. The History of Egypt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.

EGYPT, AMERICAN MERCENARIES IN An infusion of nineteenth-century America into northeast Africa resulted from the military policies of Egypt’s ruler, Khedive Ismail (r. 1863–1879). Looking to improve his army through the import of martial talent, he recruited numerous European, Turkish, and American mercenary officers. The Americans were an interesting group, forming a significant community that played a role in military, geographical, and exploration history. These men, and sometimes their families as well, took long voyages to a land very different from home. Why did they go? Calling the American flag “that hated emblem of cursed tyranny,” former Confederate Henry Derrick succinctly explained his motivation for moving to Egypt. More common was the view of another southerner, Samuel Lockett, who, like Derrick, was barred from returning to duty in the U.S. Army and could not find work. “It is awful to be poor,” he wrote. This opinion was shared by northern counterparts like www.abc-clio.com

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William Dye and Charles Stone, who saw no future in the rapidly demobilizing U.S. Army of the late 1860s. Ismail offered these men payment in gold, at rates compatible with similar American ranks. He also promised promotion based on reorganizing his army, exploring uncharted regions of the Sudan, and the possibility of military glory as Egypt tried its own version of imperialism. This was a generous offer that attracted over fifty Americans between 1869 and 1882. Some lasted only a few months, while one, Stone, served the duration. A mix of Confederates and Yankees, they were often less divided by North-South issues than by their jockeying for power with Ismail’s European and Turkish mercenaries. Not especially successful in that struggle, the Americans focused on empowering the general staff. Stone, who was chief of staff, sent many of his fellow countrymen to explore the backlands of Egypt’s colonial holdings in the Horn of Africa. This resulted in significant cartographical results, one of the major accomplishments of the American mercenaries. These efforts also convinced Stone to add his voice to a chorus of advisers pushing Ismail toward war with King Yohannis IV (King John) of Ethiopia. A war with Ethiopia began in 1875 and featured efforts by American representatives from the general staff to exert their influence a year later at the battles at Gura, present-day Eritrea, wherein the Egyptians were defeated, ending their invasion of Ethiopia. A debacle for Egypt, it tarnished the Americans’ reputation and, combined with Egypt’s concurrent financial woes, convinced many of the mercenaries to return home. The last officer, Stone, left in 1882; his lieutenant, Alexander Mason, transferred to Egypt’s civil service and played a role in

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negotiating the Adua Treaty (1884) that ended the Egyptian-Ethiopian War. Although the Americans did not bring victory for Ismail’s army, they played an important role in African cartography. In addition, their magazine articles and books intrigued the reading public with their American insight into “deepest darkest Africa.” For good or bad, they represented the largest American expatriate community in nineteenth-century Egypt. John P. Dunn References Dunn, John P. Khedive Ismail’s Army. London: Routledge, 2005. Icenogle, David. “The Khedive’s Cartographers.” Aramco World Magazine, September–October 1984). Hesseltine, William B., and Hazel C. Wolf. The Blue and Grey on the Nile. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

EGYPTIAN SOLDIERS IN MEXICO “[T]heir skins are as black as tar and their clothes as white as snow. Scrupulously neat in person and dress, they are always ready for dress parade.” Thus did William M. Anderson describe the only regular African troops sent to fight in the New World. Speaking in 1865, Anderson had just observed the Bataillon Negre Egyptien in Veracruz, Mexico, a most unusual component of the French-directed multinational force supporting Mexican Imperialists against Benito Juarez and his Republicans. An elite force, these “Egyptians” were actually Sudanese, whose deployment to Mexico rested partially on their renowned fighting skills. For much of the nineteenth century, the Sudan was part of a greater Egyptian Empire and provided significant numbers of long-serving infantrymen. www.abc-clio.com

Additionally, Egypt’s ruler, Said Pasha (r. 1855–1863), fostered close relations with France, whose emperor, Napoleon III, agreed to pay all expenses of the Sudanese force. Napoleon III held favorable views on Egyptian soldiers based on their record in the Crimean War and, equally important, was influenced by then current medical theory that considered Africans a better choice than Europeans when fighting in tropical zones. Vera Cruz, a vital port for Imperialist supply lines, is located in the tropics. It maintained a reputation as a place of disease during the 1860s. Nearby swamps, lagoons, and dank forests created a belt of malaria, yellow fever, and other deadly diseases. Spread by swarming mosquitoes, virulent and unstoppable by medical science, these diseases caused a high mortality rate for troops stationed there. Indeed, the local cemetery was sardonically referred to as a “garden of acclimatization.” Some men survived, and veterans of previous encounters were reasonably immune to repeat attacks. Thus, the latter were viewed as especially valuable for deployment around Vera Cruz. While troops of this nature were not available in France, Egypt had significant numbers in her army. Equatoria, the area from which many Sudanese regiments obtained their manpower, existed in an environment similar to that of Vera Cruz. Between 1863 and 1867 the Sudanese helped guard the port, served as train escorts, and participated in counter-guerilla sweeps. In every case, the Sudanese were active participants in the failed effort to create a Mexican Empire. Their service was exemplary, which only increased agitation among Republican forces and their American backers, who were especially bothered by

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the employment of African troops in Mexico. Expressing the views of President Andrew Johnson U.S. secretary of state William Henry Seward stated: “In the Opinion of the President, Negroes, natives of Africa, cannot rightfully be employed as soldiers in any way to subvert established political institutions, or disturb society in the American continent” (Dunn, 2005, 21). Although the use of the Sudanese soldiers was cause for the poorest relations between Egypt and America until the 1950s, most U.S. pressure was directed toward France, whose withdrawal in 1867 guaranteed that the Sudanese would quickly follow. Returning home after a triumphal visit to Paris, where every soldier obtained the Mexican Campaign Medal from Napoleon III, the Sudanese were spread among Egyptian garrisons throughout the Sudan. These veterans played important roles in the 1870s and 1880s. They often were noted by travelers for their smart military bearing and the distinctive colors of the ribbons attached to the medals given them by the emperor of France. John P. Dunn References Anderson, William M. An American in Maximilian’s Mexico, 1865–1866, ed. Ramon Eduardo Ruiz. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1959. Crecelius, Daniel, and Anahid Crecelius. “An Egyptian Battalion in Mexico.” Der Islam 53, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 70–86. Dunn, John. Khedive Ismail’s Army. London: Routledge 2005. Hill, Richard, and Peter Hogg. A Black Corps d’Elite: An Egyptian-Sudanese Conscript Battalion with the French Army in Mexico, 1863–1867, and Its Survivors in Subsequent African History East Lansing: Michigan State University Press 1995. “Seward to Hale, Washington, 14 December 1865.” In United States Department of State, Diplomatic Instructions of the United States, 1801–1906: The Barbary Powers, National Archives, Washington, DC.

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EKWENSI, CYPRIAN ODIATU DUAKA (1921–) Cyprian Odiatu Duaka Ekwensi is one of Nigeria’s most prolific and versatile novelists, short story writers, and children’s authors. A pioneer in many ways, he is the father of the Nigerian novel. An Igbo, he was born in Minna, Niger State, on September 26, 1921; attended Government College and the University College, Ibadan, in Yorubaland; and trained as a forestry officer before studying at the Lagos School of Pharmacy and the Chelsea School of Pharmacy, London. He wrote hundreds of short stories, dozens of novels, some twenty children’s books, and four collections of folktales as well as radio and television scripts. Most of his works have been on school syllabi for decades. His first publications, When Love Whispers and Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Ibo Tales, both issued in 1947, were closely associated with the rise of Onitsha market literature. Committed to the production of reading material for Nigerians, he later spearheaded the transition from Onitsha market to a mainstream audience with People of the City (1954). Ekwensi’s most acclaimed novel, Jagua Nana (1961), was published in the United States in 1969. That same year, he visited the United States with Chinua Achebe and Gabriel Okara, lecturing at universities. His exposure to various Nigerian cultures and his travel experiences greatly influenced his writing. His works, now translated into many languages, including French and Arabic, reveal the impact of the urbanization and influence of Western values on the lives of ordinary citizens. He presents the urban cultural mix and coexistence of traditional and Western cultures as the cornerstone of the country’s modernization and gives women a significant place in the development of this mix.

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In 1968 he was awarded the Dag Hammarskjöld International Prize in Literature. In Nigeria he has inspired a number of writers and supported the birth of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). An experienced broadcaster, he served as head of features for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation and was the first Nigerian federal director of information. In 2001 the National Council for Arts and Culture (NCAC) in Abuja gave him an Honors Award by for his leading role in the promotion of Nigeria’s cultural heritage. Francoise Parent Ugochukwu See also: Achebe, Chinua; Emecheta, Buchi; Igbo; Nigeria; Nwapa, Flora; Okri, Ben References Emenyonu, Ernest. Cyprian Ekwensi. London: Evans, 1974. Emenyonu Ernest, ed. The Essential Ekwensi: A Literary Celebration of Cyprian Ekwensi’s Sixty-fifth Birthday. Lagos, Nigeria: Heinemann Educational Books, 1987.

ELLISON, RALPH WALDO (1914–1994) An author of short stories and essays, Ralph Waldo Ellison is best known for writing one of the most influential and widely read novels of the twentieth century, Invisible Man (1952). Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and raised by his mother, Ellison studied music for three years at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before moving to New York City to find work in music. There, Ellison met numerous writers, began to publish, and by working for the Federal Writers’ Project became acquainted with a wide range of African American experiences, histories, and folktales. By the time Ellison entered the merchant marines, serving from 1943 to 1945, he had over sixty fiction and nonfiction publications. www.abc-clio.com

Ralph Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man has become a classic of modern American fiction, wrote compellingly about African American experiences of racism in contemporary American society. (National Archives)

In 1952 Ellison published Invisible Man, whose outstanding attributes include its recapitulation of twentieth-century African American history, its “jazz narrative aesthetic” and incorporation of the black oral tradition, its “existential” critique of both “white” and “black” spheres of American society, its informed optimism, and its literary sophistication. For many African American intellectuals, however, some of these characteristics of Invisible Man were seen as, if not capitulations to “white” society, then at least as distractions that dulled the de rigeur radical politics of African American literature. From the 1950s until his death in 1994, Ellison worked on his second novel, amassing some 2,000 pages of manuscript that John Callahan edited into the novel Juneteenth (1999), with more forthcoming. In addition to two novels, Ellison published five collections of short stories and essays,

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taught at numerous universities, sat on many boards and commissions, and won multiple literary awards in both the United States and Europe. Ellison’s particular importance includes the individual’s struggle to attain self-knowledge; the broad scope of his work, which incorporates not only the African American literary tradition, jazz, and blues but also the more traditional American literary canon and Western philosophy; and his prominence as a public intellectual. Ralph Ellison moved the African American literary tradition into the heart of the American literary tradition and thereby permanently changed the definitions of both. Kevin M. Hickey See also: Jazz and the Blues; Juneteenth

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as it was, without directly threatening southern institutions. As the war continued with Union victory seeming distant, Lincoln increasingly turned toward emancipation as a means to aid the war effort. During the summer of 1862, he discussed the idea with members of his cabinet. With the Union victory at Antietam in September, Lincoln presented his Emancipation Proclamation to the nation, and since Lincoln had no authority under the Constitution to end slavery in areas loyal to the Union, the Proclamation was a military measure applying only to Confederate-controlled territory. Despite some criticism in the North that the Proclamation did not free slaves in Union territories, no border state seceded,

References Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. New York: Wiley, 2002. Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION The Emancipation Proclamation is the U.S. Civil War document, proclaimed in 1862, which declared that all slaves in areas under rebellion against the Union would be forever free. On September 22, 1862, almost a year and a half after the beginning of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln announced his Emancipation Proclamation, to become effective January 1, 1863. Lincoln’s handling of emancipation had been extremely cautious. While a longtime critic of slavery, his primary goal in the Civil War was the quick restoration of the Union. Lincoln’s objective during the first year of the war was to maintain the Union www.abc-clio.com

1864 engraving of the Proclamation of Emancipation with an eagle and U.S. flags over a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and composite of seven scenes of slavery. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. (Library of Congress)

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nor did any significant number of Union troops desert. Instead, Lincoln had dealt an effective blow to the Confederate cause. The Union war effort was now officially directed against slavery. European countries no longer considered supporting the Confederacy. While the South of course did not abide by the measure, Union armies liberated thousands of slaves and began actively recruiting freedmen into Union service. Most importantly, the Proclamation initiated the end of slavery across the nation by helping pave the way for the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery shortly after the war. Ian M. Spurgeon See also: American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission; Civil Rights Movement; Juneteenth; Slavery (History) References Franklin, John Hope. The Emancipation Proclamation. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Guelzo, Allen C. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

EMECHETA, BUCHI (1944–) Buchi Emecheta is a London-based Nigerian woman novelist writing in English. Born of Igbo parents on July 21, 1944, in Lagos, Nigeria, Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta, living in London since 1962, is one of the most influential African women writers. Since 1972 she has published nineteen novels, already translated into fourteen languages, plays for the BBC, poetry, essays, and books for children. She draws her material directly from her own life to document the experience of Africans in the diaspora, focusing upon the lives of the black immigrant women, and considers her experience of immigration to Britain as a major influence in her work. Her first novel, In the www.abc-clio.com

Ditch (1972), initially titled “Observations of the London Poor” and planned as an article for a magazine, was inspired by her experiences in a north London slum. Her writing, focused on exile, women, gender, and crosscultural issues, presents black women struggling to maintain their identity and fighting to win economic independence. In 1982 she set up her own publishing firm, Ogwugwu Afor, with her journalist son to provide a platform and financial support for black artists. The turning point in her life came when she left Nigeria to join her husband in the United Kingdom in February 1962. Four years later she left him and started writing while studying, first for a bachelor of science degree in sociology with the University of London, which she received in 1974, then for a masters degree in social education at the University of London. Her studies helped to provide her with analytic tools she used to structure her observations and ideas. After completing her formal education, she pursued a dual career as a writer and a social worker, served on numerous public committees, and became a respected voice on feminism and integrationist issues. In 1975 Second-Class Citizen (1974) received the Daughter of Mark Twain Award. In 1978 The Slave Girl (1977) received the Sunrise Award and won the New Statesman’s Jock Campbell Award for Commonwealth Writers for its stand in the feminist debate and its attempt to define new understandings of African feminist literary theory. In 1979 The Joys of Motherhood (1979) was selected as Book of the Month Club choice and won the Best British Writer’s Award in 1980. Emecheta’s style is rooted in her culture; she describes herself as a storyteller and sees

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herself as oral communicator. Her homeland, Nigeria, is the setting of several novels: The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Destination Biafra (1982), and Double Yoke (1982). The Rape of Shavi (1983) is a parable about race relations set in a fictional African country. Head above Water (1986) is Emecheta’s autobiography. Gwendolyn (1989), published in the United States as The Family in 1990, takes place in Jamaica and London, and Kehinde (1994) is set in both London and Nigeria. Emecheta’s work, written in the United Kingdom, was given much attention by American and British literary critics but very little by African critics. Françoise Parent Ugochukwu See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Ekwensi, Cyprian Odiatu Duaka; Igbo; Nigeria; Nwapa, Flora; Okri, Ben. References Fishburn, Katherine. Reading Buchi Emecheta: Cross-cultural Conversations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. Nzeako, Tagbo. Emecheta. Ikeja: Longman Nigeria, 1982. Sougou, Omar. Writing across Cultures: Gender Politics and Difference in the Fiction of Buchi Emecheta. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Umeh, Marie. Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1995.

ENGLISH, AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the everyday spoken speech of African Americans, composed of grammatical elements and linguistic structures that contrast with the official standard. It is a language referred to historically, with numerous connotations, as Negro Dialect, Substandard Negro English, Nonstandard www.abc-clio.com

Negro English, Black English, Vernacular Black English (VBE), Black English Vernacular (BEV), and Afro-American English. It is currently referred to as African American English (AAE), African American Language (AAL), Black Talk, Ebonics, and Spoken Soul. Such a variety of nomenclature is indicative of the controversy surrounding its history. African American Vernacular English is an ethnic variety of the language spoken in the United States by many blacks whose African ancestors were formally enslaved in British North America and subsequently the United States from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The term “vernacular” applies to the unmonitored, everyday speech spoken in a local community; it contains and is defined by socially stigmatized grammatical elements and linguistic structures that contrast with the official standard. African American Vernacular English differs in some way from community to community, but shared patterns of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar identify it all as AAVE. Beginning with the introductory works of J. L. Dillard and William Labov in the 1960s, AAVE has been the focus of more studies and more published work than has any other ethnic or social variety of American English. Since then, linguists such as Guy Bailey, John Baugh, Salikoko Mufwene, Geneva Smitherman, John Rickford, and Walt Wolfram have generally focused on four central questions: (1) Is AAVE a dialect or is it just slang produced in an unsuccessful attempt at standard American English? (2) Did AAVE originate from remnants of early American and British English or from creole structures from West African languages? (3) Is AAVE converging with other varieties of American English or becoming

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more like them? (4) What influence does AAVE have on education and culture? The longest-standing explanation for the origin of AAVE lies in the Anglicist hypothesis, which argues that slavery wiped out most, if not all, African linguistic and cultural tradition and that the apparently distinctive features of AAVE come from English dialects spoken by British peasants and indentured servants. Some scholars, taking an Africanist stand, contend that the African American vernacular bears the vivid imprint of the African languages spoken by slaves who came to this country in waves from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. For the Creolist hypothesis, the central question is whether AAVE was ever as different from Standard English as the creole varieties spoken today in such places as Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and Barbados or whether it was ever influenced by them. Both the Creolists and Africanists believe that, since the Gullah language of coastal South Carolina and Georgia is a confirmed creole and since Africans settled at these sites in great numbers before moving inland, the resulting AAVE must have creole origins. While it is certain that AAVE is changing, the question that arises is whether the change is toward being more like mainstream Anglo-American English or becoming more distinctive from it. Some sociolinguists believe that when social relationships between black Americans and white Americans improve, the two groups begin to pick up features from one another, with AAVE incorporating mainstream characteristics in a process of convergence, but that when social relationships between the two groups degenerate, then AAVE speakers choose grammatical and especially vocabulary

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features that identify them as specifically belonging to an AAVE community. The Ebonics debates of the late 1990s revived the 1960s deficit-or-difference arguments that linguists thought had been resolved. Proponents of the deficit theory maintained that not only was the vernacular grammatically insufficient to communicate adequately, but also that its use inhibited the effective thought and communication processes of its speakers. Regional and social dialect studies proved these varieties to have differences that were consistent with language systems, and that social and ethnic dialects persist because they contain means by which a community can maintain its cultural connections. The Oakland school board resolution on Ebonics recognized that the distinctive language of African American children was a valid linguistic system by which to educate and communicate. Mary Ziegler References Green, Lisa J. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Rickford, John. African American Vernacular English. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. Rickford, John, and Russell Rickford. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: John Wiley, 2000. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin that Talk: Language, Culture, and Education in African America. New York: Routledge, 2000.

ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHY By the “Enlightenment” is meant the eighteenth-century international movement in thought, characterized by a faith in universal human rationality and a skeptical

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A philosopher of the Enlightenment, David Hume’s discussions of reason led him to brief, but often-cited speculations on the nature and origins of race. (Library of Congress)

attitude to traditional dogmas and ancient authorities. A noteworthy feature of this movement is the absence from it of any sustained discourse of race. At the beginning of the century Gottfried Leibniz was prepared to dismiss the idea of race altogether. By the century’s close, figures such as Wilhelm von Humbolt interpreted the Enlightenment task of perfecting humanity and human society as crucially bound up with, in his words, “establishing our common humanity—of striving . . . to treat all mankind, without reference to religion, nation or colour, as one fraternity, one great community” (Malik, 1996, p. 48). This is not to say that the idea of race was altogether unknown in the period. Rather, conceptions of race developed piecemeal in the context of debates concerning the relative significance of social,

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environmental, and biological factors in accounting for human variation. Carolus Linneaus distinguished five major “varieties” of human being, holding that the causes of human variation lay in cultural and environmental factors such as “education and situation” and “climate and art” (Eze, 1997, p. 13). Georges Buffon has been considered a key influence on nineteenth-century racial theory, but he too considered human variation to be primarily environmental in origin, a product of what he said was “climate, food, mode of living, epidemic diseases, and the mixture of dissimilar individuals” (ibid., p. 13). Immanuel Kant wrote extensively on anthropology, and his work exhibits debts to both Buffon and Linneaus. In Kant’s terminology, Linneaus’s five human varieties are interpreted as “races.” That is to say, they constitute a range of types generated from a single original stem and capable of engendering fertile hybrids, while each is also capable of maintaining its distinctiveness over successive generations when transplanted to an alien environment. Kant’s conception of race is apparently a response to the perceived inadequacy of purely environmental explanations of human variation and the absence of any developed genetic theory. The lack of any clearly articulated scientific consensus on race left Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in the middle of the century, able to effectively ignore any implications for human perfectibility that might have been thought to follow from the observed fact of human variation. Rousseau treats human variety nonreductively and as essentially plastic in the face of social, cultural, and environmental change. Nascent ideas of race only begin to pose a real challenge to Enlightenment

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ideals when human variation is understood to have a fixed biological basis. There is a suggestion of such a view in David Hume’s essay “Of National Characters.” Hume voices the suspicion, in a footnote, that blacks are “naturally inferior” to whites, implying at the same time that the causes of the alleged inferiority go beyond the environmental: while “moral” (social, cultural) factors suffice, Hume argues, to account for the variety of European national characters, and while such physical factors as air and climate might explain certain other observed differences between races, it seems necessary to invoke the idea of a natural “original distinction” to explain the constancy of black racial characteristics in the face of changed social and geographical circumstances. Thus, Hume was led to doubt whether blacks could ever rise above their existing “slender accomplishments” in the arts and sciences (Hume, 1985, p. 208). Kant was apparently prepared to follow Hume’s lead in this matter, regarding the differences between whites and blacks as “fundamental” and “as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour” (Kant, 1960, p. 11). (Given his views on humanity’s common origin, however, it seems unlikely that Kant would have accepted everything that might be read into Hume’s claims concerning an “original distinction.”) Much has been made of the fact that eighteenth-century ideas of race, including those of Kant, were grounded in a conception of nature as a “great Chain of Being” (Gates, 1992, pp. 64–65). According to the Chain of Being concept, nature exhibits a hierarchical order of divine origin. However, this concept was distinct from both medieval teleology and nineteenth-century evolutionism. Unlike evolutionism, the Chain of Being idea interprets the order of www.abc-clio.com

nature as essentially fixed. Unlike medieval teleology, it does not place either humanity or God straightforwardly at the apex of the hierarchy, as the final cause of the whole. Consequently, the Chain of Being idea remains open to surprisingly egalitarian interpretations: every being has its proper place in the chain, and to each belongs the perfectibility characteristic of its kind. While the various links in the chain are not equal in dignity, the raison d’ être of each is never to be found in its utility to another (Lovejoy, 1936, pp. 188–189). In Goethe’s words, “every animal is an end in itself ” (ibid., p. 189). Even sympathetic interpreters of Kant have described his views on race as “deplorable” (Wood, 1999, p. 4). But it is important to appreciate that he firmly respected Rousseau’s distinction between physical and political inequality. For Kant, nothing follows from a human individual’s physical or intellectual attributes with regard to his or her ethical or political entitlements. Kant’s moral theory, as he famously wrote in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, requires us to act so as to treat ourselves and others “never merely as a means but always at the same time as ends in themselves.” Accordingly, he emphatically condemns slavery, along with other examples of the purely instrumental treatment of human beings. Indeed, Kant’s low estimation of the intellectual abilities of some nonwhite groups enables him at times to underscore his ethical universalism. In his Metaphysics of Morals, while simultaneously emphasizing the supposed intellectual inferiority of various nonwhite groups, Kant condemns European appropriations of their land and goods as flagrantly unjust. The task of disentangling Hume’s ethical and political views from his views

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on race is more difficult. Hume, like Kant, was opposed to slavery; and many of his arguments anticipate those used later by more vigorous opponents of the institution. However, combined with his views on the natural inferiority of blacks, Hume’s moral theory yields an unpleasantly pragmatic approach to the ethics of slavery. According to Hume, moral virtue is a matter of exhibiting qualities of character that afford to a spectator “the pleasing sentiment of approbation” (Hume, 1975, p. 289). Such qualities usually involve beneficence or humanity and suggest a “tender sympathy” for others and a “generous concern” for the human species (ibid., p. 178). This, however, leaves judgments of virtue highly susceptible to cultural bias. Judgments founded on what happen to strike members of a dominant social group as useful and agreeable qualities are apt in practice to reinforce morally repugnant social inequalities. Hume himself criticizes slavery primarily on the grounds of its pernicious effects on the slave-owning class—it is corrupting of ordinary human relations among the masters and is not economically beneficial. One might reasonably object that these are very far from being the best or most urgent reasons to oppose slavery, and that ideals of justice and human equality ought to figure in any genuinely enlightened discussion of the topic. Peter Lucas See also: Abolitionism; Race, History of; Slave Narratives References Eze, Emmanuel C. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Gates, Henry L. “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference It Makes.” In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, by Henry Louis Gates. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hume, David. Essays: Moral, Political, Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis, IN: LibertyClassics, 1987. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Translated by John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936. Malik, Kenan. The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Miles, Robert. Racism. New York: Routledge, 2003. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Discourse on Inequality. Translated by Maurice Cranston. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics, 1985 . Wood, Allen W. Kant’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

ENVIRONMENTALISM Environmentalism refers to the concern for and attempt to reform policies relating to the treatment of the natural world. After decolonization in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, American and African environmentalism merged under the auspice of American-based developmental aid, university research programs, and nongovernmental agencies. United Nations meetings in 1992 and 2002 in Rio de Janeiro and

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Johannesburg initiated significant environmental collaboration between the Americas and Africa. American and African environmentalism stem from the same origins: the British Empire. The two movements diverged from the 1880s to the 1970s due to the fact that the British, French, and Portuguese controlled large parts of Africa, curtailing any political, cultural, and economic ties of the Western Hemisphere nations with the African continent. The postcolonial era, however, has seen important points of collaboration between African and American environmental movements and substantial discussion of common interests around environmental degradation, global warming, the loss of biodiversity, and urban pollution. Environmentalism in Africa and North America—at least regarding the implementation of large-scale environmental reforms such as soil conservation programs, the establishment of large forestry departments, and the creation of large land reserves for the protection of plants and animals—had its antecedents in British India. British Indian forestry, begun in the nineteenth century, became the model of large-scale state forestry for Canada, the United States, and large parts of British Africa. South Africa, the British East Africa Protectorate, Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone all adopted forestry charters and created forestry departments similar to those of British India in the early 1900s. American and Canadian forestry borrowed from British Indian forestry laws, forestry methods, and departmental structures. From the 1910s to the 1960s, American and African environmental movements also diverged as American countries such as Canada and the United States developed their own traditions of forestry and www.abc-clio.com

environmental protections that differed from the British and French imperial methods and models. During this period the Americas and Africa were intellectually separated on environmental issues, largely because African leaders were focused on fighting for independence from British rule. Once Africa nations gained their independence from colonial rule in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, American and African environmental policies could once again influence each other. As the British, French, and Portuguese ruling elites left Africa during those decades, the United States turned its eyes toward the African continent. The U.S. had a great degree of interest in African political affairs, including its environmental policies, as American diplomats worried that the Soviet Union’s influence might sway some African states toward Communism or socialism, such as Zimbabwe in 1980. Half of American aid during the 1970s and 1980s went toward agricultural and environmental reforms so as to alleviate hunger and environmental degradations resulting from deforestation, soil erosion, and the extinction of native animals. Canada, as well as the United States, created numerous programs for African countries that promoted the dispersion of forestry, biological conservation, and agricultural knowledge. At the same time that the U.S. and Canadian governments increased their aid to Africa, a variety of nongovernmental organizations began funding environmental projects thoughout the whole of Africa. The collaboration of nongovernmental agencies as well as the combined research of scientists and humanists in Africa and America allowed policy makers and philosophers to see environmental degradation and

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solutions in a new light. Environmental philosophers began to look at environmental degradation, both in Africa and in the Americas, as a process of hasty industrialization brought on by the West. Instead of American environmental solutions, largely derived from scientists and policy makers, environmental philosophers looked toward traditional African lifestyles as a way to increase agricultural sustainability and environmental protection. Alongside these intellectual developments were a variety of international agreements created in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. The most important developments in the 1990s stemmed from international cooperation between various American and African countries at United Nations–coordinated meetings. The first important gathering, the United Nations Conference on Environmental and Development of 1992, also known as the Earth Summit, met in Rio de Janeiro and created a large number of goals and international regulations that attempted to curb the loss of biological diversity, slow down global warming, and protect the health of people in such dangerous environments as expanding third-world cities. Ten years later in Johannesburg, South Africa, the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development reviewed the progress of various Earth Summit regulations and agreements and created more international agreements on sustainable development. African and American environmental policy makers continue to create new scientific and legal relationships, especially through United Nations meetings. As scientists respond to the possibility of global warming, the astonishing loss of biological diversity, and urban-related environmental pollution, the partnership of Africa and the www.abc-clio.com

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Americas will continue to grow throughout the twenty-first century. Brett Bennett See also: Agriculture, Sustainable; Ecology References Barton, Gregory. Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Conca, Ken, and Geoffrey Dabelko, eds. Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Johannesburg. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004. Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. London: Longman’s Press, 1999. Hughes, David. From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006

EQUATORIAL GUINEA The Republic of Equatorial Guinea, with a population of about 523,000, was—along with part of Morocco—a Spanish colonial possession on the African mainland and includes the island Fernando Póo. Today, the United States is the country’s second largest trading partner, with oil anticipated to be an important future export from the African country. The Portuguese arrived in 1472, and after many disputes between Portugal and Spain, the rights to the territory were given to Spain in 1777 by the Treaty of San Ildefonso, but the Spanish did not make any efforts to colonize the territory. Instead they invited the British to lease the island of Fernando Póo (now Bioko, in Equatorial Guinea), to be used as a base to stop slave ships sailing from nearby Nigeria. In 1844 Spanish settlers arrived on Fernando Póo, and eleven years later Spain appointed its first governor. The first official U.S. connections came in 1859, when Spain

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authorized the U.S. government to establish a coal supply base at Playa Carboneras, near Santa Isabel. Twenty-one years later the Presbyterian Church in the United States opened a mission in Río Muni, on the mainland, which twelve years later was also under Spanish control. This mission continued until 1968. From 1930 until 1936, and again from 1960, the missionaries’ ecclesiastical district of Corsico (in modern-day Equatorial Guinea) was connected to the New Jersey synod. The Protestant World Evangelization Crusade from Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, was also active in Spanish Guinea for many years. Spanish Guinea, as it was known officially, was proclaimed as a Spanish protectorate on January 9, 1885. On July 30, 1959, Spanish Guinea was divided back into Fernando Póo and Río Muni (which included Elobey and Corisco), and these became two overseas provinces of Spain. On October 12, 1968, the two were again merged together to form the Republic of Equatorial Guinea. The first president of Equatorial Guinea was Macías Nguema Biyoga, who—five years after independence— renamed Fernando Póo after himself. During his rule, which ended in 1979, widespread human rights abuses took place, with reports of up to 50,000 people killed. He was executed after a successful coup d’état in 1979, in which his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasongo, took over, and despite some attempts to improve the international reputation of the country, there are still allegations of political abuses of power—although nothing on the same scale as under Macías Nguema. Since achieving independence, Equatorial Guinea’s second largest trading partner has been the United States, first in www.abc-clio.com

terms of the African nation’s imports and third regarding its exports. Diplomatic relations were established on November 21, 1968, six weeks after independence. Equatorial Guinea’s first ambassador to the United Nations, S. Ibongo Iyanga, began— on his arrival in the United States— research for a thesis on international relations at Columbia University. It was never completed, as he was assassinated six months later. After that, diplomatic relations with the United States were strained, the latter worried about a possible spillover of the Biafran War. After the unsuccessful coup Macías Nguema became extremely critical of the United States, which he believed was behind the coup effort. He forced out of the country the Protestant World Evangelization Crusade, which had been operating in Spanish Guinea since 1933. In speeches and press releases, Macías Nguema accused the United States of supporting coup attempts against him, and the U.S. embassy in Santa Isabel, then the capital, was closed by the U.S. in 1971, following an incident in which a U.S. diplomat A. J. Erdos, killed his colleague, D. J. Leahy, the only other U.S personnel composing the U.S. mission, with a pair of scissors. Erdos was later charged when he arrived back in the United States. In each of the years 1971 and 1972, U.S. diplomatic staff visited the country twice, but no U.S. citizen lived there with the exception of one working for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. As relations deteriorated, the U.S. embassy in Cameroon became responsible for Equatorial Guinea until March 15, 1976, when diplomatic relations were suspended. After the 1979 coup that removed Macías Nguema from power, the U.S. government reestablished formal diplomatic ties and the USS Spiegel Grove paid a goodwill visit to

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the country. Aid from the U.S. government resumed, and the Peace Corps began functioning in the country. With Biafra so close, it was long thought there was oil in Equatorial Guinea that could make the country wealthy. Early oil prospecting by Gulf Oil, Mobil Oil, and Chevron had limited success, until large findings were made in 2004. Justin Corfield See also: Oil References Decalo, Samuel. Psychoses of Power: African Personal Dictatorships. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989. Liniger-Goumaz, Max. Historical Dictionary of Equatorial Guinea. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000.

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EQUIANO, OLAUDAH (1745?–1797) Olaudah Equiano was a formerly enslaved sailor, possibly of Igbo descent, whose early slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789), is frequently taught as both fact and fiction. In his narrative Equiano tells of being kidnapped from his Ibo family in Nigeria and sold into slavery in 1755. Transported to the Caribbean and then Virginia, Equiano was owned by a series of sailors and merchants, one of whom renamed him Gustavas Vassa. By engaging in trade Equiano was able to secure enough capital to purchase his freedom in 1766; he then took to sea.

Olaudah Equiano, an ex-slave who purchased his own freedom, spoke out publicly against slavery and the slave trade, becoming an important figure of the eighteenth-century British abolition movement. His widely published autobiography was a major early work against slavery. (Library of Congress)

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Equiano traveled through the Arctic, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, all of which he documented alongside his search for salvation. Accompanying his religious struggle was a political struggle against slavery. In the 1780s Equiano became active in the antislavery movement in England and was prominent in a group of black men, the Sons of Africa. In his Interesting Narrative, an antislavery work, he documented his biography as well as his involvement in a number of enterprises, including a plan to colonize Sierra Leone with repatriated Africans. In 1792 Equiano married an Englishwoman, with whom he had two daughters. He died five years later. In recent years Equiano’s biography has become a subject of some debate. The scholar Catherine Obianuju Acholonu engaged in anthropological research to locate Equiano’s point of origins, uncovering an oral narrative which suggested that his family arranged for him to be kidnapped to pay off debts. In contrast, Professor Vincent Carretta has uncovered a baptismal certificate as well as a Royal Navy muster roll, both of which give Equiano’s place of birth as South Carolina. Jennifer Harris See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Slave Narratives References Acholonu, Catherine Obianuju. “The Home of Olaudah Equiano—A Linguistic and Anthropological Search.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22 (1987): 5–16. Carretta, Vincent. “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity.” Slavery and Abolition 20, 3 (December 1999): 96–105. Carretta, Vincent, ed. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 2003.

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ERITREA One of Africa’s newest countries, Eritrea declared independence from Ethiopia on May 24, 1993, after a thirty-year armed struggle. It is one of the smallest African nations, with a population of about 4.5 million in an area about the size of the state of Pennsylvania. Located in the Horn of Africa, Eritrea is bounded on the south by Ethiopia, on the northwest by Sudan, on the southeast by Djibouti, and on the northeast by the Red Sea. It also includes the Dahlak Archipelago in the Red Sea. Its capital city is Asmara, with a population of half a million; the Red Sea ports of Massawa and Assab are also important cities. The name Eritrea was given by the Italians, who colonized the area from 1889 until 1941, after the Roman name for the Red Sea, Mare Erythraeum. While 80 percent of the population is agricultural or pastoral, only about 5 percent of the land is arable; the rest is either too mountainous or too arid for farming. Like Ethiopia, the population is evenly divided between Muslims and various Christian groups, including Eritrean Orthodox (which separated from Ethiopian Orthodox in 1993), Roman Catholic, and Protestant. The predominant ethnic groups are Tigrigna (50 percent) and Tigre (40 percent), and the major languages are Tigrigna, Tigre, Arabic, and English.

History Eritrea’s location on the Red Sea across from the Arabian Peninsula has been a major factor in its history. The Red Sea is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and has been an important avenue for trade as far back as the first millennium BCE. Goods from the hinterland, such as ivory, gold, and slaves, were transported to

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the Red Sea coast to be exchanged for textiles, metals, and other manufactured goods from the Middle East and the Mediterranean. By the first century CE, the state of Axum controlled the seacoast and what is now Eritrea; it dominated the region commercially and militarily until the eighth century CE, when Muslim power began to grow. Successors to Axum retained control over much of what is now Eritrea until it was occupied by the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. The Ottomans were eventually driven back to the coast, and the inland area remained closely tied to Tigray in northern Ethiopia, with which it had linguistic and cultural affinities. However, the coastal areas were subsequently occupied by the Egyptians, and while Ethiopia’s emperor Yohannes IV was able to fend off further incursions by the Egyptians in 1875, Ethiopia did not regain its access to the coast until Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia by the United Nations in 1952. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made the Horn of Africa and the East African coast more accessible to the Mediterranean. It also made Europe’s penetration and colonization of Africa much easier. As early as 1869, Italy purchased the Bay of Assab, though Egypt claimed the coast at that time. Assab was not declared an Italian colony until 1882, after Italy had opened diplomatic relations with Yohannes IV. Italy soon sought to expand its holdings along the coast, occupied the other main port of Massawa, and then began moving inland toward the highlands. Following the death of Yohannes in 1889, the Italians, under Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, signed the Treaty of Wichale with his successor, Emperor Menelik II, which effectively gave Italy www.abc-clio.com

claim to part of northern Ethiopia. The Italians began confiscating land for Italian settlement, but the residents resisted; Italian retaliation to the resistance culminated in their shocking defeat by Menelik’s troops at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. However, the Italians retained their colony of Eritrea, as Menelik’s army lacked the power to drive them completely out. The new civilian governor of Eritrea, Fernando Martini, who served from 1897 to 1907, abandoned the plan to settle Italians in Eritrea. Instead, he consolidated colonial rule by striving for both stability within Eritrea and good relations with Ethiopia. Eritrean stability was particularly important in light of the colony’s role in supplying soldiers to support the Italian efforts to consolidate their rule in Somalia and Libya. Thus, what became the modern country of Eritrea was established by an Italian military venture: it was the territory that the Italians were able to seize and retain. Eritrea remained an Italian colony until it was taken by the British following Italy’s declaration of war on Britain and France in 1941. In 1935 the Italians used Eritrea as a staging ground for invading Ethiopia, which they occupied for six years. At this time, the Eritreans serving in the colonial army comprised 40 percent of the entire male labor force, and Italy returned to its settler strategy for Eritrea as Italian laborers and soldiers arrived and the colony was converted into a commercial and industrial center for the Italian East African Empire. This project was short lived, as Italy was defeated in World War II and its colonial holdings were parceled out to the victors. Britain took control of Eritrea and Ethiopia and maintained them under separate administrations. The future of Eritrea was deliberated for several years by the Great

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Powers (Britain, France, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China), who were unable to agree on a solution. The Eritrean population was divided between those who wanted to unite with Ethiopia (mainly highland Christians) and those who wanted independence (mainly lowland Muslims). Ethiopia sought to acquire Eritrea in order to regain access to the sea, claiming that Eritrea had been part of Ethiopia prior to colonization. The United Nations became involved in 1950, and the United States pressed to have Eritrea attached to Ethiopia but with an autonomous government. There was considerable American interest in a communications station in Eritrea that had been built by the Italians and also concern that it would fall into Soviet hands. The federal solution seemed the one most likely to keep Ethiopia’s favor while placating Eritrean separatists. The Ethiopian government proceeded to impinge on Eritrean autonomy, imposing Amharic as the language of instruction in Eritrean schools; suppressing the Eritrean flag; and, in 1960, downgrading the Eritrean government to an “administration.” Eritrea effectively became a province of Ethiopia, losing its relative autonomy. A group of exiles in Cairo formed the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and began armed attacks within Eritrea in 1962. This insurgency continued for nearly thirty years. The Marxist-oriented Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF) eventually supplanted the ELF as the main insurgent group. In 1991, together with the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) in Ethiopia, they overthrew the Marxist regime that had taken control of Ethiopia in a 1974 revolution. Once again, the fate

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of Eritrea was up in the air. The TPLF and EPLF had made an agreement that Eritrea would become independent, but the EPLF also agreed to postpone independence until a 1993 referendum to give Ethiopia’s new government a chance to stabilize. In the meantime, the EPLF became the provisional government of Eritrea, but Eritrea lacked international recognition and the means of acquiring foreign aid to help with postwar reconstruction. Also, nearly 80 percent of the population was living on emergency relief because of the war and recurring droughts that had devastated the agricultural sector. Nevertheless, the provisional government pushed ahead with its own reconstruction plans until the 1993 referendum established an independent Eritrea.

Eritrea Today The new government of Eritrea faced a monumental task of reconstruction and development following the war, in addition to devising new state institutions and other nation-building tasks. The old colonial infrastructure had not been maintained by the Ethiopian government after it acquired Eritrea in 1952, and very little new had been built since. Recurring droughts and a lack of resources had left the agricultural sector a shambles. The EPLF, led by Isaias Afwerki, became the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) and continued as the dominant (and only legal) political power through the designated transition period (1993–1997). A legislative branch, the National Assembly, was established in 1993, consisting solely of PFDJ members. Isaias became president of the transitional government, and a constitution was drafted and ratified in 1997, though it

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did not go into effect. The PFDJ inherited the resources of the EPLF and became the main investor in the postwar economy, founding numerous “private” enterprises in construction and other sectors. In fact, the PFDJ, while remaining the only legal political organization in the country, has tried to promote itself as a mass movement distinct from the state. Everything seemed poised for Eritrea’s smooth transition to a democratically oriented independent nation. However, relations with Ethiopia became increasingly tense, and a border war began between the two countries in 1998, following the Eritrean invasion of the town of Badme, which had been one of several disputed areas. Despite a formal end to the war in December 2000, the border remains disputed, and a physical demarcation originally scheduled for 2003 has not taken place. Neither have Eritrean elections. The border war became an excuse for the transitional Eritrean government to postpone elections indefinitely, and the 1997 constitution remains unimplemented. In addition, the war with Ethiopia has set back Eritrean reconstruction and development considerably. Jericho Burg See also: Ethiopia References Connell, Dan. Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution. Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997. Marcus, Harold G. A History of Ethiopia. Updated ed. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Negash, Teketse. Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 1882–1941: Policies, Praxis, and Impact. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1987. Negash, Teketse, and Kjetil Tronvoll. Brothers at War: Making Sense of the EritreanEthiopian War. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000.

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Trevaksis, G. K. N. Eritrea: A Colony in Transition: 1941–1952. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Wrong, Michela. “I Didn’t Do It for You”: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

ETHIOPIA Ethiopia is one of two countries in subSaharan Africa that was never colonized by a European power. (The other is Liberia.) Because of this, and its rich and welldocumented history, it became an important inspiration for anticolonial movements in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. More recently, from the mid1980s, Ethiopia has become famous for drought and famine and, consequently, for being a major recipient of international humanitarian aid. The third most populous country in Africa, with seventy million inhabitants, Ethiopia is home to approximately eighty different ethnic groups; the largest are Oromo, Amhara, Tigrigna, Sidamo, and Somali. Nearly half of the population is Muslim, while Ethiopian Orthodox Christians still predominate in the central and northern highlands. Located in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia is bounded to the south by Kenya, to the west and north by Sudan, to the southeast and east by Somalia and Djibouti, and to the northeast by Eritrea, which gained independence from Ethiopia in 1991. Despite being in the heart of this conflict-prone region, Ethiopia has become a center of important political and economic activity on the continent. Its capital, Addis Ababa, hosts the headquarters of the African Union and the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Africa, among other important international organizations. Even

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so, and despite a long history of centralized rule, Ethiopia remains a nation of smallholder farmers and pastoralists, with 85 percent of the population living in rural areas.

History Accounts of Ethiopia’s long history often begin with Lucy, the name given to a 3.2million-year-old female Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found in the northeastern Afar region in 1974. Called Dinkenesh by Ethiopians (Amharic for “you are wonderful”), a replica of Lucy’s skeleton is on view at the National Museum in Addis Ababa. Other human ancestral remains have been found in Ethiopia, including Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, which eventually evolved into Homo sapiens, or modern humans. Thus, the region now called Ethiopia was a site of human evolution, and much important fossil evidence has been recovered there. Ethiopia was also one of the early centers for the domestication of plants and animals; by the second or third millennium BCE, several important crops had been domesticated, including finger millet, teff (a staple grain in the highlands), and ensete, the “false banana” that is a staple in the lowlands. The ox-drawn plow became an important feature of rural life, and it continues to be today. During the first millennium BCE, a series of states formed in what is now northern Ethiopia, participating in economic and cultural exchange with southern Arabia and the eastern Mediterranean world via the Red Sea. The state of Axum emerged as a regional commercial and military power that came to dominate the region in the first century BCE. The Axumites learned about Christianity through contact with the Roman Empire, www.abc-clio.com

and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which has its own patriarch, developed from the influence of two Syrians in the Axumite court in the beginning of the fourth century CE. Axum continued to dominate Red Sea trade until the rise of Muslim power in the eighth century. After this, the region of Ethiopia became more isolated from the Mediterranean world and lost its control over interior trade routes. The center of the kingdom moved south and eventually came under control of the Zagwe dynasty, one of whom, King Lalibela, commissioned the eleven rockhewn churches in his capital of Roha, now called Lalibela. Dating to the early thirteenth century CE, this remains one of Ethiopia’s most famous historic sites. The persistent Christian beliefs of the Zagwe dynasty gave rise to the European legend of Prester John, a Christian priest-king ruling an exotic land who had kept Muslim invaders at bay. The Zagwe dynasty eventually succumbed to the so-called Solomonic dynasty, a line of kings that fictitiously traced their ancestry back to the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Saba (or Sheba) in order to win support.

Modern Ethiopia:The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries The traditional core of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and centralized rule through feudal lords can be traced back many centuries. Modern Ethiopia was born out of conflict between this traditional core (geographically located in the northern regions of Tigray and Amhara), Muslim states to the east, and the Oromo people to the south and southwest, as well as internal conflicts between feudal lords. By the midnineteenth century, the Ethiopian state had

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expanded to the south into Oromo lands. Under a succession of emperors beginning with Tewodros II (r. 1855–1868), Ethiopian territory reached its current extent, but not without considerable conflict and resistance. Tewodros, though striving to modernize the Ethiopian state, resorted to such violence that when he went so far as to imprison the British consul, a British-led force deposed him in 1868. Tewodros was eventually succeeded in 1872 by Emperor Yohannes IV, who followed a more cautious strategy of unification and fought off an Egyptian invasion in 1876. However, the most famous of the nineteenth-century emperors, Menelik II (r. 1889–1913), succeeded not only in fending off an Italian invasion at the famous Battle of Adwa in 1896, but also in expanding Ethiopia to its modern boundaries and establishing the national capital at Addis Ababa in 1892. The defeat of the Italians at Adwa had international reverberations for many decades. It was a victory of Africans over Europeans at a time when the rest of the continent was falling under European domination. This victory and continued independence made Ethiopia a symbol of hope for blacks not only in the rest of Africa, but also in the Americas and the Caribbean. However, Menelik was not able to drive the Italians completely away, and they established a colony, Eritrea, along the Red Sea coast. Ethiopia remained independent into the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie (born Tafari Mekonnen), who succeeded Empress Zawditu, Menelik’s daughter, in 1930. The Italians occupied Ethiopia briefly from 1936, though Haile Selassie sought exile in England to avoid defeat by drawing in British involvement. The Ethiopian army continued to fight against www.abc-clio.com

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the Italians, who were driven out when Haile Selassie returned with British assistance following the Italian declaration of war on the Allies in 1940. When the British tried to incorporate Ethiopia into British East Africa, Haile Selassie turned to the Americans for support. Ethiopia thus remained an independent nation, with American military and technical assistance through the 1950s and 1960s. Haile Selassie’s success in maintaining control of Ethiopia caused his international image to attain messianic proportions, even spawning the Rastafarian movement (taken from Ras Tafari, the emperor’s former title and name) among working-class blacks in Jamaica. Haile Selassie gave the Rastafarians a land grant in the town of Shashamane, inviting them and others of African descent to live there; there are some 200 Rastafarians living in Shashamane today. Despite his international popularity, Haile Selassie’s increasingly autocratic rule led to growing insurgency in Eritrea (which the United Nations granted to Ethiopia following World War II) as well as swelling opposition among diverse groups such as peasants, intellectuals, and minority ethnic groups. The shift of American interest from Ethiopia to Egypt in the late 1960s, as well as the increase in international oil prices in 1973 and a severe famine in 1973–1974, all paved the way for a military-led Marxist coup d’état on September 12, 1974. Mengistu Haile Mariam, a major in the Ethiopian army, led the coup and established a provisional military government, popularly called the Derg (Amharic for “group of equals”). The Derg ruled as a Marxist-Leninist regime, engaging in massive nationalization of both rural and urban land. However, the regime faced a series of crises, including

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renewed insurgency in Eritrea led by the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF), a liberation movement in Tigray (the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front, or TPLF), invasion by Somalia in 1977, and a major famine in 1984–1985. Following the famine, the EPLF and TPLF entered into an alliance and were able to defeat government forces in a series of battles. Meles Zenawi, chairman of the TPLF and a new multiethnic organization, the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), and Isaias Afwerki, the EPLF’s general secretary, began planning for a post-Derg Ethiopia and an independent Eritrea with the United States. In 1991 the combined movements surrounded Addis Ababa and demanded Mengistu’s resignation. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe on May 21, 1991, and the EPRDF controlled most of the country shortly after that, ceding Eritrea to the EPLF. However, relations with Eritrea became strained, and in 1998 a two-year border war broke out between the two countries. The border has yet to be formally demarcated, pending Ethiopian acceptance of a 2002 delimitation proposed by the independent Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission.

nine ethnically based regions: Afar, Amhara, Benishangul Gumuz, Gambela, Harari, Oromiya, Somali, Tigray, and Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region. Each region has considerable autonomy, including the right to secede. The federal government consists of an executive branch (president, prime minister, and Council of Ministers), legislative branch (the House of Federation and the House of Peoples Representatives), and judicial branch (the Federal Supreme Court). The EPRDF retains a majority in the legislature, but the Coalition for Unity and Democracy gained support during the 2005 elections, and numerous smaller parties are also active. Jericho Burg See also: Eritrea References Keller, Edmund J. Revolutionary Ethiopia: From Empire to People’s Republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Marcus, Harold G. A History of Ethiopia. Updated ed. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Negash, Teketse, and Kjetil Tronvoll. Brothers at War: Making Sense of the EritreanEthiopian War. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. Sorenson, John. Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Zewde, Bahru. A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1974. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991.

Ethiopia Today The EPRDF established a transitional government with support from the United States, with TPLF leader Meles Zenawi appointed president. In 1995 the House of Peoples Representatives voted to adopt a new constitution, establishing the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, with Meles as its prime minister. Through elections in 2000 and 2005, the EPRDF retained its dominance, with Meles still as prime minister. Ethiopia’s political structure is that of an ethnic federation, with www.abc-clio.com

ETHNICITY Ethnicity identifies and classifies people into groups according to perceived cultural similarities and differences of beliefs, values, customs, histories, and any other relevant views and practices that are subsequently passed on to future generations.

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The historical presence and use of the idea of ethnicity is important to understanding both transatlantic colonial history and the postcolonial world. The peoples of Africa alone belong to more than one thousand different ethnic groups. While the Greek root ethnos refers to people, nation, or foreigners, the adjective “ethnic” denotes a way of life, including shared cultural attributes and customs. The term ethnic group continues to denote minority groups outside of the dominant, institutionalized national culture. “Nationalities” then, may be seen as ethnic groups that either have, or are attempting to acquire, sovereignty for their own country. The complex contemporary interaction between ethnicity, racial classification, and nationalism is part of the history of European and American expansion. Ethnic differences were often used to create colonial hierarchies. Ethnic groups also emerged in resistance to colonialism. In the postcolonial world of Africa and the Americas, ethnic identity is both a source of political cooperation for marginalized peoples within nations; it is also the focus on conflict in places where sharp disparities in access to political power and economic resources appear to exist along ethnic lines. Commonly held cultural characteristics encourage a sense of ethnic identity in which members of an ethnic group define themselves as “us,” while outsiders become a derisive “them.” For example, the Tewa Pueblo Indians assigned the ethnic group name (or ethnonym) Navajo, meaning “thieves,” to their Native American neighbors in the southwest United States. The Navajo, however, call themselves Diné, meaning “the people,” a common practice among many Native American and African ethnic groups. Therefore, ethnicity is not simply a concept used to help explain social www.abc-clio.com

consensus; it also highlights differences from others by creating boundaries that represent the “social organization of cultural difference”(Barth, 1998, p. 6). Different definitions of the function of ethnicity exist. Some explain ethnic group affiliation as a rational choice based on individual and group interests. For example, in nineteenth-century Rwanda, one could move from being a subjugated Hutu to an upper-class Tutsi by accumulating wealth and status. This characterization of ethnicity as socially constructed, however, has been criticized for failing to account for long-term ethnic group stability, neglecting the role of context on individual choices, and downplaying enduring emotional attachments to particular groups. Some observe that ethnic identity can be contextual and that people share ethnic identities and discuss, negotiate, and modify them in everyday interactions potentially leading to cultural change. For example, in the western Darfur region of Sudan, Fur agriculturalists also own cattle; however, they prefer to leave their livestock in the care of the pastoralist Baggara. As their investments in cattle increase, Fur sometimes choose to take up the pastoralist lifestyle. They become marginal nomads rather than remaining wealthy landowners who risk losing their accumulated livestock capital. Accordingly, writes Gunnar Haaland, “Through the nomadization process individuals are thus sloughed off from Fur local communities and eventually incorporated into Baggara communities” (1998, p. 65). Ethnicity and ethnic group labels also provide important political distinctions. Politicized movements of group solidarity such as the Jola peoples’ Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC)

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in southern Senegal continue to assert their uniqueness by referring to indicators of ethnic authenticity such as language and dress. Ethnicity, then, often encompasses politically charged identification categories based on political autonomy (the nationstate), sociopolitical organization (e.g., tribe), and phenotypic biology (race). When an ethnic group is believed to have a biological basis, it is called a race. Race is not significant as a scientific concept; however, distinguishing people based on physical traits (e.g., skin color) remains a socially acceptable practice in many countries. The U.S. Census Bureau still classifies the American population according such racial categories as “white,” “black,” and “other.” A homogeneous American nationality (i.e., the melting pot), then, is perhaps more of a symbol rather than a reality. Ethnic consciousness in the United States continues to rebound, although deciding on ethnic labels can be a difficult exercise. Ethnic, racial, and national classifications are often problematic because they vary according to the traits they represent. Hispanic, for example, is an ethnic label lumping millions of people from Spanish-speaking countries together. The term Latino, on the other hand, is a more geographic label, including the Portuguese speakers of Brazil as well as Spanish-speakers from Central and South America and the Caribbean. Members of these and many other ethnic groups often switch between identifying themselves based on their genesis, nationality, religion, gender, or race, depending on need and circumstances. In the context of European colonial expansion beginning in the fifteenth century, ethnicity, along with race, became a rhetorical tool used by the colonizers to promote www.abc-clio.com

and solidify advantageous ideological and geographic boundaries. The hierarchical nature of eighteenth-century capitalism reinforced rigid state boundaries on a global scale. States (or independent, centralized political units) claimed legitimacy based on their representation of distinct populations, whether national, cultural, or ethnic. This remains often the case today, even though, due to migration, conquest, and colonialism, ethnically homogeneous nation-states make up less than one-fourth of the world’s countries. For example, of the more than fifty countries in Africa, many have more than twenty ethnic groups within their borders. Nigeria alone has more than 350 different ethnic groups, all with their own customs, languages, and traditions. Colonialism has had a major role in shaping how ethnic groups and identities developed. Precolonial groups such as the Khwe Khoe, Basarwa, and San peoples of the Kalahari Desert often acquired newly synthesized ethnicities based on attributions from political agents such as colonial European officials and anthropologists, who, for example, labeled all Kalahari peoples under a single derogatory term, the Bushmen. In addition, disparate peoples lumped together and forced to coexist often created ethnic identities to strengthen their group’s cohesion, including the linguistically similar Khoisan of southern Africa. Reinforced by proximity, cultural familiarity, and social pressure, members of an ethnic group often procreate primarily with members of their ethnic group, perpetuating ethnic identification patterns. By the nineteenth century, modern states and empires blanketed the globe. The arbitrary boundaries of empires, and—in the twentieth century—the subsequent boundaries of newly independent nations

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in Africa and the Americas invariably left confined minority populations among dominant groups that controlled national politics. This multicultural, multiethnic challenge forced minority group members to seek equality based on individual rights or on outright political autonomy for their people, the latter leading to a proliferation of smaller enclaves with little political power on the global scene. Divisions within multicultural societies habitually result in interethnic tension or outright conflict fought over limited resources. In 1985 George Simpson and J. Milton Yinger identified six types of interracial and interethnic relations defined along a continuum stretching from cooperation to outright aggression. These relationships are (1) pluralism, (2) assimilation, (3) legal protection of minorities, (4) population transfer, (5) long-term subjugation, and (6) genocide. Despite the diversity and differences in economic opportunity among many plural societies in Africa, ethnic groups such as the Wolof, Serer, and Pulaar of Senegal strive to live together in peace and harmony. The homogenizing effects of nationalism and global culture, however, eat away at diverse societies through cultural, social, and physical integration and assimilation. By legally protecting minorities through official policies such as the civil rights laws in the United States, subnational identities continue to provide marginalized groups a political platform. On the negative side, the belief that one’s own culture is superior to others (ethnocentrism) can lead to long-term subjugation, ethnic conflict, ethnocide, and in its extreme form, genocide. Ethnocide, often an overt policy of colonial regimes, is the application of political coercion and force to pressure marginalized peoples to give up www.abc-clio.com

their way of life. For example, the Portuguese implemented a colonial policy of Assimilação, in which subjugated peoples could attain Portuguese citizenship by owning land and speaking and writing the colonizer’s language. This policy weakened the defining markers of the originally colonized ethnic groups. Assimilationist practices like this still abound, where powerful factions coerce ethnic minorities into fitting in with their dominant culture or, alternatively, experiencing discrimination. Within the United States, the end of the treaty system signaled the erosion of Native American sovereignty. A focus on individual rights advanced assimilationist government policy aimed at the Native Americans from the 1880s to the 1930s. The Dawes Act of 1871, popularly known as the Indian Homestead Act, divided up commonly held lands, portioning out private allotments and, consequently, assimilating Native Americans into American society. For example, in February 1890, the U.S. government broke a Lakota treaty by carving up the Great Sioux Reservation of South Dakota to accommodate homesteaders. In reaction against this discriminatory policy, Lakota warriors of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation adopted a militant form of Jack Wilson’s (Wovoka) Ghost Dance religion. This religion was a syncretic mix of Native American and Christian beliefs in which ancestor spirits would avenge their mistreatment by the whites. On December 29, 1890, while attempting to disarm and relocate a downtrodden Lakota encampment, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry massacred more than 150 men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. This ethnic conflict escalated to its violent end in large part due to a misunderstanding of the Ghost Dance movement.

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Genocide, or the systematic eradication of an entire people by force in pursuit of political aims, is the outcome of ethnic identity politics taken to extreme ends. The Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust in Europe, the Bosnian genocide in former Yugoslavia, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide—where two extremist Hutu militias slaughtered an estimated one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in less than four months—attest to the power of group membership and exclusion as a motivation for human behavior. Additionally, the Darfur conflict that began in February 2003 has been described by the mass media as genocide, or “ethnic cleansing.” The Janjaweed Arab militia groups in Sudan are estimated to have killed more than 400,000 non-Arab peoples in the region. Both sides of this conflict are Muslim, and both sides are largely black in skin color. Therefore, the animosity is described by most scholars as largely ethnic (Arabs collectively termed Baggara versus nonArabic peoples such as the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa). Political and economic motives spur on the Darfur conflict; competition is fierce over scarce resources such as arable land and surface water between farmers and nomadic pastoralists in the drought-prone Sudan. Ethnicity and ethnic differences alone are neither inherently a source of cooperation or conflict between groups. Rather, people’s desire to belong to a group in conjunction with many other historical, cultural, political, economic, and even environmental factors may help explain why people interact in different kinds of consensus, cooperation, or antagonism. Brandon Lundy See also: Anthropology; Colonialism; Race, History of; Sudan (Darfur Region) References Barth, Fredrik, ed. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of

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Culture Difference. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1998. Haaland, Gunnar. “Economic Determinants in Ethnic Processes.” In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. Fredrik Barth. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1998. Hechter, Michael. “Ethnicity and Rational Choice Theory.” In Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Hutchinson, John, and Anthony D. Smith. “Introduction.” In Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Simpson, George E., and J. Milton Yinger. Racial and Cultural Minorities: An Analysis of Prejudice and Discrimination. 5th ed. New York: Plenum, 1985.

EVOLUTION, HUMAN Human evolution is British naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory and documentation of the development of the human species, originating in Africa. The similarities between humans and chimpanzees hint at an African origin of humans, and molecular evidence puts the split between the lines leading to humans and chimpanzees at roughly 5 million years ago. Soon after, perhaps 4 million years ago, a precursor of humans first walked upright. One hypothesis suggests that these animals foraged with their hands and brought food to their mates and children. This hypothesis implies kin cohesion, as may the 3.6 millionyear-old footprints in Laetoli. These are two sets in synchrony, one presumably left by an adult and the second by a child. The two had walked side by side and had perhaps been parent and child. These animals, some of which must have led to humans and others to a dead end, lived in southern and eastern Africa. The fossils from 4 million years ago are too fragmentary to permit full reconstruction of anatomy, but the

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fossils, particularly the skeleton dubbed Lucy, that date to roughly 3 million years ago provide anatomical detail. These Australopithecines were diverse. Some were slightly built, much as are humans, and others were far more robust than humans, implying great muscularity and strength. The large, flat teeth equipped the robust Australopithecines to grind plants and seeds, whereas the teeth of the gracile Australopithecines, more like ours, may indicate a diet that included meat. Females were much shorter and lighter than males, implying competition among males for mates. Australopithecines, with a large mandible and small cranium, must have resembled chimpanzees more than humans, at least in the face and head. The long arms of Australopithecines suggest that they climbed trees as well as walked on the ground, putting them somewhere between an arboreal and terrestrial existence. Around 2.5 million years ago in eastern and southern Africa, contemporaneous with the Australopithecines and in their haunts, arose a hominid with a small mandible, flat face, and a brain larger than that of Australopithecines. Paleoanthropologists designate this new hominid the first of our genus, Homo habilis, and assert that at least two species of Homo existed by 2 million years ago. With our genus, the size difference between males and females declined, implying that nearly all of these hominids who reached adulthood mated. These may have been the first hominids to fashion stone tools, presumably for the butchering of carcasses. Whether they hunted or merely scavenged remains open to question. The use of stone tools may have driven the increase in brain size, and roughly 2 million years ago these precursors of humans radiated into still other species with even larger brains. These new www.abc-clio.com

species, Homo ergaster and Homo erectus, were the first to use fire, and Homo erectus was the first to migrate out of Africa. The prevalence of animal bones in sites occupied by Homo ergaster and Homo erectus evidences a regular supply of meat that could have come about only through hunting. Hunting implies cooperation among networks of people and so implies social cohesion. With Homo erectus, people began their long trek around the globe. Despite settling Asia, Homo erectus did not cross the Bering Strait into the Americas. The ocean then barred the first migrants out of Africa from the Americas. As Homo erectus spread from Africa into Eurasia, this species branched into others. Over time these species developed larger brains and a wider array of stone tools, making it difficult to determine which populations were or were not human in anatomy and behavior. Neanderthal, for example, had a brain slightly larger than that of modern humans, undermining the caricature of him as a witless brute. Moreover, these populations of archaic sapiens surely interbred, making it likely that genes from these early inhabitants of Africa and Eurasia persist in contemporary populations of humans. In a striking contrast with earlier hominids, archaic sapiens, notably Neanderthals, buried the dead, possibly with flowers and other items that bespeak a ritual. Burial and the religious trappings that surround it imply that archaic sapiens were human in a meaningful sense, though they did not make art and may not have spoken a language. Our species arose perhaps 130,000 years ago in Africa and, like Homo erectus, settled Asia, replacing archaic sapiens wherever he went. Homo sapiens crossed the last cultural Rubicon, developing language and art. During these last 130,000 years,

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human evolution has been less biological than cultural. About 40,000 years ago Homo sapiens settled Siberia and may have immediately crossed the Bering Strait— then land because the ocean had sunk as the polar ice caps absorbed water—into the Americas. Fossils of Homo sapiens in the Americas, however, date only to the last 12,000 years, weakening the conjecture that humans had entered the Americas earlier. Having made the long journey from Africa to the Americas, humans found themselves isolated in the New World. The retreat of the glaciers 10,000 years ago returned the ocean to its present depth, once more submerging the land bridge between Asia and the Americas and preventing humans from migrating between the continents. Independently from one another, humans in the Old and New Worlds developed agriculture, cities, and writing. Despite these similarities, people in the Americas on one side of the Atlantic and in Africa and Eurasia on the other side created separate worlds. In contrast to the people of Africa and Eurasia, the Amerindians domesticated few animals, had no draught animal, used the wheel only as a toy, and had rudimentary metallurgy and shipbuilding. Isolated from the rest of humanity, the Amerindians did not develop immunity to the diseases that swept Eurasia and Africa. Christopher Columbus rejoined the Old and New Worlds; began an exchange of microbes, plants, and animals between the two regions; and nearly obliterated the Amerindians. Homo sapiens, in the form of Africans and Europeans, replaced the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas as they had replaced archaic sapiens in Eurasia. Christopher Cumo See also: Columbian Exchange; Diaspora

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References Lewin, Roger. Principles of Human Evolution: A Core Textbook. Malden, MA: Blackwell Science, 1998. Lewin, Roger. Human Evolution: An Illustrated Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Science, 2005. Oppenheimer, Stephen. The Real Eve: Modern Man’s Journey Out of Africa. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004. Powell, Joseph F. The First Americans: Race, Evolution, and the Origin of Native Americans. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

EXODUS The Exodus, or departure of the Israelites from Egypt of the Old Testament, has religious, social, and political significance through its new application by colonized peoples. The biblical story of Exodus tells how Moses—adopted as a child by the Egyptian royal family—makes common cause with his fellow Hebrews (or Children of Israel), who are toiling under the tyrannical regime of the Pharaoh, and draws on special God-given powers to persuade the Pharaoh to “let my people go.” Parting the waters, Moses leads them across the Red Sea with the promise of a land “flowing with milk and honey” they could call their own, although they must spend many testing years in the wilderness—and defeat more adversaries—before they arrive at the banks of the Jordan to take possession of Canaan, under Moses’s successor, Joshua. The narrative has proved an enduring rhetorical resource for a wide range of political projects. Not surprisingly, it has been of particular service to settler societies, whose pioneers—in New England and South Africa, for instance—modeled themselves on the Hebrews of the Old Testament, who fled the oppression of Egypt to

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build a new land, even if it meant displacing those already living there. If the story helps an emerging people or nation to make sense of itself, the consequences may vary considerably. It can encourage complacency and justify conquest; but it can also provoke self-doubt, as the would-be Israelites wonder if they could ever equal their elected forebears and if perhaps they are not actually divinely “chosen” at all. But more complex, ambivalent uses of Exodus are evident among those who find themselves ruled by those settlers, whose “milk and honey” they are (often violently) prevented from sharing. In South Africa, where “Ethiopian” churches seceded from mission churches (notably in1896 and 1917), black religious leaders often identified themselves as new Moseses, with a mission to free their people from white domination. A notable example is Albert Luthuli, leader of the African National Congress in the 1950s, who called his autobiography Let My People Go (1962), its title a Mosaic injunction addressed to the Pharaoh-like guardians of apartheid. But it is probably in North America where Exodus motifs have been reworked most extensively. Slaves in the antebellum South appropriated the religious teachings to which they were exposed in such a way as to give prominence to the Old Testament narratives that told of the political history of the Jews. This made their Christianity as much about secular as spiritual redemption, even though the secular message had to take on coded and indirect forms in the sermons and spirituals likely to be overheard by their masters. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass tells how, nevertheless, “a keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of ‘O Canaan, sweet Canaan,/I am www.abc-clio.com

bound for the land of Canaan,’ something more than a hope of reaching heaven.” If the Pilgrim fathers interpreted the crossing of the Atlantic as a voyage from bondage to freedom, a voyage metaphorically repeated, as it were, in the War of Independence (as the original proposals for the Great Seal of the United States suggest), for slaves it meant something different. For them, neither the colony nor the republic was a promised land but rather a new Egypt to which they had been forcibly removed. The authors of slave narratives frequently invoked Exodus. Henry Bibb, for instance, recalled in his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave (1849), how he dreamt of escape to Canada from Kentucky, but found “the river Ohio was my limit. To me it was an impassable gulf. I had no rod wherewith to smite the stream, and thereby divide the waters.” Yet others found ways of yoking this biblical rhetoric not to individual, clandestine flight but to collective direct action. Thus, we find it in the appeals to their followers by the leaders of slave insurrections such as Gabriel Prosser (1800) and Denmark Vesey (1822). An uncompromising twist is also apparent in Henry Highland Garnet’s stark assertion, in his Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (1848), that there can be “no redemption without the shedding of blood” for “the Pharaohs are on both sides of the blood-red waters!” This divergence of interpretations should remind us that the Exodus story may be read in many different ways. A further complication in African American cultural history arises when the Egypt of Exodus (as a land of slavery) coexists with the Egypt as it is reconfigured in Ethiopianism, which draws on other parts of the Old Testament

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(and other sources) in order to make Africa into a symbol of a golden age of black freedom and achievement (as illustrated by Edmund Blyden’s lyrical description of the Pyramids). Those promoting black emigration to Liberia sometimes paradoxically represent the return to Africa as a crossing of the Red Sea back to Egypt. The figure of Moses also often provokes ambivalent reactions. Harriet Tubman, who led thousands of slaves North on the Underground Railroad, became affectionately known as the “Moses of her People.” White abolitionists sometimes acquired a similar distinction—John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, for instance. But Lincoln’s ignominious successor, Andrew Johnson, was found rather less worthy of the comparison. As Charles Sumner remarked: “They should have had a Moses as a President; but they had found a Pharaoh,” indicating the ever-present danger that a powerful leader always poses, however well-intentioned (cited in Du Bois, 1956, 314). Many twentieth-century black figureheads have donned the mantle of Moses, from Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, through Joe Louis, to civil rights leaders of the 1960s. The best illustration, perhaps, is Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous final speech, on the eve of his assassination: “Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. . . . And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land.” Whether such a “Messiah complex” is politically empowering for the masses who are meant to follow remains a matter of considerable debate. In 1917 Robert S. Abbott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender, coined slogans (“The Flight Out of Egypt”) and promoted songs (“Bound for the Promised Land,” “Going into Canaan”) in an attempt

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to encourage southern blacks to migrate to the North. And the Exodus motif has proved an enduring strain in African American popular music. Consider, for example, the many recorded versions of “Go Down Moses” (by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, The Golden Gate Quartet, and Archie Shepp, among others). Consider, too, the persona celebrated by Isaac Hayes on his album Black Moses (1971) (wittily dissected in Chester Higgins’s biblical liner notes) or Joe Smooth’s inspirational deep house anthem “Promised Land” (1989). There are memorable reworkings of Exodus in literature, too, above all, perhaps, in poems that draw on the idioms of the black preacher. “Ante-bellum Sermon” (Paul Lawrence Dunbar) and “Let My People Go” (James Weldon Johnson) are the best-known examples. Melvin B. Tolson’s planned volumes after Harlem Gallery (1965) were to have been: Egypt Land, The Red Sea, The Wilderness, and The Promised Land. But the most extended treatments have been the verse narrative, Moses, a Story of the Nile (1869), by Frances E. W. Harper, and Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). In daring to make Moses an Egyptian, Hurston at once confronts the vexed relationship of race and political leadership in the United States (for her allegory makes Moses a black man) and foregrounds the influence of Africa on black Christianity in the New World (for, at a more literal level, we understand that he is heir to pagan traditions of healing and magic, such as voodoo). “Africa has her mouth on Moses,” she writes, and Hurston is more aware than most of the black Atlantic significance of the biblical figure, who also appears in the

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syncretic religious formations of Haiti, for example, where he is fused with the Dahomean god Damballa. Perhaps the most popular “Black Moses” of the diaspora was the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, leader of the United Negro Improvement Association. At the height of his fame in the 1920s, he could boast millions of followers in a vast network of political, cultural, and entrepreneurial initiatives worldwide. Garvey continues to be invoked as a mythic figure in contemporary Rastafarianism and is no doubt known to many through reggae lyrics. At the turn of the twenty-first century, however, his global reach has certainly been surpassed by his fellow countryman, the Jamaican singersongwriter Bob Marley. It is salutary to consider the striking discontinuity between the self-aggrandizing and racially exclusive “back to Africa” rhetoric of Garvey and the inclusive and joyous first-person plural exhortations of the title-track of Marley’s Exodus (1977)—a glimpse, perhaps, of an open-ended narrative of liberation, in which leaders do not become heads of state, and where the point is not to secure territory but to keep on moving. Alasdair Pettinger See also: Civil Rights Movement; Egypt; Garvey, Marcus; Johnson, James Weldon; Marley, Robert Nesta; Slave Revolts / Maronnage; Slavery (History). References Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Douglass, Frederick. Henry Louis Gates, editor. Douglass: Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1996. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Russell & Russell, 1956.

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King, Martin Luther. James M. Washington, editor. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982. Schwartz, Regina M. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Smith, Theophus H. Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Walker, David, and Henry Highland Garnet. Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles: An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005.

EXPLORATION AND EXPLORERS, AFRICA Exploration in Africa, done for goods and resources, the dissemination of religion, political domination, and adventure, has had an impact on all parties involved. After a brief overview of the earliest explorations of Africa, this entry looks at Central Africa as the location that exemplifies the dominant goals and perspectives of European explorers of Africa. Following this will come a brief discussion of East, West, and southern Africa, and finally the Sahara. The reference in Herodotus’s fifthcentury BCE work, Historiai (The Histories), to a three-year circumnavigation of Africa by “a Phoenician crew” under Egyptian king Neco (610–595 BCE) documents the earliest known exploration of the continent. Hellenistic interest in what Herodotus knew as “Libya” is reiterated in the secondcentury CE Geo¯graphike¯ hyphe¯ ge¯ sis (Guide to Geography) of Ptolemy, which places the

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Nile’s source in the Lunae Montes (Mountains of the Moon). The fourteenth-century Rihlah (Travels) of Ibn Battu¯ta in West Africa, the sixteenth-century Descrittione dell’ Africa (1550; A Geographical Historie of Africa) of Moroccan traveler, Leo Africanus (c. 1490–c.1554), who twice visited West Africa, a few accounts of Ethiopia, and records of coastal explorations (typically emphasizing commerce and navigation) constitute the major literary records of subSaharan Africa before the eighteenth century. It is important to remember, however, that from at least the mid-first-millennium CE, traders (usually Muslim) had been traveling back and forth across the Sahara from North Africa to West Africa as well as by sea from the Arabian Peninsula to East Africa. Because the bulk of accounts of African exploration are from Europeans, however, we will focus on Europe’s exploration of that continent, beginning with Central Africa. In the Western imagination, the essence of the continent that has stood for “darkness” has been—as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) attests—Central Africa. Europe has perceived Central Africa as the most primitive, most savage, and thus most “other” location within the landmass that German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (1837; The Philosophy of History), describes as “compressed within itself . . . enveloped in the dark mantle of Night . . . . [where lives] man in his completely wild and untamed state. Such presumptions have made Central Africa the antipode against which European difference—and supposed physical, intellectual, and spiritual superiorities—could best be proven. Europeans associated Central www.abc-clio.com

Africa with Herodotus’s description of Africans as “dog-headed,” other Africans as “headless . . . with eyes in their breasts,” and still others who “squeak like bats.” But Central Africa might also hold the answer to what Herodotus stated as “the Nile and the riddle of its source,” so it is no wonder that perhaps the three most famous explorers of Africa—David Livingstone (1813–1873), Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), and Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904)—distinguished themselves there. Explorers sometimes approached this cartographically blank region from the north, as with Heinrich Barth (1821–1865), who traveled from 1850 to 1855, and Georg Schweinfurth (1836–1925), who traveled from 1868 to 1871. But more typically they came from the south, as did David Livingstone, who traveled in 1850–1856, 1858–1864, and 1866–1873, and from the east, usually setting out from Zanzibar, as John Hanning Speke (1827–1864) and Richard Burton (1821–1890) did for their 1856–1858 expedition and later with James Augustus Grant (1827–1892) and Speke for their 1860–1863 travels. Scottish missionary David Livingstone set much of the tone and goals of nineteenthcentury travel in Central Africa when he abandoned the proselytizing of missionary work to focus on the “Commerce and Civilization” that Livingstone declared in his Missionary Travels (1856) would “open” the continent to both Christianity and the abolition of slavery—the proclaimed raisons d’être of much European involvement in sub-Saharan Africa. The importance of rivers to commerce catalyzed not only the quest for the source of the Nile but also the quest to map the major rivers of the region.

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The nineteenth-century traveler in Central Africa typically carried a noblesse oblige air of paternalism, typified by Burton’s description of indigenous people, in The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860), as “of those childish races.” Explorers’ texts and accompanying illustrations magnified the crisply dressed European, whose stature and faraway gaze signified an ability to lead, and these scenes typically included a national flag as Central Africa became an arena in which not only men but, metonymically, nations competed to prove themselves and their “natural” superiorities. Livingstone may have declared himself a “pioneer of Christianity,” but “grop[ing] in the interminable forests” for the source of the Nile, he “stuck to it like a Briton,” as reported in Livingstone’s Africa (1872). What these explorations opened Central Africa to, however, was not enlightenment, but approximately 10 million deaths under the exploitative and brutal rule of Belgian king Leopold II (1835–1909), sovereign of the État Indépendant du Congo (Congo Free State) from 1885 to 1908. In addition to finding the source of the Nile, the “grail” of Central African travel was to pass through it and escape alive (akin to the Greek heroes who visited Hades and returned to tell the tale), a feat first accomplished by Stanley, as told by him in his Through the Dark Continent (1878). In East Africa, however, the goal was most certainly to answer the riddle set out by Herodotus by finding the Nile’s source. Speke solved this more than 2,000year-old riddle in 1858 and published the answer (Lake Victoria) in his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863). In West Africa the main goals were to map that region’s major river, the Niger, www.abc-clio.com

and to visit the fabled center of commerce and learning, Timbuktu. Expeditions generally traveled either south from Tripoli (Libya) or east from Senegal. It was largely poor Irishmen (Daniel Houghton) and Scotsmen (e.g., James Bruce, Mungo Park, Walter Oudney, Hugh Clapperton, and Alexander Gordon Laing) who represented Britain in early nineteenth-century expeditions to West Africa. It was the destitute Frenchman, René August Caillié (1799–1838), who took the guise of a Muslim to become, in 1828, the first European known to enter Timbuktu—and thereby win a prize from the French Geographical Society. He described his journeys in his Journal d’un voyage à Temboctou, dans L’Afrique Centrale (1830; translated as Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo [1830]). Of particular importance to West Africa were the travels of Scottish botanist Mungo Park (1771–1806), who, although he died during his second exploration of the Niger River, set scientific and ethnographic standards of observation that influenced many who followed. At the other end of the century, Mary Kingsley made two trips to West Africa, and her account in Travels in West Africa (1897) showed not only that English etiquette, including “a good thick skirt,” could be maintained in “the African forest,” but that grit and courage were not characteristics solely of men. More importantly, Kingsley proved herself a sympathetic ethnographer attuned to detail and to the lives of women. Perhaps because of the early and spreading presence of Europeans in the less “glamorous” southern Africa, the explorations there are, for the general reader, the least interesting. Lacking the great rivers, mountains, and fabled cities of the farther north, and with more of a focus on setting

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up mission stations and studying the flora and fauna, narratives such as Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (1842), by Robert Moffat (1795–1840), are slower and more intimate. Also slower in pace are the narratives of Sahara Desert exploration, but with these comes a grandeur and often an inspiring spirituality. While early-nineteenth-century travelers to West and Central Africa typically saw the Sahara as something to “get through,” in the mid-nineteenth century this desert increasingly became a goal in and of itself. The best early example of this is Heinrich Barth’s detailed and highly observant five-volume Reisen und Entdeckungen in Nord- und Central-Afrika in den Jahren 1849 bis 1855 (Travels in North and Central Africa: Being A Journey of an Expedition Undertaken Under the Auspices of H. B. M.’s Government in the Years 1849–1855, published in 1857). As with the exploration of the dense Congo (or Zaire) River basin of Central Africa, the goal to a great extent has been to explore this greatest of all deserts and return to tell the tale. But additional focal points of the Sahara include the veiled Tuareg men, the nearly time-halting serenity of oases, the rock art, and encountering (or even joining) caravans. Of all the continents, Africa is the one most associated with exploration and explorers. Africa has long been a place to explore and find things: the source of the Nile, fabled cities, the Mountains of the Moon (the Ruwenzoris), snow-capped mountains on the equator, Stanley finding Livingstone. It has been a continent of

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beauty, stark contrasts, and a diversity of articulate and developed cultures largely unappreciated by early explorers. Africa has often been the primitive “foil” against which the Western explorer, and by extension the Western world, has defined itself. Exploring Africa has also often been transformed into a trope for either traveling back to a more primitive time or for descending into the primitive unconscious of the human id. What this tells us is that the exploration of Africa has long been more about the traveler than about the place called “Africa”; it has been about using that continent to define or inspire or test or enrich explorers and the Western cultures those explorers stood for. In this sense, Africa has “served” not only the West’s economic needs—though cheap labor and natural resources—but also the West’s psychological needs. Kevin M. Hickey

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See also: Colonialism; Denver African Expedition; Kongo; West Africa References Barth, Heinrich. Travels in North and Central Africa: Being A Journey of an Expedition Undertaken Under the Auspices of H. B. M.’s Government in the Years 1849–1855. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857. Forbath, Peter. The River Congo: The Discovery, Exploration, and Exploitation of the World’s Most Dramatic River. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. Translated by John Sibree. New York: Prometheus Books, 1991. Hibbert, Christopher. Africa Explored: Europeans in the Dark Continent, 1769–1889. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.

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F FALASHA (BETA ISRAEL) Falashas, Ethiopic for “strangers,” is the name given to black Jews who lived in the northwestern part of Ethiopia. According to tradition, the Falashas (or Beta Israel, as they call themselves) are the descendants of Menelek, the son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba. While the origin of the Falashas is a mystery, it is likely that they descended from Jews who immigrated to Ethiopia during the early years of the Christian era. It is certain, however, that they broke away from mainstream Judaism before the Mishnah was completed around 200 CE. The Falashas, a religious minority in a Christian country, had a complex relationship with Ethiopian Christians. The two groups were culturally and racially similar in many ways, and the two religions had a long history of influencing, converting, fighting, and sharing with each other. Judaism as practiced by the Falashas was very different from other forms of Judaism. Whereas they kept the Sabbath and Passover and practiced dietary restrictions and circumcision, Falashas were unaware of the Mishnah and Talmud traditions. They did not use Hebrew as their sacred language and did not celebrate Purim and Hanukkah. Their Judaism was also different in that Falashas incorporated certain conventions of

the Ethiopian Christians into their religious practices. They had a common calendar, they used the same sacred language (Ge’ez), they observed circumcision of both males and females, and they divided their places of worship in the same manner. The Christian institution of monasticism also played an important role in their religious and secular life for nearly a century and a half after its introduction by a fifteenth-century Christian monk who converted to Judaism. Since the Christianity practiced by Ethiopians had strong roots in many Judaic influences and in the Old Testament rather than the New, there were even instances of Falasha lay clerics relying on Ethiopian Orthodox churches for their education and the production of their sacred texts. In Ethiopia most Falashas made their living in agriculture—but only as tenant farmers, since land ownership was limited mainly to Christian government officials and military officers. Other Falashas were blacksmiths, weavers, potters, and construction workers. The Falashas were recognized as Jews by the Sephardi chief rabbi in 1973 and the Ashkenazi chief rabbi in 1975. This recognition allowed them automatic citizenship in Israel. As a result of famine, civil war, and the Falashas’ desire to emigrate, Israel, with

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diplomatic assistance from the United States, lobbied the Ethiopian government to allow them to relocate to Israel. On May 24 and 25, 1991, the Israeli military airlifted over 14,000 persons in Operation Solomon. An earlier, clandestine attempt in 1984, Operation Moses, had airlifted to Israel over 8,000 individuals. In 1992, 4,000 more left Ethiopia for Israel. Today, all but a handful of Falashas have immigrated to Israel. Unfortunately for the Falashas, however, Israel has not proven to be a paradise, as evidenced by their major demonstration in 1996 to protest the racism manifested against them. Kathy A. Campbell See also: Judaism; Religion (Africa) References Naim, Asher. Saving the Lost Tribe: The Rescue and Redemption of the Ethiopian Jews. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. Quirin, James. Evolution of the Ethiopian Jews: A History of the Beta Israel (Falasha) to 1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

Psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon was a leading intellectual of the anticolonial and Black Power movements of the 1950s and 1960s. He also worked with the National Liberation Front during Algeria’s struggle for independence. (Algerian Ministry of Information)

FANON, FRANTZ (1925–1961) Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquan-born soldier, psychiatrist, and a pan-African scholar and activist. He was one of the foremost scholars on the psychology of oppression. Although born in the Caribbean nation of Martinique, Fanon is perhaps most closely identified with the African nation of Algeria, for which Fanon fought during the latter nation’s war for independence from French colonial rule. Furthermore, although he was trained as a psychiatrist, Fanon probably is best-known as a pan-African scholar-activist, thanks largely to such classic anticolonial treatises as The Wretched of the Earth (1965), Black Skin, White Masks (1967), and A Dying Colonialism (1970). www.abc-clio.com

At first glance, it might seem ironic that Fanon chose to attend medical school in France, the nation that had colonized not only his birthplace of Martinique but also his future adoptive home of Algeria. However, Fanon was adept at mastering the tools of the colonial power (e.g., French language, French education) and subsequently using those tools to subvert colonialism. Fanon’s unique psychiatric perspective, infused with black militancy, was so revolutionary in scope that even the left-leaning existentialist perspectives of such French intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre—who wrote the preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth—were tame in comparison.

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According to Fanon, the negative effects of colonialism can be seen in the racist attitudes and corresponding behavior of many persons of European descent toward persons of color, as well as the self-hatred and corresponding behavior of many persons of color toward each other. This is not to say that all persons of European descent are racist, or that all persons of color engage in self-hatred. Nevertheless, Fanon argued, so many persons of European descent and so many persons of color accept the prevailing racial hierarchies in colonized nations around the world that in general, race relations were, are, and always will be marked by gross social inequities—that is, unless persons of color rise in armed struggle against their white oppressors. In his writings on the pan-African concept of Négritude (i.e., affirmation of one’s physical and cultural blackness as a countervailing force against antiblack racism), Fanon provided an intellectual bridge between the concept of “Africanisms” among black Americans (proposed by sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois at the beginning of the twentieth century) and the concept of racial identity development among black Americans (proposed by such post–civil rights era, post–black power era psychologists as William Cross). Fanon did not invent the concept of Négritude. (The concept already had been championed by Aimé Césaire, whom Fanon admired at one time). Nevertheless, Fanon’s writings on Négritude helped define the subject matter of black studies in general (and black psychology in particular) during the 1960s. Like Du Bois, Fanon was renowned as a scholar-activist. Unlike Du Bois, Fanon explicitly and consistently advocated the violent overthrow of colonial regimes around the world. One might be tempted to conwww.abc-clio.com

clude that the difference between the approaches of Du Bois and Fanon to eliminating social inequities around the world is akin to the difference between the approaches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to eliminating social inequities specifically in the United States. However, just as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were more similar in ideology than one might imagine, so too in hindsight were Du Bois and Fanon. Both Du Bois and Fanon believed that sustained political action was necessary to achieve social equality. Among personality theorists in the discipline of psychology, Fanon’s originality rivals that of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler. However, authors of mainstream personality textbooks rarely mention Fanon and never accord him the same status as Freud, Jung, or Adler. In contrast, scholars in the multidisciplinary field of black studies frequently draw upon Fanon’s insights regarding the impact of colonialism upon black personality development. With the possible exception of Du Bois, no other social scientist has mounted as formidable an intellectual challenge to mainstream views on race and personality as has Fanon. Stanley O. Gaines Jr. See also: Black Power Movement; Colonialism; Decolonization, African; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Négritude; Pan-Africanism References Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1965. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. London: Cox & Wyman, 1970. Gendzier, Irene. L. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. London: Wildwood House, 1973. McCulloch, Jock. Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon’s Clinical Psychology and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

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FARRAKHAN, LOUIS (1933–) Louis Farrakhan is the current minister and leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan, who leads the Nation of Islam movement, calls on African Americans to rise into a position of power, one that whites, he believes, will never concede willingly. Blacks must achieve agency through abstemiousness, devotion to Allah, discipline, selfreliance, and pride in their African roots. Born to West Indian parents in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Louis Eugene Walcott was raised in a strict Episcopalian milieu in the Boston area, where he spent most of his boyhood after his father’s early death. He excelled in music (he is an accomplished violinist), track sports, and academic subjects. His racial consciousness was raised in the 1950s, when the struggle against segregation reached a heightened level of intensity; he came to doubt the sincerity of Christianity, thinking that no godly religion could have tolerated whites’ age-old racism. Farrakhan—calling himself “The Charmer”—pursued a singing career that changed dramatically in 1955. In that year he heard the Nation of Islam leader, Elijah Muhammad, speak at a Chicago club and decided instantly to convert to Islam. Committed to the Nation, he became Minister Louis X, preaching at the Boston mosque. He recorded propagandistic songs and also wrote dramatic presentations such as The Trial, in which “The White Man” is found guilty of innumerable crimes. Farrakhan remained with Elijah Muhammad’s faction of the Nation when Malcolm X split from the movement in 1964. Farrakhan suggested that Malcolm deserved to be shot for his alleged treachery. Soon after, Malcolm X was assassinated, but no direct link between Farrakhan and the gunmen has ever been proved. But the www.abc-clio.com

Louis Farrakhan addresses his followers at the Nation of Islam’s Saviour’s Day Convention at the University of Illinois-Chicago Pavilion on February 23, 1997. The convention included a live speech via satellite from Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi and taped messages from the leaders of Ghana and Nigeria. In his speech Farrakhan condemned American values and said that African Americans should form a nation of their own. (AP/Wide World Photos)

apparently coincidental sequence of Farrakhan’s outburst followed by Malcolm’s murder fuels much of the continual fire of controversy and insinuation that follows Farrakhan everywhere. A defendant in the murder trial notoriously announced that he considered Farrakhan’s remarks to be a statement of instruction. Farrakhan carries baggage from the assassination, but for many years he has revered Malcolm publicly and has sought reconciliation with Malcolm’s relatives. To Farrakhan’s dismay, Elijah Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Mohammad, was named as the new leader of the Nation when the old leader died in 1975. In 1977 Farrakhan revolted against Warith, forming a new Nation of Islam. Since then, Farrakhan has been the Nation’s public face.

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Farrakhan’s public profile has been vastly enlarged since 1984, when the Nation’s policy of political abstention changed to allow support for Jesse Jackson’s presidential bid. Farrakhan also became highly conspicuous as a figure of hatred for Jews, in particular, as he articulated blatantly anti-Semitic sentiments and made comments about Adolf Hitler’s supposed merits. Farrakhan has colorfully attacked Jewish “bloodsuckers” who worship in “synagogues of Satan.” Such hateful rhetoric has ensured that Farrakhan is internationally notorious. Since 1986 he has been banned from entering Britain by the United Kingdom’s Home Office, ostensibly because his more extreme remarks may cause violence between Britain’s Caribbean, Jewish, and Muslim populations. Although tested by prostate cancer, Farrakhan remains a loud oppositional voice in America. He organized the spectacular Million Man March on Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill in 1995 and has vociferously supported Iraq against the U.S. military attacks of 1991 and 2003. Farrakhan is feared by many whites, who see him as a vicious proponent of a dangerous black supremacy; many African Americans worry that black self-esteem is harmed by his insistence on the race’s victim status and his rigid stress on the importance of collective black goals. Other critics complain that Farrakhan attacks the political system from the outside when he could perhaps achieve more by engaging with it. His many supporters, however, maintain that Farrakhan is a latter-day prophet who can lead African Americans from a position of abject subjugation to one of righteous domination. Kevin De Ornellas See also: Islam, African American; Malcolm X; Mohammed, Warith Deen; Nation of Islam

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References Alexander, Amy, ed. The Farrakhan Factor: African-American Writers on Leadership, Nationhood, and Minister Louis Farrakhan. New York: Grove Press, 1998. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century. New York: Touchstone Press, 2002. Haskins, James. Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. New York: Walker, 1996. Madiga, Arthur J. Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His Nation. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Nation of Islam, Official Site of The. http://www.noi.org.

FAUSET, JESSIE (1882–1961) Jessie Fauset was the most published black female novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. As literary editor of The Crisis, the official journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), from 1919 to 1927, Fauset also discovered and promoted many leading black artists, although much of the credit has been wrongly attributed to W. E. B. Du Bois. Her own work has generally been dismissed as assimilationist. Born in 1882, the daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister in Philadelphia, Fauset was the first black woman to graduate from Cornell University with a Phi Beta Kappa key, having been rejected by Bryn Mawr on account of her race. She later gained a masters degree in French at the University of Pennsylvania and also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. Fauset spent fourteen years teaching French at the famous M Street High School in Washington, D.C., during which time she worked on NAACP discrimination suits in the still-segregated capital. A frequent contributor to The Crisis, she moved to Harlem to work as literary editor on the journal in 1919.

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Fauset published four novels: There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1929), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy: American Style (1933). In her fiction, Fauset offers a commentary on the trials of being a black woman in America. She suggests that there are alternatives for women beyond marriage and children and depicts numerous successful, economically independent, and sexually confident women. Fauset works toward a “feminist” alternative, where her heroines, though not always successful, are almost always aware of the obstacles that have been placed in their way because of both their race and their gender. Although well reviewed by much of the black and white press at the time, Fauset’s novels have since been heavily criticized because of a tendency among black literary critics to glorify proletarian and folk traditions while disparaging those who depict the middle class. More recently, feminist critics have argued for a sympathetic consideration of the progressive aspects of Fauset’s novels, especially her implicit criticism of the conventions of black women’s romance novels. Moving beyond her novels to her short stories, poems, and articles for The Crisis and the black children’s magazine, The Brownies Book, critics have developed a better understanding of the PanAfrican consciousness in her work. Fauset supported the Pan-African Congresses organized by Du Bois, and in 1919, as one of the few black women in attendance at the second Congress, she delivered an address in which she sent a greeting from the black women of America to the women of Africa. When Fauset left The Crisis in 1927, she taught at De Witt Clinton High School in New York City and continued to teach and publish after her marriage in 1929. Like many black women writers, she was unable to recapture www.abc-clio.com

her earlier literary success after the Harlem Renaissance. She moved to New Jersey in 1940 and died in 1961, long before her literary contribution was fully recognized. Kate Dossett See also: Crisis, The; DuBois, William Edward Burghardt; Harlem Renaissance; Pan-Africanism References Sylvander, Carolyn W. Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer. Troy, NY: Whitson Publishing, 1981. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

FÉDEON REBELLION On the Caribbean island of Grenada in the late eighteenth century, the Fédeon Rebellion was an antislavery, anticolonial insurrection led by both whites and blacks. On March 2–3, 1795, an alliance of free coloreds, white French, white British, and enslaved Africans launched one of the most spectacular, sustained, bloody but ultimately unsuccessful antislavery, anticolonial, proto-nationalist struggles of the Age of Revolution. Led by Julien Fédeon, the free colored owner of Belvidere estate, which was the revolutionary headquarters, the rebels controlled all Grenada’s territory except the capital, St. George’s, for nearly two years until Lieutenant General Ralph Abercromby’s British Expeditionary Force suppressed this incipient revolution. The liberated territory had its own capital, Gouyave—re-named Port Libre—and other rudiments of a polity. Chattel slavery was abolished and residents were considered citizens of the French Republic. Actual planning began in 1793, but the rebellion originated in more than a century of slave resistance and also in French discontent over British rule since 1763, but particularly after Grenada’s restoration to Britain

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in 1783, which followed a short-term French occupation begun in 1779. Between 1784 and 1795, the British Protestants used the state apparatus to repress the French Catholics. In 1793 the appointment of the Catholics’ chief persecutor, Ninian Home, as lieutenant governor of Grenada precipitated the revolution. Preparations were advanced before Victor Hugues arrived at Guadeloupe from France in 1794 to implement the National Convention’s decree that abolished French slavery and extended French citizenship to all in her colonies. This was part of France’s strategy to regain her eastern Caribbean empire and capture British-held territory. Hostilities began with simultaneous attacks on the towns of Grenville and Gouyave. Within twenty-four hours, Home and important members of the British establishment were captured. After the British refused to surrender the colony to General Fédon and the revolutionaries, Grenada experienced internal war. Home and the others remained prisoners at Belvidere until April 8, when a bungled British attack resulted in the execution of Home and forty-seven others. Tensions between Hugues and the Grenadians over the conduct of the internal war eventually split the revolutionary forces into two, with units of the French republican army at Port Libre and the Grenadians at Belvidere. By early 1796, Grenada was virtually an independent black republic. After Abercromby’s arrival in the Caribbean in March, the balance tilted permanently against the revolutionaries. On June 10 the French surrendered. Belvidere fell on June 19. Those revolutionaries captured alive were found guilty of high treason, hanged, and decapitated. Their properties were confiscated. Others were transported to Central www.abc-clio.com

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America. It was the end of French social power in Grenada. Fédon was neither captured nor made to suffer an ignominious death. He is believed to have escaped to Cuba, where, oral tradition holds, he died. He is a legend and inspiration to Grenada’s artists, nationalists, and revolutionaries. Fédon’s Rebellion defies categorization. The involvement of free coloreds and white British and French made it an insurrection against British rule. The participation of thousands of mostly African-born enslaved made it a slave rebellion. The French military and civilian presence made it an episode of St. Lucia’s 1797 Brigands’ War. The Fédeon Rebellion failed to abolish slavery and capture Grenada for republican France, but British rule and slavery were shaken to their very foundations. C. M. Jacobs See also: Slave Revolts/Maronnage References Brizan, George. Grenada: Island of Conflict. London and Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education, 1998. Cox, Edward. Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1763–1833. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984. Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1982. Devas, Raymund P. History of the Island of Grenada: 1498–1796. St. George’s, Grenada: Carenage Press, 1964. Steele, Beverley A. Grenada: A History of Its People. Oxford: Macmillan Education, 2003.

FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S EQUALITY MOVEMENTS, AFRICAN African feminism has had a complex intellectual history in a postcolonial sociopolitical context. Although it is clear that women throughout Africa, from ancient

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times on, worked to effectuate their own power and agency within traditional African societies, a conscious or official “women’s movement” did not emerge in a substantial way until the twentieth century. Feminism often emerged in tandem with independence movements and thus, in Africa, has often been tied to larger questions and problems of postcolonial economic development and the fight against imperialism. In turn, women in Africa have expressed their needs and sought equality in a complex relationship of dialogue, support, tension, and conflict with feminisms from the West, especially the United States. Two phases may be seen in the development of women’s movements in Africa from the time of independence onward. The first phase is what is called a “Women in Development” approach. A good deal of scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s dealt with women and their role in the development of Africa. Women’s organizations were tightly tied to the newly formed national governments and, after the United Nations’ Decade for Women, to those of their members who were given formal posts within the government to work on women’s development. Because of these close ties, however, the efforts of many women’s groups were hobbled by the agendas of the political parties to which they were linked, and women’s issues were sidelined in favor of the larger project of getting votes for the party. This began to change in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when women’s organizations began to assert their independence from governmental organizations. Partly, this was the result of the increasing presence of multiparty systems in many parts of Africa. In addition, there was growing emphasis on fund-raising through the creation www.abc-clio.com

of independent organizations, many of which availed themselves of the increased funds poured into Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) by industrialized nations. These NGOs became more willing to fund causes like women’s liberation, which allowed many of the women’s groups arguing for their rights to make more efficacious statements. The influence of the international feminist movement, and particularly the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference, helped to mobilize women in Africa into new organizations. These organizations tended to be local in origin and in agenda, speaking to the varied needs of women throughout Africa and not attempting to be larger, overarching organizations dealing with all of women’s needs. In addition, rather than attempting to work with developmentalist agendas, these groups more often found themselves lobbying for politically strategic issues that directly impacted women’s lives—issues such as increased access to education and political office for women as well as domestic violence, rape, and other matters requiring legal protection for women. These groups were also able to mobilize women across ethnic divides. For example, the Women’s National Council in South Africa was a group able to cut across traditional boundaries between groups in order to voice more powerfully the concerns of women. Women’s concerns, then, have come to be addressed in increasingly diverse ways in many parts of Africa, and in ways often different from the approaches of Western, including U.S., feminists. For instance, many African feminists use the idea of motherhood with which to gain moral authority to argue for the collective rights of women. Additionally, tensions along class lines among women have been visible. With an

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increasing number of women having access to university educations since independence, there is sometimes a divide between those with and without university educations and between older and younger generations of feminists. Overall, however, these differences have not stemmed the tide of women’s organizing. Several key voices and publications provide examples of the diversity of African feminisms. Combining photographs, data, and commentary, Buchi Emecheta and Maggie Murray’s Our Own Freedom (1981) emphasizes the many social roles that African women play. Emecheta and Murray assert the need for women in Africa to arrive at their own versions of freedom, while reminding women of the West of the need to understand the everyday lives of women in Africa before making interventions in African matters that, though wellintentioned, are often ineffectual and sometimes even harmful to the women they are trying to help. Florence Abena Dolphyne, a former chair of the National Council on Women and Development in Ghana, observes that Western women and African women who had joined together in solidarity throughout the 1970s and 1980s often found themselves at odds regarding how to argue for the rights of women in Africa. Many Western feminists found themselves arguing for the right of women to be free of what they saw as the patriarchal institutions of polygamy, child marriage, female circumcision, and the birthing of too many children. However, many women from Africa found themselves on the defensive over these matters, trying to explain the deep cultural roots that some of these practices had. While Western feminists argued for immediate governmental action via www.abc-clio.com

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legislation, African feminists argued for more gradual approaches that included education programs and the improvement of overall living conditions for many of the women, often rural, who experienced these practices in their everyday lives. In addition, Western feminists seemed to want to avoid issues of international political import to women in Africa—issues such as South African apartheid and conflicts in the Middle East—while women in Africa argued that these issues, too, touched the lives of women very deeply and should be meaningfully addressed by women. They were not, for the African women, a distraction, but a very vital part of liberating women from the oppression they faced, oppression that in some cases implicated the global imperialist system. Dolphyne argues that economic survival and development are of primary concern for African women, and that education combined with sound economic policies and goals will help Africa and Africa’s women to move forward in their own liberation. In African Feminism (1997), Gwendolyn Mikell attempts to explain the differences that keep U.S. and African feminists from uniting. Mikell argues that African feminism emerged under different conditions and with different goals because African feminism comes out of a resistance against Western hegemony in Africa and not out of a bourgeois capitalist context. Because of these different circumstances, the “rights” focus of U.S. and European feminism finds little place in the emerging African feminism. Instead, Mikell argues, African feminism is heterosexual and pronatal in emphasis and is more concerned with daily issues of survival, such as food, housing, and the power relations that underlie how resources are distributed. Thus,

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the types of community formed through African feminist alliances tend to be less individualistic and more closely related to shared cultural experiences and these alliances’ links to political power. Because of these different forms and emphases, there have been a number of difficulties between Western and African feminists in forming links to fight women’s inequality. Controversies over female circumcision in Africa, for instance, are viewed differently from the Western feminist point of view than they are in many places on the African continent. In addition, women’s reproductive rights and capacities have been areas of conflict among U.S. and African feminists, as Mikell asserts that African women do not view reproduction and their roles as mothers as oppressive and stultifying, in contrast to some early U.S. feminist theorists. Instead, many African feminists see the roots of their oppression in their lack of control over the economic circumstances of their lives due to Western interventions both during and after the colonial period. Oyèrónké Oy˘ewùmí argues that Western feminists have too long sought to define African women and their relation to motherhood in terms that are imperialist and inaccurate. Instead of the metaphor of sisterhood, for instance, Oy˘ewùmí argues that alliances across the idea of motherhood are more appropriate in light of familial and social relations within Africa. Because what most women share in Africa is motherhood, she argues that this should be the basis of identification among women. African feminism must be united around the varying identities held by all members of African society, not just a biological consideration of gender, which, despite inroads of Western imperialism, remains secondary to other identity markers such as age, status, and www.abc-clio.com

class. In addition, she complicates the relationship between black American feminists (or womanists) and Africa, noting that they often partake in many of the same imperialistic discourses as their white American counterparts in relation to Africa, and that they allow their own image of Africa to override the realities of life in Africa. Overall, African feminism might be said to be charactized by an interest in the common struggle with men against the imperial exploitation of Africa by Europe and the United States; a recognition of inequities springing both from traditional African institutions and those that have been added through colonialism; and a belief that the local material conditions of women’s lives must dictate the goals of the African feminist movement. Rather than simply importing Western feminist agendas, African feminism seeks to determine which institutions need to be changed within African society for the betterment of women. African feminism also seeks to respect the economic autonomy of African women and works to establish their continued prosperity in connection with collective action for the benefit of all women. It draws critically on traditions from both the West and its own communities to create equality and empower women. Kelly O. Secovnie

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See also: Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, U.S.; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Movements, Africa and African Diasporic; Reproductive Health and Family Planning in Africa, U.S. Influence on References Davies, Carole Boyce, and Anne Adams Graves, eds. Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1986.

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FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S EQUALITY MOVEMENTS,TRANSATLANTIC 453 Dolphyne, Florence Abena. The Emancipation of Women: An African Perspective. Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1991. Emecheta, Buchi, and Maggie Murray. Our Own Freedom. London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1981. Mikell, Gwendolyn, ed. African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Oy˘ewùmí, Oyèrónké, ed. African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. Tripp, Aili Mari. “Transformations in African Political Landscapes.” International Feminist Journal of Politics. 5, no. 2 (July 2003): 233–255. Wieringa, Saskia, ed. Subversive Women: Women’s Movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. London: Zed Books, 1995.

FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S EQUALITY MOVEMENTS, TRANSATLANTIC Women’s transatlantic equality movements refer to woman-centered struggles, political drives for legal equality, and coalitions departing from mainstream political and class cultures that oppress minorities. For centuries, women have played integral roles in challenging and resisting oppression in Africa and the Americas. Though the struggle for gender equality involves countless individual leaders and organizations, some of its general motivations and characteristics become clearer when examined through the unique lens of the transatlantic. From colonial rebellions to current political battles for legislation, the efforts of women’s equality movements tell a complex story of perseverance and desire. Their narrative is one of coalition, of building bridges, and of creating communities that reflect the multilayered and complex interests of different interest groups. At the same www.abc-clio.com

time, the histories of African feminists and their movements also reveal their connections with and departures from U.S. feminism as they demand their own places in dialogues revolving around transnational women’s movements. During the colonial period that displaced Africans to the Caribbean, women were extremely active in the maintenance of African traditions and spiritual expression, and they used these aspects of their heritage to subvert oppressive systems of power. While many slaves practiced their religious rituals under the auspices of Catholicism, enslaved women in Peru rejected their European masters’ faith in the sixteenth century. Thus, African women retained powerful positions as priestesses, persons with extremely important societal value. Often, they used religious practices like obeah to challenge the oppressive power structures. African female slaves figured prominently in eighteenth-century rebellions as well. For instance, Jamaicans still talk about the legendary slave priestess, Grandy Nanny, who ran away to the Blue Mountains and led a guerrilla resistance against the British. Women were also active in antislavery movements in the Spanishspeaking Caribbean. Mariana Grajales, for example, is a widely known figure of protest in Cuba. During the Ten Years’ War from 1868 to 1878 in which Cuba fought for its independence from Spain, Grajales organized a hospital for the wounded and was then exiled at the end of the war. These specific examples of women fighting for independence are emblematic of a larger trend in Africa and its diaspora of resistance against not only hegemonic systems of patriarchy but also more general sources of racist, classist, and misogynist governmental and institutional oppressions.

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For instance, many women’s equality movements have united people from different class strata to fight against the very political and class structures that would divide them. In the two years of 1921 and 1922, working-class women in El Salvador, aligned with the growing Labor movement, rebelled against their government and called for the Meléndez administration to release political prisoners. Women have worked across class lines in Chile as well, forming coalitions like the Centros de Belén de Zárraga in 1913 to protest the exploitation of women workers in the mining industry. In Mexico, women from various class strata united to resist Cortez’s conquest and later to play active roles in the nineteenth-century Mexican wars of independence. Jamaican women also fought together to enact sociopolitical change. They were involved in the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, and they later contributed to the decolonization movement that was ideologically fueled by leaders like Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. This ongoing demand for equal rights persisted in the sustained suffrage movements of the twentieth century. Even though women did not win the right to vote in Nicaragua until 1955, they lobbied for suffrage rights as early as 1932, when the U.S. military administration denied the request. And in El Salvador, women’s voting rights were constitutionally recognized in 1938, though women did not actually vote until 1950. The alliances among women traversed class status. Everyone was thus able to play a part in achieving a more egalitarian society. While women from the upper and middle classes used their positions to write about sociopolitical ills, women workers were able to use land to gain more social autonomy in their relationships with men, as well as economic autonomy. www.abc-clio.com

Like these women freedom fighters in the Americas, African women have also unified themselves across class strata to advance their struggle for equality. Rural women in places like South Africa historically have been discriminated against, commonly being accused of witchcraft. One of the interventions by women came in the form of social organizations that bound women together. For instance, in the early twentieth century, Zenzele Clubs worked to establish autonomy for women in an oppressive society controlled by a white hegemony. These clubs were based on the African Women’s Self-Improvement Association and the Bantu Women’s Home Improvement Association, both of which taught domestic skills to women from rural and working-class areas. During their run from the 1920s through the 1950s, these organizations played integral roles in maintaining equal rights efforts of poor women. Much of the focus of these women, despite their backgrounds, involved an opposition to a broad, boundary-crossing sense of social injustice that permeated class, race, and gender. Thus, women played an active part in the Kenyan revolts against colonial powers in the mid-twentieth century, risking imprisonment and even death at the hands of their enemies in order to exact social change. Along with the alliances they formed in a general resistance to governmental oppression, African women have come together through their roles as mothers. During the colonial period in Zimbabwe, motherhood was extolled both by European missionaries and by African women themselves. For the missionaries, maternity perpetuated Christian ideals of womanhood. For the women, bearing children ensured more social opportunities both politically and economically.

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This common elevation of motherhood helped to form connections even between African politics and European religion. Women employed Methodist prayer circles in attempts to bolster their fertility. Also, in the mid-twentieth century, a religious sect called the Mai Chaza Church branched off from the Wesleyan denomination and emphasized the sacred position of motherhood. The maternity that bonded women despite class or racial variance became a prominent factor of unification of women in Central and South America and the Caribbean as well. Perhaps the most well-known of the coalitions formed out of a sense of maternal duty is the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the May Plaza) in Argentina. This group was founded in 1977 by mothers who crossed paths when frantically searching for their children who had gone missing after the government sanctioned their “disappearances.” These women used their common agenda to demand their children back from the state that had terrorized them. Though they had not previously been politically active, the Madres became a strong and effective societal force. Like women in Zimbabwe, the Madres used their social position as mothers to stimulate political change. The historically esteemed role of maternity in the transatlantic is one of the ways in which women’s movements in Africa and the Americas have distinguished themselves from traditional U.S. feminism. Maternity has not been a source of obligatory marginalization. Rather, it has been channeled as a positive force for coalition building that has demanded respect, even from government leaders. However, several associations have found feminism a useful rallying point around which to organize their agendas. www.abc-clio.com

First published in 1976, the Brazilian newspaper Nós Mulheres (We women) was the first to identify itself as “feminist.” Significantly, many of the equality movements and groups in the latter half of the twentieth century consisted of women from working-class, urban areas. Again, emphasis on gender has not limited equality movements to resistance against misogyny; rather, these movements have spread their domain into the broader concerns of humanitarianism. Nós Mulheres, for example, dealt with concerns of working-class women but still retained strong support from the domestic women of the middle class. In the latter half of the twentieth century, more and more formal groups and alliances throughout the Americas adopted feminist affiliations and agendas as part of their overall objectives. Gender was a singular political issue in the preparatory meetings leading up to the International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City in 1975. Then, beginning in 1981, women began to meet at biannual encuentros (encounters) to discuss feminist concerns as distinctly politicized ends unto themselves. With each encuentro taking up new and specific issues like race, sexuality, and autonomy, feminists—or feministas—mapped out aims and motivations in a unique vision of women’s equality. Women maintained the practice of working with other women of different ethnicities and classes to attain their general goals. Throughout the 1970s, they protested governmental oppression and worked to provide their own solutions to meet the needs of marginalized women. In Brazil, rural and urban women alike worked for greater ownership rights and equality in working conditions. Race became a central issue for Afro-Brazilian

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women, and they created the United Black Movement (Movimento Negro Unificado, MNU) to counter racist ideologies. The 1970s and 1980s also saw the rise of projects like the Feminine Amnesty Movement (Movimento Feminino pela Anistia, MFA) and the Cost of Living Movement (Movimento contra a Carestia). Such activity in Brazil has led many to pinpoint 1979–1981 as the peak years of organized women’s equality struggles, as evidenced by groups such as the First Paulista Women’s Congress. The 1970s and 1980s proved important decades for African women’s movements as well. Feminists in South Africa organized Rape Crisis in 1976, one of the oldest organizations of its kind, in Cape Town. It received an enormous response from women who formerly had no place to turn. Another pivotal coalition at this time was WAG, the Women’s Action Group, formed in 1983 as a resistance to the Zimbabwe government’s Operation Clean-up, a discriminatory effort by the government to clear out prostitutes and the homeless from the streets. The attempt soon got out of hand as the military and police began arresting urban professionals like teachers and nurses, most of whom were black women. WAG intervened by publishing documents concerning the excessive arrests and presenting them to the prime minister. They also insisted that victims of Operation Clean-up receive reparations from the government to alleviate their losses. Although the women who were arrested never received any financial consideration, WAG’s unrelenting efforts contributed to the government’s eventual termination of the program. After the successful end of Operation Clean-up, WAG organized a meeting attended by women from various class strata in 1984. www.abc-clio.com

Out of that gathering came the widely read but unpublished report, Women of Zimbabwe Speak Out (1984), which spoke to many of the social concerns of American women. WAG has remained active in Zimbabwe, jump-starting initiatives like the 1990 Women’s Writers Project and maintaining a focus on creating coalitions and intersections of women from various backgrounds and experiences. The late 1980s also saw the surfacing of another focus for African women—the vast number of mistreated female Somali and Sudanese refugees. In the early 1990s women worked to end South African apartheid, and during 1994 they not only witnessed the results of their efforts in the region’s first democratic elections, but also wrote the Women’s Charter for Effective Equality, which shed light on violence toward women. More recent dialogues and movements in these areas of women’s concern have included attempts to bring attention to women’s rights in the midst of sociopolitical and religious unrest in the Sudan. Coalitions have played important roles in the past two decades in the Americas as well. Chilean women with socioeconomic concerns united in the early 1980s to publish the notable socialist magazine Furia. Other concerns have begun to be addressed by feminists in the 1990s. For example, the United Nations Conference on the Environment in 1992 received valuable information and support from transnational feminist ecologists who formed the Planeta Femea, or Women’s Planet, as distinct space for women. Other groups and organizations with diverse supporters but common goals include the Iniciativa Feminista, which began in the early 1990s out of the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter held in Argentina. In Nicaragua,

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women united in 1996 to form the National Coalition of Women, which gave a common initiative to women with various political allegiances. Women have tirelessly worked throughout the Transatlantic World to attain power through numbers and to achieve equal rights in areas of gender, race, class, and sexuality, to name a few. Their efforts are numerous and span Africa and the Americas, and the vast majority of them maintain a focus on celebrating diversity through coalitions and bringing women of varying background together to work for common goals. These goals cover a lot of ground, from the revolutionary call in 1994 of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation for gender equity to the international summits and conferences that have published documents chronicling women’s status around the world and enumerating their continued efforts. The strong and energetic work of feminist and women’s equality movements has carried on into new generations of transatlantic coalitions, and women are still today carving out vital spaces for themselves on an international level. Bringing differences of identity and experience to the fore and disrupting the hegemonic systems that would marginalize them, women’s movements in Africa and the Americas continue to use their historical struggles as a foundation of unity and a means of speaking all the more powerfully to a global audience. Merinda Simmons References Goetz, Anne Marie, and Shireen Hassim, eds. No Shortcuts to Power: African Women in Politics and Policy Making. London: Zed Books, 2003. Higgs, Catherine, Barbara A. Moss, and Earline Rae Ferguson, eds. Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the

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Americas. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002. Jaquette, Jane S., ed. The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Participation and Democracy. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. Kampwirth, Karen. Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Navarro, Marysa, Virginia Sánchez Korrol, and Kecia Ali. Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Restoring Women to History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Twine, France Windance, and Kathleen M. Blee, eds. Feminism and Antiracism: International Struggles for Justice. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Waller, Marguerite, and Sylvia Marcos, eds. Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S EQUALITY MOVEMENTS, U.S. The feminist and women’s equality movements in the United States developed over two centuries in what are known as first, second, and third wave feminisms; this historical development has had a complex relationship to the interventions of various groups, including African Americans, lesbians, and feminists from around the Atlantic World. The intersection of the African Diaspora and feminism and the pursuit of both racial equality and gender equality in the United States has involved positive cross-racial engagement, but also exclusions of various parties with agendas that have been considered either too specialized, unrelated, or in direct competition with a specific feminist movement’s goal. Many strands of both African American and international feminist thought have emerged in response to the exclusions of feminist movements that limited their involvement with

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race issues. These strands of response have resulted in the promotion of stronger crossracial engagement on issues of equality.

First Wave In Feminist Theory (1985), Josephine Donovan cites the Enlightenment as the start of American feminist thought, noting Abigail Adams’s efforts to include women’s concerns in the country’s new Constitution along with the contributions of such figures as Judith Sargent Murray, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Sarah Grimké, who crafted “On the Equality of the Sexes,” A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and Letters on Equality respectively, in accordance with the natural rights theory of the Enlightenment that had originally been offered only to white, propertied males. The Declaration of Sentiments, drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others in July 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, was also based on natural rights theory and, accordingly, mimicked the tone of the Declaration of Independence. Using natural rights theory as a model for their demands, the women of this era asserted their rights under the rubrics of rationality, the equality of women’s and men’s souls, the need for education, and the right of the individual to pursue her own agenda independently from others. These Enlightenment values led to the demand for political rights within the American system. The other strand of nineteenth-century feminism was what Donovan calls cultural feminism. Once again grounded in Enlightenment values, this strand stressed the broader changes that needed to take place in the culture for women to be considered equal and rational citizens. At the same time, unlike the more politically minded reformers, who emphasized the similarities www.abc-clio.com

between men and women, the cultural feminists (Margaret Fuller being a prime example) stressed the differences between them in an effort to show how women’s unique cultural qualities could bring about social reform. A good deal of the challenge to the cultural domination imposed on women came through questioning the Christian Bible and the ways that it was used against women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible and Matilda Goslyn Gage’s Woman, Church, and the State both critiqued the Bible and its use in women’s oppression. Throughout the nineteenth century, then, we find a dual emphasis on culture and politics and a demand for the expansion of women’s natural rights at both levels. One of the large controversies surrounding the first wave of the feminist movement resulted from its initial alliance with the abolitionist movement and its subsequent distancing from that movement. In White Women’s Rights (1999), Louise Michelle Newman traces the feminist’s alliance with abolitionists as a surface alliance that, in fact, depended on the devaluing of black women (and men) in order that white (which she defines as meaning, in nineteenth-century parlance, a configuration of persons who were Anglo-Saxon, American, Caucasian, civilized, Protestant, etc.) women could affirm their rights alongside white men. The philosophy that bolstered this affirmation was Social Darwinism and later an imperialist philosophy that was taking hold in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These discourses offered only tokenism to black women within the movement, a tokenism that was most popularly acknowledged in Sojourner Truth’s speech in 1851 titled “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” Along with other African Americans of the day,

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Sojourner Truth theorized the ways that white women were excluding black women from the movement and thus drew attention to the discourse on race that feminism was to encounter again and again throughout its history. Although many white women in the early feminist movement were exposed to the ideas of Truth and others, they steadfastly refused to address the needs of black women in any programmatic way. Instead, the elevation of black women was said to be their own problem, one that would come along with their civilization’s evolution. With whiteness as the preeminent category, then, all other hierarchies of race, class, and even religion fell into place beneath it. As white women sought their liberation from the white male patriarchy, they nonetheless held their privileged possession of whiteness as their birthright and as an evolutionary benefit that should accrue to them alongside the white men from whom they demanded their rights. The civilizing of the rest of the world could take place when white women were granted their right to “bring up” the uncivilized portions of the world right alongside of white men. Thus, the discourses of Christianity, imperialism, and social Darwinism worked together to create what Newman calls the racial origins of the feminist movement. The movement for black (men’s) suffrage, which did not include women’s right to vote, caused a rift and controversy between early leaders of the feminist movement and some of black male suffrage’s earliest proponents, such as Frederick Douglass. When black male Americans achieved the vote with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, many of the women who had worked for abolitionist causes felt betrayed. It would be another fifty years before the www.abc-clio.com

first wave of feminists achieved their ultimate political goal of representation through enfranchisement, but the lingering effects of the debate within feminism on the issue of race would continue.

Second Wave Josephine Donovan applies the term “radical feminism” to the resurgence of the women’s movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. In this era, too, the movement was connected to the struggle for the rights of black Americans, as many of the women who later became part of the feminist movement were involved in the Civil Rights Movement that was taking place in the 1960s. These women, both black and white, having played vital roles in the radical movements of the New Left of that decade, but not having received equal treatment with the male activists, found themselves with the skills and wherewithal to argue for their own rights as women along similar lines that civil rights workers had argued for their rights as African Americans. Nonetheless, until recently this background was not the focus of most research on the origins of the second wave of the feminist movement. Instead, the focus has been on some of the “germinal” works of the movement, such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The former attempts to theorize patriarchy through an examination of the ways that relationships between men and women are not simply intimate matters, but also political matters. Millett uses the analogy of the relationship between the races in the United States, noting that the rule by one “collectivity” over another (e.g., whites over blacks) has been acknowledged as political, while that same type of rule, when applied to women, is seen as solely

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personal. She suggests, then, that while racism is going the way of rule by aristocracy in the United States, the issue of men’s rule over women is urgently important to recognize as a political reality in need of reformation. Backing up the claim that the personal is a matter for politics, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) attempts to investigate “the problem that has no name” (p. 15). This problem, she stated, was encompassed in the various ways that American women were moving backward in the fields of education, marriage, the world of work, and relations with men. Friedan names the problem as that of the suburban housewife, the American wife who is supposed to be the envy of the world but who has no sense of her own fulfillment, only the mystique of that fulfillment through the entrapment of material goods to make her life comfortable. This work, along with Millett’s, forms the locus of early feminist interventions, which encompassed the idea of raising women’s consciousness of their oppression, of naming the personal as political, and of fighting for the rights of women to make their own destinies. Another aspect of the second wave of feminism was the expression of sexuality and the ways that it was implicated in the patriarchal system that ruled women’s lives. Coming in the wake of the so-called sexual revolution, feminists began to question the roles that they as women were expected to play as sexual objects. This questioning produced a great deal of resistance to the feminist agenda, with those opposed to the women’s movement labeling feminists “lesbians” as a way to insult them. A number of opponents of the women’s movement sought to discredit it through this attack on women’s assertion of a sexuality free from male oppression. www.abc-clio.com

Unfortunately, a number of feminists responded to this attack by targeting lesbians within their own organizations as scapegoats. Although the gay rights movement had been developing alongside the feminist movement, and many lesbians were avid advocates of women’s rights, they sometimes were rejected by the larger movement organizations. Over time, lesbians began to form their own feminist organizations and to theorize the relationship between heterosexual oppression and patriarchy. Eventually, mainstream feminist organizations began to incorporate gay rights as part of their platforms, recognizing the relevance of the struggle of lesbians to the struggle of all women.

Third Wave “Third wave feminism” is a sometimes controversial term, both from the viewpoint of some of the women who would consider themselves modern proponents of women’s rights and by those feminists who came of age in the 1970s. On the one hand, some third wave feminists are uncomfortable with the label “feminist,” while some second wave feminists see the third wave as nontheoretical, uncommitted, or both and question the need for a new “wave” when there is much work to be done to advance the revolutionary social change begun by second wave feminists. A good deal of dialogue and thought has gone into theorizing the third wave, and not without some conflict. In Catching a Wave (2002), Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier argue that there is a great need for a third wave of feminism, as inequities in U.S. society continue, especially at the higher levels of power. Some bill this sort of feminism as a reversion to individualism and see the need for organization and consciousness raising

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of the kind that was done in the second wave. In short, the status of third wave feminism is still, in some ways, under debate. The backlash against second wave feminism has played a part in third wave feminist agendas, with some wishing to embrace the aspects of the second wave that were useful, like raising consciousness, while rejecting those that were not, like conformity and racism. From the perspective of some second wave feminists, third wave feminists come across as ungrateful and as lacking in knowledge. Typically, then, the relationship between second and third wave feminists has been framed as a sort of intergenerational conflict. Writers like Dicker and Piepmeier, though, argue for the continuity between the two groups and for the possibilities of a reinvigorated feminist movement that addresses the issues of inequality that continue to plague American women into the twenty-first century. Rather than perpetuating what they see as a type of martyr motif in earlier feminist movements, third wave feminists seek to exercise individual agency over their personal behavior. In addition, the third wave strongly emphasizes everyday activism to empower women and men for political and social change.

African American Feminist Interventions By the early 1980s many women of color in the United States were arguing against some of the racist and classist assumptions made by the mainstream women’s movement. Theorists like Angela Davis, bell hooks, and others criticized white feminism as a middle-class institution that did not take into account the experiences of black women in America. Davis’s Women, www.abc-clio.com

Race, & Class (1981) insisted on the historical investigation of the black woman’s experience during slavery as a prerequisite for understanding black women’s struggle for social emancipation. Since many black American women still existed in working conditions akin to those of slavery, Davis argued, much can be learned about black female experience in America today by looking at the historical precedents that controlled how black women could work, and thus survive, in American society. Through examining the ways that women’s lives intersect via their class and racial status as well as their status as women, Davis hoped to move the discussion of black women’s liberation forward. In addition to Davis, bell hooks has been one of the early and continuing influences in the feminist movement. Her book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism picks up on Sojourner Truth’s theme from the first wave of feminism and expands on it to help readers understand the very specific histories of African women during the time of slavery. She also examines the dynamics within colonial American society that contributed to the psychological trauma of slavery, not just for black men, but also (and perhaps especially) for black women. Among other considerations, black feminists differed from white feminists of the second wave because they attempted to fight on several fronts against sexism, racism, and class oppression. This multitiered agenda created both an opportunity for alliance and a challenge. African American feminists admitted to difficulty in gathering support from both black women in fighting sexism. One of the central reasons for their resistance, the black feminists argued, was the limited resources black

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women possessed simply to survive. Also, fighting the system would also involve a risk to many black women’s fragile sense of stability within American society. Nevertheless, black feminists continued to argue for a feminism that would overthrow the patriarchal and capitalist status quo in order to fight the battle for equality. In this sense, the black feminists brought a different focus to the feminist movement, moving it from an argument for individual rights to an argument for the collective rights of women while recognizing the particularities of experience encountered by the various groups of women in the United States. During this same period of time, a number of lesbians, black and white, began to speak out against the heterosexism that they saw both in society at large and within the ranks of the women’s movement. They argued that compulsory heterosexuality as it was practiced co-opted both women and men into roles that oppress women through their forced identification with men, an identification that is in no way natural, but is constructed to support the patriarchy. In Personal Politics (1980), Sara Evans notes that the two major waves of U.S. feminism, that of the 1830s and 1840s and that of the 1960s, were intimately connected with the movements against racism. The first went hand in hand with the abolitionist movement, in which a number of white women participated, and the second was linked to the Civil Rights Movement, in which, similarly, a number of white women were involved. Thus, she argues that the movements for women’s rights and for the rights of black Americans were intimately connected throughout the feminist movement. Many burgeoning feminists learned lessons from the organizational and www.abc-clio.com

community and political activities involved in the fight for the rights of black Americans, she argues. Likewise, black women were instrumental in bringing issues of women’s power to the fore of discussions within and outside the movement.

Transatlantic Connections Through the interventions of African Americans and other women of color as well as from lesbian feminists, the feminist movement in the United States has faced a good deal of criticism as being connected with the patriarchal power it has sought to overthrow, particularly as it relates to white and heterosexual privilege. Recent research has begun to plumb the depths of the American feminist movement’s involvement with other parts of the world, including Africa, to look at the ways that imperialist discourses have impacted on the efforts of U.S. feminists to bring a more global slant to their analysis. Tracey Jean Boisseau’s White Queen (2004), which examines the life of May French-Sheldon, an early American feminist and explorer of Africa, provides a model for this type of historical research. By looking at the ways that French-Sheldon positioned herself in relation to Africa, the imperialist endeavor, and the new American presence on the international scene of colonialism from the 1890s through the 1920s, the study attempts to theorize the rise of feminism in the United States with the colonial and imperialist impulse in Africa and thus to show the ways in which women’s subjectivity, even in a seemingly radical era for women’s rights in the United States, was dependent on the very imperialist structure that oppressed women (and men) in Africa. As opposed to the more standard histories of American feminism, which sees it as linked mainly to Europe, this

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study is one of recent import that attempts to examine the history of U.S. feminism through the lens of national and international events concurrent with colonial and imperial domination and the rise of the U.S. role in international politics. Likewise, Karen Sacks’s “An Overview of Women and Power in Africa” (1982) affirms the way that later colonialism of the first half of the twentieth century had an impact on African women’s lives. Her analysis focuses largely on the responses of African men and women to the imperialism of the West and on the ways that women found to resist those aspects of capitalism that did not suit them. Sacks asserts that African women have their own forms of kinship and sisterhood that define their resistance to oppression and that Western forms, contrary to what many, including many feminists, might think, introduced and reproduced oppression for women in African societies. Sacks contends that the power of Western hegemony has been and continues to be so strong that feminists have reproduced the Africanist discourses of the nineteenth century well into the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. This Africanist feminist discourse involved not only a universalizing of all women as subject to patriarchy, regardless of time or place, but also placed its agenda in the privileged position of saving the world’s women from a victim status that Africanist feminism, paradoxically, promoted. Thus, second wave feminism took on its civilizing mission in a different form, attempting to socialize the women of Africa and other parts of the third world into feminist ideology and to save them from themselves. The author argues that these attitudes have done a great deal of harm and reveal the ways that Western www.abc-clio.com

feminism needs to evaluate its own theory before attempting to understand the lives of women in Africa. In addition to focusing on the imperial mindset and its conjunction with U.S. feminists, many recent studies have attempted to ground their analysis in a more materialist theoretical framework. By focusing on the lives of women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, for example, these studies attempt to take an approach to the feminist concerns of women in the third world by looking at the ways that women work, both within family structures and in the developing modernization that has been occurring in these areas of the world. By examining the means of production, they attempt to address the inequalities that women throughout the world face on an everyday basis, showing how their welfare impacts all of the world’s poor people and how the threat to their autonomy harms the whole world.

International Feminism In an attempt to forge new theories that take into account the lives of women in Africa, many have proposed a more international feminist orientation. Theorists have pointed out, however, that work needs to be done to bring together U.S. feminism and its concerns and African feminism with its issues. Tani Barlow’s “International Feminism of the Future” (2000) looks at the growing movement of international feminism coming out of the United States. She argues that more often than not, international feminism comes to be associated with capitalist and neoliberal policies that actually reinforce the inequities that they purport to remedy. In addition, Barlow sees the movement as more about consolidating

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epistemological power within a U.S. framework than really choosing to understand the lives and feminisms of those living elsewhere in the world. In order to create a truly international bond, she argues, feminists in the West need to interrogate the basis for their behavior toward Africa and other places in the world. Georgina Ashworth’s A Diplomacy of the Oppressed (1995) attempts to interrogate U.S.-based international feminism to bridge the apparently wide gaps between what she calls women of the North and women of the South. Warning against condescending maternalism, Ashworth asks the women of the North to try to understand the conditions that, in part, have been created through their own nations’ imperialist policies in the so-called third world. At the same time, she warns women of the South to not fall into a victim status and to fight practices that have been justified as cultural but which are, in fact, damaging to women, such as female genital mutilation. Through coalition building and fierce and honest self-examination, Ashworth argues, an international feminist movement can work to change the lives of women all over the world if only feminists of all areas will come to understand the parts they play in changing their own lives, communities, nations, and international politics.

connection with Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. Because of the courageous interventions of black feminists both in the United States and abroad, U.S. feminism has grown to embrace the concept of intersectionality—that is, the recognition that every woman possesses her own relationship to the concept of gender based upon her experiences. The understanding of these experiences has gone beyond the assumption that “woman” means white, middle-class, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon women of the United States and into the recognition that identity, whether formed through the rubric of race, class, religion, colonial context, sexuality, or other factors, is a matter of both personal and political import. In that sense, U.S. feminism demonstrates a continuity despite all of the conflicts within which it was (and is) formed. This continuity exists in the mantra that the personal is political. The definition of the personal, thanks to the interventions of many throughout the centuries, has helped to delineate a richer, more real relationship between the personal and the political. Kelly O. Secovnie

The Future of Feminism All of the conflicts engendered among various groups making claims on a feminist perspective seem to point to a continued relevance for the ideas, ideals, and actions of feminists around the world. Though the definitions change from context to context, the theorizing of U.S. feminism in the twenty-first century seems to be one that is likely to lead to more understanding and www.abc-clio.com

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See also: Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Movements, Africa and African Diasporic References Ashworth, Georgina, ed. A Diplomacy of the Oppressed: New Directions in International Feminism. London: Zed Books, 1995. Barlow, Tani. “International Feminism of the Future.” Signs 25, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 1099–1105. Boisseau, Tracey Jean. White Queen: May French-Sheldon and the Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Dicker, Rorym, and Alison Piepmeier, eds. Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002.

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FETU OF CAPE COAST Donovan, Josephine. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985. Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left. New York: Random House, 1980. Newman, Louise Michelle. White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Sacks, Karen. “An Overview of Women and Power in Africa.” In Perspectives on Power: Women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, edited by Jean F. O’Barr. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982.

FETU OF CAPE COAST The Fetu, inhabitants of present-day Ghana, were peoples with a long tradition of trading with Europeans. They played an important role in enabling Britain to establish itself along the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century and remained allied with Britain into the nineteenth century. Fante and Ga traditions state that the Fetu were already established, probably by the thirteenth century, along the coast when they arrived. The Fetu originally settled around ten miles inland from Cape Coast—in modern Efutu, Ghana—and then expanded to the coast. When the Portuguese arrived in the late fifteenth century, Cape Coast was one of many Fetu fishing villages. The Fetu not only fished but engaged in agriculture and salt and palm wine production and traded with various inland states and peoples. The Fetu quickly developed an economic relationship with the various Europeans states that arrived on the Gold Coast and which, by the sixteenth century, utilized Akan weights for their gold trade. In the seventeenth century, the coastal importance of the Fetu expanded as the English, Dutch, www.abc-clio.com

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and Swedes competed for their interests. In 1649 the Englishman Thomas Crispe obtained from the Fetu king the right to build at Cape Coast, but nothing came of this at the time. In 1688 the Dutch at Elmina convinced the Fetu king to attack Cape Coast Castle, but when he was driven back, the English supported a new king, thus strengthening the relationship between the English and the Fetu. It is around this time that the Fetu capital moved from Efutu to Cape Coast, thus increasing the bonds between the Fetu and English. By the early eighteenth century, as the struggle between the Fante and Asante began, the Fetu controlled important trade paths between the coast and the interior. One of these paths gave the Fetu access to the Asante. As the Fante worked to control the trade between the inland and coastal peoples, in 1708—having defeated the Asebu—they then attacked the Fetu and took King Ahen Pompa prisoner. Sir Thomas Dalby of the Royal African Company decided to intervene for economic reasons and attempted to make Aguebah Brasso the new queen of Fetu. In 1717 Fetu acquired a new king and this was followed, in 1720, by another Fante attack. While the Fante never officially conquered the Fetu, because of the changing coastal political situation the latter—along with the increasingly powerful Asante—were integrated into the Fante confederation. Within all of this, the Fetu, because of their long history and experience with Europeans, were very effective traders and cross-cultural brokers and played an important economic role within the Fante confederation. Ty M. Reese See also: Akan; Cape Coast Castle; Royal African Company

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466 FILM (AFRICA) References Daaku, Kwame Yeboa. Trade & Politics on the Gold Coast 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Fynn, J. K. Asante and Its Neighbours, 1700–1807. Evanston, IL: Longman and Northwestern University Press, 1971.

FILM (AFRICA) African film is a fledgling industry, seeking an identity and struggling to free itself from the dominance of Hollywood and European films, which monopolize African media. Africa does not have a centralized film industry like that in the United States, and access to modern film production technology is limited. Most early films produced in Africa have American or European financial backing and exhibit a predominantly Western ideological perspective. The very first motion picture made by an African was Ain el Ghezal (The girl from Carthage), a 1924 film by Tunisian director Chemama Chikly. Under South African apartheid (legalized racism), whites controlled all aspects of African art and music by regulating the programming of visual media as well as the release and performance of popular music. In 1931 South Africa enacted the Entertainment Law, which essentially forbade any artistic freedom of expression from a black point of view, and blacks were forbidden by law to view any uncensored, unapproved films. Though a few films were made in the thirty-odd years after Ain el Ghezal, African filmmaking did not truly gain momentum until the late 1950s and early 1960s. African cinema is divided into two primary regions: north (francophone) and south (anglophone) of the Sahara. Much of early African cinema corresponded to the political www.abc-clio.com

independence of African states and the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963. That same year, one of Africa’s premier directors, Ousmane Sembene from Senegal, made his first film, Borom Sarret, a twenty-minute short that changed the trajectory of the fledgling African film movement. In the context of post-colonialism, African film seeks to view Africa, her peoples, and cultures though an African lens rather than through the distorted lens of the Western colonial powers. Films made by black Africans reflect the world of Africa from an African perspective, which seeks to communicate to the African viewer the more identifiable realities, experiences, and desires of African societies. Sembene’s Borom Sarret presented the first alternate view in film of Africa from an African perspective and introduced the possibility of a distinct African identity, separate and independent from postcolonial hegemony. But with the end of the era of colonial domination in Africa came another form of Western imperialism: cultural imperialism. Most films shown in Africa are from America or Europe. Hollywood dominates the African film and television scene, inundating African societies with American ideologies and values and advertising American products. The majority of movie houses in Africa are owned and operated by American or European corporations and they control the films that are presented, privileging films from the United States and Europe. Indigenous African films, even if they are of high quality, cannot compete with the power of Hollywood for distribution rights and unfortunately are not widely viewed by African audiences. Three principal styles of cinema are shown

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in Africa: Hollywood cinema (which reinforces colonial hegemony); third-world imitation Hollywood (mostly action or romance films from India and low-budget kung fu films); and what is called African “radical” or “liberation” cinema—films made by black Africans that challenge the Hollywood depiction of black African characters as derogatory Western stereotypes, that carry sociopolitical messages, that reflect and engage in a black cultural discourse, and, most importantly, that present uniquely African stories told from an African point of view. Radical African filmmakers do not view film as simply a means for entertainment but also as an important tool with which to engage in a discourse that examines and critiques the political, social, historical, and modern realities of African society. Modern Africa faces a cultural crisis from the saturation of U.S. and European films and popular television that import Western values and ideologies, which are replacing and damaging traditional African beliefs and values. To combat this cultural imperialism, African filmmakers use Africa’s vast resource of traditional myths and stories to comment on the African experience in contrast to Hollywood and European models. Some of the common themes in African films are: the quality of life; poverty; political instability; loss of infrastructure; apartheid; the conflict between traditional and modern life; the commodification of traditional art objects; the unchecked influence of Western culture; the questioning of traditions that are exploitive or harmful; gender roles and such practices as polygamy, religion, and the caste system; the questioning of historical narratives and the presentation of an alternative African view; the environment www.abc-clio.com

and its exploitation by the West; and the continuing anticolonial struggle. But because of limited resources and a lack of production and post-production facilities, many filmmakers in Africa look to the West for financial support and use of production resources. That support unfortunately comes with a price, namely, giving the backer the right to control the creative output of the project, which comes into play particularly if the film is too critical of the West or of capitalism and capitalist structures. African filmmakers present their work at film festivals worldwide, which counters the negative portrayal of black Africans that dominates Western media and provides African filmmakers with a vehicle for broader distribution outside the dominance of those media. Some notable African filmmakers and their films are: Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de . . . (Black Girl) (1965), Mandabi (1968), Xala (Impotence) (1973), Ceddo (Outsiders) (1977), Emitai (God of Thunder) (1971), and Camp de Thiaroye (The Camp at Thiaroye) (1988); Safi Faye’s Kaddu Beykat (Letter from My Village) (1975); Idrissa Ouèdraogo’s Poko (1981), Wend Kuuni (God’s Gift) (1982), and Yaaba (1989); Kwaw Ansah’s Love . . . Brewed in the African Pot (1981); Amadou Saalum Seck’s Saaraba (Utopia) (1989); Moussa Sene Absa’s Yalla Yaana (1995); Jilali Ferhati’s La Plage des enfants perdus (The Beach of Lost Children) (1991); Soraya Mire’s Fire Eyes (1994); Dikongue-Pipa’s Muno Moto (Somebody Else’s Child) (1974); and Cheick Oumar Cissoko’s Guimba (Guimba The Tyrant) (1995). The greatest challenge facing postcolonial African filmmakers is to create a new black African identity that reflects African values and ideologies, not

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the malformed African identity that reflects Western ideals and biases. Debbie Clare Olson See also: Film (Atlantic); Ousmane, Sembene; Postcolonial Studies References Bakari, Imruh, and Mbye Cham, eds. African Experiences of Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1996. Diop, Samba. African Francophone Cinema. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2004. Givanni, June, ed. Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory, and the Moving Image. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Ukadike, Nwachukwu. Black African Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

FILM (ATLANTIC) The term “Atlantic film” refers to the notion of a diasporic, transnational space represented in the cinema of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. The concept of the Atlantic as a location for a multinational culture that transcends the nationalist paradigms traditionally employed in the field of cultural studies is developed in Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic (1993). For Gilroy and other writers, terms traditionally used to discuss the black diaspora such as “syncretism,” “creolization,” mestizaje (miscegenation), and “hybridity” all point to the ways in which the Atlantic itself signifies a spatiotemporal unit of intercultural exchange (between various cultures on both sides of the Atlantic) that reaches beyond the borders of the national. This notion of the Atlantic as a spatiotemporal unit is exemplified in the chronotope. A concept developed by Mikhail Bahktin to discuss the confluence of space www.abc-clio.com

and time in the novel, the chronotope is fundamental to Gilroy’s theory of the black Atlantic. Gilroy argues that modern black culture has been preoccupied with the exploration of roots, while the paradigm he proposes regards issues of identity not as fixed in time or place, but as fluid and in flux. Rather than rootedness, Gilroy looks to rhizomorphic and transnational connections—that is, to lateral connections that displace traditional horizontal hierarchies limited by national boundaries. As such, the transoceanic travels of black people serve as an important trope or figure for the interconnectedness of the Atlantic World. For Gilroy, ships themselves serve as the operative metaphor, and the “Middle Passage,” a term that refers to the transporting of slaves across the Atlantic, is key in illustrating the fluidity of both time and place. Some critics of Gilroy’s work, however, object to the way his theories privilege firstworld consciousness and give little attention in particular to the Caribbean. Still others, such as Hamid Naficy in his An Accented Cinema (2001), caution against seeing the global without considering the contribution of national consciousness to diasporas. He argues that the relationship between the national and the diasporic must not be overlooked, and that the reductive view of a single black diaspora would have to correlate to an equally reductive single Other. While transatlantic migration has led to an exilic cinematic production (cinema produced by filmmakers in exile from their native countries) in the cinemas of Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas that challenges the dominant theories and aesthetics of mainstream cinema, many of these films share a sense of multiple identification of race, gender, class, language, and

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nationality, all of these intersecting in ways that are sometimes contradictory and oppositional. The multilinguality of these films alone and the increasing numbers of co-productions have led to a questioning of ways to position exilic, diasporic cinema in a global context. In “South American Cinema” (2000), Julianne Burton-Carvajal points to the term “transculturation,” coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, to emphasize the reciprocity of contact between cultures and the ways exile serves to redefine the national. A case in point is British filmmaker Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002), a film that inverts the marginalized position of an illegal Nigerian immigrant. Okwe, a doctor by profession, is relegated to working nights in a hotel. He develops a relationship with a Turkish maid, and the two find a way to turn the tables on the exploitation they are suffering at the hands of a society that keeps them in their marginalized status. In the process, Frears explores a side of London that has remained largely invisible in the dominant discourse. The motivation of Latin American cinema to bolster its sense of nationalism while also responding to postcolonial ideological and political hegemony (that is, the cultural dominance of the former colonialist powers) is shared by filmmakers in Africa and the Caribbean. The process of decolonization in Latin America and the Caribbean (and indeed, Africa), marked by the upheaval represented by the Cuban Revolution, led to a project of recovering the histories of the voiceless, in particular the African and indigenous populations in the Americas subjugated by the colonizers. Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece, La Última Cena (1976; The Last Supper), presents a stinging indictment www.abc-clio.com

of the hypocrisy of Spanish slave owners who professed to be Christian while benefiting from the inhumanity of slavery. The films of Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral—El otro Francisco (1974; The other Francisco), Plácido (1986), Maluala (1979), and Rancheador (1977; Bounty hunter)—likewise deal with attempts to reframe the slavery and racism of the colonialist past. Gloria Rolando’s film, Hijos de Baraguá (My Footsteps in Baraguá) (1996), uncovers the syncretic phenomena of African cultures and practices in present-day Cuba, as does the Puerto Rican documentary, The King Does Not Lie: The Initiation of a Shangó Priest (1993), by Judith Gleason and Elisa Mereghetti, which illustrates the ritual initiation of a priest into the AfroCaribbean religion of Santeria. Recovering African heritage through family and local filiations is the theme of Daughters of the Dust (1991), by African American filmmaker Julie Dash, and Sugar Cane Alley (1983), by Euzhan Palcy, from Martinique. Palcy’s film draws attention to the prevalent themes of Euro-African tension in the Caribbean by underscoring the issues of race and gender. José, the young protagonist, is mentored by a village elder who stands for the absent patriarchal Africa, while in a subplot, the dynamics of a white European patriarch and a black-Creole mother are played out. Written and directed by Haile Gerima, Sankofa (1993), a title that means going back in time in order to go forward, uses the figure of an African American fashion model transported from modern-day Ghana to a Jamaican plantation, where she becomes a slave. Carlos Diegues’s Quilombo (1984) tells the story of the quilombo (a settlement of runaway slaves) in the Palmares region of

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Brazil. Set in the seventeenth century, the poetic and fantastic meet in this film to recount what is ultimately the tragic story of the Portuguese colonization. The themes of colonialism and postcolonialism are also felt in modern Senegal in Camp de Thiaroye (1987), by Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, considered by many to be the father of African cinema. The film exposes the French colonialist mentality through the story of colonial troops returning to Africa in 1944 after fighting the Germans in France. Temporarily detained at Camp de Thiaroye, the troops finally learn what being an African in the French Empire really means when they are slaughtered by the French themselves. In the Hollywood film Amistad (1997), possibly the most commercially successful film in the United States to take on the theme of Africans’ forced exile into slavery, Steven Spielberg offers his perspective on the Middle Passage. The plot revolves around the uprising aboard the slave ship Amistad in the year 1839 and the subsequent trial that takes place in New England. The powerful scenes of the mutiny, however, are marred by the graphic images of the captive Africans murdering the Spanish slave runners. Spielberg unwittingly perpetuates the stereotype of the black savage taking brutal revenge on his captors. But the film’s greatest disappointment lies in Spielberg’s inability to make the Africans the subjects and focal point of the movie. The film, nonetheless, succeeded in introducing an important aspect of U.S. history to a large audience. María Cristina Saavedra See also: Amistad Case, The; Atlantic World; Creole/Criollo; Dash, Julie; Film (Africa); Film (Caribbean); Film (Latin America); Film (North America); Film (South America); Ousmane, Sembene; Quilombo

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References Burton-Carvajal, Julianne. “South American Cinema.” World Cinema: Critical Approaches, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Downing, John D. H., ed. Film and Politics in the Third World. New York: Autonomedia, 1987. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Hill, John, and Pamela Church Gibson, eds. World Cinema: Critical Approaches. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Martin, Michael T. Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Third Cinema: The Aesthetics of Hybridity.” In Rethinking Third Cinema, edited by Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake. New York: Routledge, 2003. Ukadike, N. Frank. “African Cinema.” In World Cinema: Critical Approaches, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. New York: Oxford University Press.

FILM (CARIBBEAN) Many Caribbean films are made by directors of Afro-Caribbean descent, whether living in the Caribbean or abroad, while some films about Afro-Caribbean culture are made by white and Asian directors. The Caribbean is defined as the islands in the Caribbean Sea excluding Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, which are covered in the article on Latin American film. Belize is included in this article, despite its geographic location in Central America, because its culture and history are more similar to other former British colonies in the Caribbean than to the Spanish-speaking countries of Central America.

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Films have been shot in the Caribbean for more than a century, but development of an indigenous film industry dates only from the 1970s. The growth of Caribbean film has been impeded by the small economies of most Caribbean countries, which have inhibited development of the infrastructure necessary for a film industry, and by the lack of opportunities for most young Caribbeans to study filmmaking.

The English-speaking Caribbean The first Anglo-Caribbean films were produced by white and Asian directors and were influential in presenting AfroCaribbean culture to the world. Music was central in these films: in fact, their soundtrack is sometimes their best feature. The first Trinidadian films were directed by the Indian émigré Harbance Kumar. Probably his best film was Bim (1975), which focused on an Indian boy growing up in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Tobago. Two of Kumar’s films are notable primarily because they recorded performances by major calypso musicians: The Caribbean Fox (1970) and Man from Africa (1982). The first Jamaican feature film, The Harder They Come (1972), directed by the white Jamaican Perry Henzell, stars reggae singer Jimmy Cliff as a young man who leaves the countryside to try to make it as a singer in Kingston. This film brought reggae music and the Rastafarian culture to the attention of a worldwide audience. Interest in reggae and the Rastafarian culture prompted the creation of three more films centered on Jamaican Rastafarians in the next decade: Rockers (Ted Bafakoulos, 1978), Children of Babylon (Lennie LittleWhite, 1980), and Countryman (Dickie Johnson, 1982). www.abc-clio.com

A significant body of Afro-Caribbean film has been created by émigrés to England. Horace Ové was born in Trinidad and educated at the London International Film School. His film Pressure (1975), the first British Film Institute–funded film by a black director, focuses on Trinidadian immigrants living in London. He also directed the comedy Playing Away (1987) and several documentaries including Reggae (1971). Burning an Illusion (1981), by the Barbadian-born Menelik Shabazz, was also funded by the British Film Institute and centers on a young Caribbean-British woman’s awakening to her African heritage. Isaac Julien, whose parents migrated from St. Lucia to London, was a founding member of the black film and video collective Sankofa and directed a number of films examining black culture, including Looking for Langston (1988), Young Soul Rebels (1991), Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996), and Baadasssss Cinema (2002). Garifuna Journey (1998), by the American directors Andrea E. Leland and Kathy L. Berger, is a documentary about the Garifuna people of Belize, whose culture incorporates links to their African past. Do You See What I See? (Suzette Zayden, Debbie Lisbey, 2004) is a documentary shot in English and Kriol (a language used in Belize that combines elements of English and several West African languages) about young people growing up in Belize.

The French-speaking Caribbean Martinique and Guadeloupe (both French overseas departments), despite their small size, have produced outstanding AfroCaribbean directors. Martinique-born Euzhan Palcy achieved international renown with her first feature film, Rue Cases-Nègres

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(1983; Sugar Cane Alley), which tells the story of a poor black family living in Martinique in the 1930s. Her other films include A Dry White Season (1989), set in South Africa in the 1970s, and Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History (1994), a documentary about the Martiniquan poet and playwright. Christian Lara, born in Guadeloupe and working primarily in France, has directed a number of French-language films concerning Caribbean subjects, the bestknown of which is Sucre Amer (1998; Bitter sugar), concerning a freed slave who became a commander in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. Willie Rameau and Julius Amede Laou are both directors of Martiniquan descent working in the French film industry who have explored the experience of Afro-Caribbean émigrés to France, Rameau in Lien de Parenté (1986; Family ties) and Laou in La Vielle Quimboiseuse et le Majordome (1987; The old healer and the majordomo). Despite Haiti’s poverty and frequent periods of political repression, Afro-Haitian directors have produced an impressive body of work. Rassoul Labuchin’s Anita (1980), the first film made in the Haitian creole language, tells the story of a young girl working as a domestic servant in Portau-Prince. Arnold Antonin directed a number of documentaries about Haiti, including Art naïf et Répression en Haïti (1976; Naïve art and repression in Haiti), Duvalier Accusé (1974; Duvalier accused), and Duvalier Condamné (1974; Duvalier condemned), and the comedy Piwouli et le Zenglendo (1999; Piwouli and the thug). Both Labuchin and Antonin were forced into exile by the Duvalier regime. Elsie Haas, born in Haiti and educated in France, directed several influential documentaries about Haiti, including La Ronde www.abc-clio.com

des Vodu (1987; The voodoo dance). The innovative documentary Krik? Krak! (1988), directed by Jac Avila and Vanyoska Gee, focused on the effects of the Duvalier regime on impoverished Haitians. Raoul Peck’s feature, L’homme sur les Quais (1993; The Man on the Shore), set in Haiti in the 1960s, was the first Haitian film released in theaters in the United States. His other films include Haitian Corner (1988), a drama about the Haitian community in New York, and Lumumba: La morte du prophète (1992; Lumumba: Death of a Prophet) and Lumumba (2000), a documentary and feature film, respectively, based on the life of the Congolese leader. Sarah Boslaugh See also: Caribbean Artists Movement; Haiti; Film (Africa); Film, Atlantic; Film (Latin America); Film (North America); Film (South America); Reggae References Ranucci, Karen, and Julie Feldman. A Guide to Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino-made Film and Video. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998. Warner, Keith Q. On Location: Cinema and Film in the Anglophone Caribbean. London: Macmillan, 2000. Cham, Mbye B. Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992.

FILM (LATIN AMERICA) Latin American film is from those countries in the Western Hemisphere that share aspects of a common culture based on the Spanish language and a history of colonization by Spain. This includes Mexico, Central America except for Belize, most of South America, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Brazil, a Portuguese-language country, is included in the entry Film (South America).

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Belize, a former British colony, is included in the entry Film (Caribbean) because it has closer historical and cultural connections with other former British colonies than with the countries included in this article.

Cuba Among the Latin American countries, Cuba has the greatest output of films concerned with Afro-Caribbean heritage and life. This is not surprising, since films have been made in Cuba for over 100 years and because Cuba has a substantial population of citizens with some African heritage. However, film direction and production has been dominated by persons of European descent. This situation improved somewhat after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and many white Cubans have dealt sensitively with racial issues in their films, but only a few Afro-Cubans have established themselves as directors. Cuban filmmaking before the Revolution largely dealt with the interests of white Cubans, who dominated the film industry and comprised the preponderance of the ticket-buying audience. Afro-Cuban life generally was referenced only in relation to Santeria or in the stock characters of formulaic comedies. Shortly after the Revolution, the Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) was formed and took over all aspects of Cuban cinema, resulting in state-supported censorship of filmmaking. Post-Revolution white Cuban directors made a number of films that included race or slavery as a theme. La Última Cena (1976; The Last Supper), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, is based on a historical slave revolt on an eighteenth-century Cuban plantation. Cecilia (1981), directed by Humberto Solás, tells the story of a mulatto www.abc-clio.com

woman in nnineteenth-century Havana. Octavio Cortázar’s Acerca de un personaje que unos llaman San Lázaro y otros llaman Babalú (1968; About a personage whom some call Saint Lazarus and some call Babalú) documents religious festivities honoring Saint Lazarus, whom many AfroCubans regard as their divinity, Babalú Ayé. In addition, several documentaries made by non-Cubans or outside Cuba are important for their presentation of Afro-Cuban music; these include Yo soy, del son a la salsa (1997; From Son to Salsa), directed by Rigoberto Lopez, and The Buena Vista Social Club (2000), directed by Wim Wenders. José Massip, an Afro-Cuban, directed La decisión (1965), which tells the story of two mulatto brothers during the regime of Fulgencio Batista. Sergio Giral is an AfroCuban director who has made a number of films examining Cuba’s heritage of slavery, including El otro Francisco (1974; The Other Francisco), Rancheador (1977; Slavehunter), Maluala (1979), and Plácido (1986). The Afro-Cuban director Sara Gomez produced a number of films in her short life (she died from an asthma attack at age thirty-one). Her documentaries include . . . Y tenemos sabor (1968; And we have taste) and Ire a Santiago (1964; I will go to Santiago), and her feature film, De cierta manera (1977; One Way or Another) explores class and race prejudice in the Miraflores neighborhood of Havana. More recently, the Afro-Cuban Gloria Rolando directed Raices de mi Corazon (2001; Roots of my Heart), about the 1912 massacre of members of an Afro-Cuban political party. Other films by Rolando include the documentaries Los hijos de Baragua (1996; My footsteps in Baragua), and Los marqueses de Atarés (2003; The marquesses of the neighborhood of Atares).

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The Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico

Mexico and Central America

Because of the close association of the United States with both the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, American films are included in this section. The Americanproduced documentary Change Up (2002), directed by Loren Mendel and Tiller Russell, deals with racial issues in the Dominican Republic through the story of two young Dominicans (one lightskinned, one dark-skinned) hoping to play major league baseball. Two other Americanproduced films, Washington Heights (2002), directed by Alfredo de Villa, and Raising Victor Vargas (2002), directed by Peter Sollett, also include Afro-Dominican characters. The documentaries Amor por el Baile (1998; Love of the Dance), directed by Eric Delgado, Jesus Burgos’s Del Africa a el Caribe (1996; From Africa to the Caribbean), Plena: Canto y Trabajo (1989; Plena is Work, Plena is Song), directed by Pedro Rivera and Susan Zeig, and Ismael Rivera and Fran Ferrer’s Concierto Mayor de los Soneros (1978; Concert for “El Sonero Mayor”) deal with African-influenced music and culture in Puerto Rico. Sharon Simon’s Mi Puerto Rico (1995; My Puerto Rico) is a documentary that explores Puerto Rico’s African, Taino, and Spanish heritage. Every Child is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas (2002), directed by Jonathan Robinson, is a documentary about Piri Thomas, the AfroCaribbean author of Down These Mean Streets (1967), who explored the internalized racial hatred of his father and described his own quest to understand his racial identity as an Afro-Puerto Rican in this autobiography.

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Although no directors of African descent from these countries have achieved world renown, a few films by white directors have dealt with racial themes. The feature film La Negra Angustias (1949; The black Angustias), by the Mexican director Matilde Landeta, is based on the life of a mulatto woman who served as a colonel under Emiliano Zapata. The Spanish-born director Luis Bunuel, who worked in Mexico for the second half of his career, made an English-language film on the theme of racial injustice; his The Young One (1960) tells the story of a African American man who is falsely accused of rape and seeks refuge on an island off the coast of South Carolina.

South America The director José Agustín Ferreyra, often referred to by the nickname “El Negro” because of his African heritage, was a pioneer of Colombian cinema. His films include Palomas rubias (1922; Blonde doves); Odio Serrano (1924; Mountain hatred); Muñequitas porteñas (1931), the first Argentinian sound film; Ayudarme a vivir (1936; Help Me to Live); and La Mujer y la Selva (1941; The Woman and the Jungle). His films are notable for their frequent focus on the favelas (slums) of Buenos Aires. Palenque: Un Canto (1992; Palenque: A Song), by the Colombian director Maria Raquel Bozzi, is a documentary about the village of Palenque de San Basilio, founded by escaped slaves. Salto al Atlantico (1990; Jump across the Atlantic), directed by María Eugenia Esparragoza, is a documentary focused on the cultural similarities between an African village in the Belgian Congo and an Afro-Venezuelan

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settlement in Venezuela, whose residents are descended from Congolese slaves. Sarah Boslaugh See also: Film (Africa); Film (Atlantic); Film (Caribbean); Film (North America); Film (South America); Mexico (Afro-Mexican Identity); Puerto Rico References Chanan, Michael. Cuban Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Garcia Osuma, Alfonso J. The Cuban Filmography, 1897 through 2001. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003. Ranucci, Karen, and Julie Feldman, eds. A Guide to Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino-made Film and Video. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998.

FILM (NORTH AMERICA) United States African Americans have been a part of the American film industry from the beginning, but until the 1960s they participated primarily as actors and actresses, typically in a limited range of roles including servants, musicians, and dancers. Exceptions include many roles acted by Paul Robeson, in films such as Dudley Murphy’s The Emperor Jones (1933), and Canada Lee, in films such as Lifeboat (1944), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and Body and Soul (1947), directed by Robert Rossen. One alternative to the mainstream American film industry was the “race movies” produced in the first half of the twentieth century. These films used entirely African American casts and were marketed primarily to African American audiences. Some race movies simply mimicked Hollywood genres such as slapstick, Westerns, and gangster films, while others took a serious look at issues such as racism and class

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prejudice. Oscar Micheaux, who directed forty films between 1919 and 1938, was the first African American to produce a feature-length film, The Homesteader (1919), and a sound film, The Exile (1931). Micheaux also wrote and produced most of his films and directed Paul Robeson’s first movie, Body and Soul (1925). George and Noble Johnson founded the first African American production company in America, the Lincoln Production Company in 1916. Among their films were The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916), A Trooper of Troop K (1917), and A Man’s Duty (1919), all directed by Harry A. Gant. Hollywood picked up on the idea of all-black casts for several musical films that were not intended exclusively for the African American market, including Hallelujah! (1929), directed by King Vidor; Stormy Weather (1943), directed by Andrew L. Stone; and Carmen Jones (1954), directed by Otto Preminger. Many African American performers also appeared in “soundies,” short musical films created in the 1940s to be played in public places such as bars or restaurants by a coin-operated machine similar to a jukebox. The first Hollywood film directed by an African American was Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree (1969), an autobiographical account of growing up in the 1920s. The 1970s saw an explosion of films featuring, and sometimes directed by, African Americans. Melvin van Peebles directed the comedy Watermelon Man in 1970 and the runaway hit Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, in which he also played the title character. The latter is generally considered the first “blaxploitation” film, although some argue that Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), directed by Ossie

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Davis, deserves that distinction. Blaxploitation films centered on the activities of black characters, usually in an urban ghetto; incorporated contemporary African American popular music; and often featured scenes of exaggerated violence and sex. The quality of these films varied greatly, and some African Americans considered the genre racist. Other works in this genre include Shaft (1971), directed by Gordon Parks; Superfly (1972), directed by Gordon Parks Jr.; Black Caesar (1973), directed by Larry Cohen; and Coffy (1973), directed by Jack Hill. Spike Lee was the first of a number of young African American directors to bring a distinctive directorial voice to American cinema in the 1980s: his films include She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), and Malcolm X (1992). Robert Townsend’s films include Hollywood Shuffle (1989), a satire about his experiences in Hollywood, and The Five Heartbeats (1991). John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991) and Matty Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991) both take an unsentimental look at African American life in impoverished neighborhoods. Women directors in this generation include Julie Dash, whose Daughters of the Dust (1991) focuses on a family living off the South Carolina coast in 1902, and Leslie Harris, whose Just Another Girl on the IRT (1993) follows the life of a female high school student in Brooklyn, New York.

Canada Afro-Canadians did not play a large part in their nation’s film industry until 1995. In that year, the first two feature films produced by Canadians of African descent were released: Clement Virgo’s Rude and Stephen Williams’s Soul Survivor. Both www.abc-clio.com

filmmakers are of Jamaican descent and set their films in the Toronto Jamaican émigré community. The plot of Rude is concerned with the intertwined lives of several characters living in a housing project. Soul Survivor’s plot centers on a young man who takes a job as enforcer for a local moneylender. Stephen Williams has worked primarily in television since 1995, while Clement Virgo has worked in both television and film; his later films include The Planet of Junior Brown (1997), Love Come Down (2000), and Lie With Me (2005). Several white Canadian directors have also treated the culture and lives of persons of African descent in their films. The award-winning animated short, Begone Dull Care (1949), directed by Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambert, features the music of the Montreal-born jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. Director Gilles Groulx’s Golden Gloves (1961) is a documentary about aspiring boxers and their social milieu that includes the story of Ronald Jones, a young Afro-Canadian living in Montreal. Sitting in Limbo (1986), directed by John N. Smith, concerns the lives of two Caribbean-Canadian teenagers in Montreal and features the reggae music of Jimmy Cliff. Directed by Rebecca Yates and Glen Salzman, Milk and Honey (1988) focuses on a Jamaican woman who emigrates to Canada to work as a domestic. The Toronto-born Norman Jewison directed several movies centering on the lives of African Americans, including In the Heat of the Night (1967), A Soldier’s Story (1985), and The Hurricane (1999). Sarah Boslaugh

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See also: Dash, Julie; Film (Africa); Film (Atlantic); Film (Caribbean); Film (Latin America); Film (South America)

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FILM (SOUTH AMERICA) 477 References Alexander, George. Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk about the Magic of Cinema. New York: Broadway Books, 2003. Cram, Pearl Bestor, dir. Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies. Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1994. Klotman, Phyllis Rauch. Frame by Frame: A Black Filmography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Klotman, Phyllis R., and Gloria J. Gibson. Frame by Frame II: A Filmography of the African American Image, 1978–1994. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Melnyk, George. One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Rist, Peter Harry, ed. Guide to the Cinema(s) of Canada. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. York, Stephen, dir. Black Shadows on a Silver Screen: The Black Film Industry from 1915–1950. Los Angeles: Republic Pictures Home Video, 1986.

FILM (SOUTH AMERICA) The countries of South America vary widely in geography, population, history, and culture. Due to their common language, the Spanish-speaking countries share aspects of culture that they do not share with Brazil (Portuguese-speaking); Guyana (English); Suriname (Dutch); and the French overseas department, French Guiana (French). For this reason, the South American countries in which Spanish is the primary language have been included in the article on Latin America, and this entry discusses films from Brazil, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana.

Brazil Brazil has been the major producer in the Western Hemisphere, outside the United States and Cuba, of films including people of African descent. This is due primarily to the www.abc-clio.com

country’s large size and population, the fact that it has had an active film industry since the early twentieth century, and the fact that a large proportion of Brazilians (about 45 percent) have some African heritage. AfroBrazilian actors and actresses have appeared frequently in Brazilian films, particularly in the chanchada, or Brazilian musical comedy films of the 1940s and 1950s, but have rarely had the opportunity to play major dramatic roles. Even fewer Afro-Brazilians have had the opportunity to direct films. However, many white directors have explored aspects of Afro-Brazilian history and life, and recently more Afro-Brazilians have gained the opportunity to direct their own films. Ironically, the first impression many movie audiences outside of Brazil received of Afro-Brazilian culture was through the somewhat parodistic portrayals in films by the Portuguese-born singer and comedienne Carmen Miranda, whose costume was adopted from that worn by Afro-Brazilian fruit sellers from Salvador de Bahia. She made films in both Brazil and the United States, and her Hollywood films in particular were distributed more widely than any Brazilian films of the day. Her films include A Voz do Carnaval (1933; The Voice of the Carnival), directed by Adhemar Gonzaga and Humberto Mauro; Alô, Alô, Brazil (1935; Hello, Hello, Brazil), directed by Wallace Downey, Alberto Ribeiro, and João de Barro; Week-End in Havana (1941), directed by Walter Lang; The Gang’s All Here (1943), directed by Busby Berkeley; and Copacabana (1947), directed by Alfred E. Green. More serious films focusing on favela (slum) life and featuring samba music include Rio Zona Norte (1957; Rio, North Zone), directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Ofeu Negro (1959; Black Orpheus), by the French director Marcel Camus,

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which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Another film by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Rio, 40 Graus (1964; Rio, 40 degrees), builds a portrait of Rio de Janeiro by following five Afro-Brazilian children through the city for a day. Recently, several Brazilian films have once again focused on the favela, but they take a more realistic and less romanticized view of it. The Carlos Diegues film Orfeu (1999; Orpheus) is based on the same play as Orfeu Negro but takes a less romanticized approach to the material. Cidade de Deus (2002; City of God ), directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, tells the story of a group of boys growing up in a violent housing project in Rio de Janeiro. Several Brazilian directors have treated the theme of slavery. Carlos Diegues directed Ganga Zumba (1963) and Qilombo (1984), which are about a village founded by escaped slaves, and Xica (1976), which is based on the life of a slave woman in eighteenth-century Brazil. The story of Qilombo is also told in the documentary Aruanda (1960), directed by Linduarte Noronha. Sinhá Moça (1953; The Landowner’s Daughter), directed by Tom Payne and Oswaldo Sampaio; A Marcha (1977; The March), directed by Oswaldo Sampaio; and Chico Rei (1982), directed by Walter Lima Jr., deal with events around the year, 1888, that Brazil abolished slavery. Haroldo Costa was the first AfroBrazilian director (Pista de Grama [1958]; Grass Track), but not until the late 1970s did Afro-Brazilians in any number get the opportunity to direct. The directors of this generation had several things in common: most were successful film actors before they got a chance to direct; most directed only a single film; and their films have not become part of the international repertoire. The www.abc-clio.com

first of these directors was Odilon Lopez, who wrote and directed the comedy Um é Pouço, Dois éBom (1970; Two is Better than One). Waldyr Onofre directed the comedy As Aventuras Amorosas de Um Padeiro (1975; The Amorous Adventures of a Baker) and worked as assistant director on three other films. Antonio Pitanga directed Na Boca do Mundo (1978; In the Mouth of the World ) and also served as second unit director on Carlos Diegues’s Qilombo. One interesting documentary produced by Afro-Brazilian directors are Silvana Afram’s Mulheres Negras (1986; Black Women of Brazil), which focuses on AfroBrazilian women dealing with racism in daily life. Another is Zózimo Bulbul’s film Abolição (1988; Abolition), which examines the situation of Afro-Brazilians one hundred years after the abolition of slavery.

Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana all have ethnically mixed populations, including a substantial number of persons with at least some African heritage. Their national languages reflect their colonial past: English in Guyana, a former British colony; Dutch in Surinam, a former Dutch colony; and French in French Guiana, a former French colony. Only a few films have been made in any of these countries. The first Guyanese film, Aggro seizeman (1975), directed by James Mannas and Brian Stuart-Young, used an entirely Guyanese cast and focused on the “seizeman” who repossesses goods that are not fully paid for. The Guyanese politician and author Rupert Roopnaraine directed The Terror and the Time (1979), an experimental film set in Guyana in 1953, the time of the first universal suffrage elections. Kean Gibson has made two films

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about African influences in Guyanese culture: A Month for the Entertainment of Spirits (1991) and A Celebration of Life: Dances with the Afro-Guyanese (1993). Guiana 1838 (2004), by the Guyanese Indian director Rohit Jagessar, is a feature film about Guyana in the year slavery was abolished. Wan Pipel (1976; One People), produced in Surinam by the Dutch filmmaker Pim de la Parra, focuses on the experiences of a Creole student who leaves the Netherlands to be with his mother in Surinam. Le Bouillon d’Awara (1995; Awara Soup), by Brazilianborn director César Paes, is a documentary celebrating the multicultural nature of French Guiana. Sarah Boslaugh See also: Brazil; Brazilian Culture; Film (Africa); Film (Atlantic); Film (Caribbean); Film (Latin America); Film (North America); Quilombo References Barnard, Timothy, and Peter Rist, eds. South American Cinema: A Critical Filmography, 1915–1994. New York: Garland, 1996. Dennison, Stephanie. Popular Cinema in Brazil, 1940–2001. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004. King, John. Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. London: Verso, 2000.

1969. The group’s name refers to its fundamental belief that its members are the 5 percent of the world that is civilized and have knowledge of self, while 85 percent of the world remains uncivilized and ignorant and under the exploitation of devils that form the remaining 10 percent. The group’s additional name, The Nation of Gods and Earths, is a reference to the idea that each black man is God and each black woman is the nurturing Earth. The group renamed areas of New York City with Islamic place-names: Harlem was referred to as Mecca and Brooklyn as Medina, for example. The Five Percenter message gained popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s through the lyrics of wellknown rap artists such as Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Brand Nubian, and Poor Righteous Teachers. The use of rap music as a medium, as well as the group’s colorful catch phrases, numerology, coded language, and message of empowerment continue to appeal to urban youth culture. Brent Singleton See also: Hip-Hop; Islam, African American; Nation of Islam

FIVE PERCENT NATION The Five Percent Nation, also known as The Nation of Gods and Earths, was founded in Harlem in 1964 by Clarence 13X (Clarence Smith [1929–1969]), a disaffected member of the Nation of Islam. Clarence 13X, called Allah by his followers, was a charismatic Korean War veteran who at one time allied himself with John Lindsay, the mayor of New York, and was partially credited for stemming violence in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. Clarence 13X was himself assassinated in www.abc-clio.com

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References Gottehrer, Barry. The Mayor’s Man. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975. Nelson, George. Hip Hop America. New York: Viking, 1998. Nuruddin, Yusuf. “The Five Percenters: A Teenage Nation of Gods and Earths.” In Muslim Communities in North America, edited by Yvonne Y. Haddad and Jane I. Smith. New York: SUNY Press, 1994.

FLYING AFRICANS Popular and sacred myths depicting flying Africans are stories about New World African slaves who could fly back to Africa rather than remaining enslaved. These stories are related to eighteenth- and

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nineteenth-century legends, folktales, and rituals, and twentieth-century film and literary motifs originating out of the ethos of the Middle Passage and transatlantic slavery. Beliefs about Africans who had the ability to fly blended elements of West African and Central African sacred myths with the circumstances of slavery in the Americas. Legends incorporating the motif of the flying African have not only attracted the attention of folklorists and anthropologists. Contemporary writers have applied the symbolic motif into their creative writing. In twentieth-century African Diaspora literature, the once sacred myth of the flying Africans is expressed through secular motifs of flight—birds of symbolic fortitude, planes, pilots, people falling or jumping from rooftops and cliffs, and prophetic dreams of flying. Thus, the flight motif has influenced the plot and characterization; the thematic quest for freedom; the “ancient properties” of the past; and selfexploration in literary works such as Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Earl Lovelace’s Salt (1997), Gloria Naylor’s Mama-Day (1988), Michelle Cliff ’s Abeng (1984), Esteban Montejo’s Autobiografia di uno schiavo (1966; The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave), and Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1957). The motif of the flying African is also portrayed in films such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s La Última Cena (1976; The Last Supper) and Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! (1969). During the reign of the transatlantic slave trade, the majority of African slaves sent to the Americas came from the Slave Coast, in the area of Senegambia and Central Africa. Although peoples from along the coast and from central areas of Africa were diverse in their ethnic backgrounds, www.abc-clio.com

they shared similar ontological beliefs. Bantu-speaking peoples from these areas had shared religious and traditional beliefs. Despite the onslaught of transatlantic slavery, these sacred beliefs survived the horrific conditions of the Middle Passage—the Atlantic crossing—and became established in the Americas through syncretic religions such as Obeah, Santeria, Candomblé and Voodoo. The myth of flying is also related to the forbidden act of suicide. The Tiv of Nigeria, for example, believed that committing suicide was worse than committing murder. Likewise among the Azande, Kanuri, Ibo, and Hausa suicide was also forbidden. One way in which to “correct” or “repair” the taboo of suicide when it did occur was through mythologizing or encoding the act. If a suicide occurred, that individualistic act had to be ritualistically cleansed by the living in order that the individual’s soul could find peace in the spirit world and not roam in various “shape-shifting” forms among the living. One of the central ontological tenets that existed among the early generations of enslaved Africans who arrived in the New World was that it was forbidden to take one’s own life. According to extant oral history, the enslaved Africans who arrived in the Americas during the early centuries of slavery frequently dismissed, denied, or concealed suicide by engaging the myth of flying. Thus, in the ethos of New World slavery, to fly would become a euphemism for suicide. In “The Nkuyu: Spirit Messengers of the Kumina” (1977), Maureen Warner-Lewis draws attention to the relationship between suicide and the myths of flying among African peoples in the emerging New World cultures. The flying African motif not only implicated suicide, but it was offered as a response for sudden and

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inexplicable feats of disappearance by slaves from their masters. Throughout numerous ancient West African societies, the ability “to fly” or to have divine powers was directly correlated with abstinence from salt. Traditions indicate that such abstinence enhanced shamanistic powers and enabled magico-religious practices. With the discipline to refrain from adding salt to food, mystics and healers separated themselves from the ordinary members of the community. In preparing the body and mind for healing and divination rituals, they would not consume salt. There was also a widespread view that salt could ward off evil because evil sorcerers would not come near the salt. Beliefs about the powers of salt abstinence persisted during the formation of neo-African cultures in the Americas. The early generations of African peoples coming to the Americas as slaves forged circumstantial reasons for their ontological beliefs, and abstinence from salt became associated with the brutality of slavery, submission to Christianity (salt was frequently given in Catholic baptismal ceremonies), and collective memory of the traumatic Atlantic crossing. In New World slave history, people of African descent began to associate salt with unmitigated death, misery, betrayal, and suffering. Yet as spiritual people who had recent collective memories of an African homeland, they trusted that through death, their souls would be able to “fly” back to Africa if they abstained from salt. The folklore and legends show that “flight” in the context of slavery in the New World represented the hope, unity, and courage of African slaves who could “rise into the air” and escape back to the homeland in Africa. Although slavery was eventually abolished in the English, Spanish, French, www.abc-clio.com

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Portuguese, and Dutch colonies in the Americas, sacred beliefs about the flying Africans and the connections to suicide developed into popular legends. These legends are part of the folklore in the English-, French-, Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Dutch-speaking communities in the New World African Diaspora. Legends of the flying Africans have especially proliferated in neo-African folklore in the United States, the Caribbean, and Central America. In The Book of Negro Folklore (1958), by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, for example, “The Legend of the Flying African” appears as a traditional story still told among the Gullah people of the Georgia Sea Islands. Some of the most wellknown twentieth-century references to “folks flyin’ back tuh Africa” can be read in the oral narratives that were collected in Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (1940) during the 1930s. Emerging from many different African ethnicities that converged in the Americas during the momentum of transatlantic slavery, the myth of the flying African has been revitalized by numerous contemporary writers into legends of liberation, empowerment, and freedom. Angelita Reyes See also: Candomblé; Film (Atlantic); Folklore, African; Georgia’s Sea Islands; Hausa; ; Morrison, Toni; Obeah; Voodoo References Georgia Writers’ Project. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. 1940. New York: Anchor Books, 1972. Hughes, Langston, and Arna Bontemps. The Book of Negro Folklore. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958. McDaniel, Lorna. The Big Drum Ritual of Carriacou: Praisesongs in Rememory of Flight. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998.

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482 FOLKLORE, AFRICAN Reyes, Angelita. “Taking Flight and Taking Foot: From Margaret Garner to Beloved.” In Mothering across Cultures: Postcolonial Representations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Warner-Lewis, Maureen. “The Nkuyu: Spirit Messengers of the Kumina.” Savacou 3 (1977): 57–82 Werner, Alice. Myths and Legends of the Bantu. 1933. Reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1968.

FOLKLORE, AFRICAN African folklore is part of the oral tradition of black culture. They are oral traditional tales of Africa that have survived and been transformed by African American and Caribbean storytelling and cultural practices. When they needed to write about the literature of their ancestors, West African intellectuals of the 1960s turned to the griot to preserve the age-old traditions of African storytelling. The griot, whose inherited wisdom was acquired through legacy, age, and experience, was the only person who could keep the African past from falling into oblivion at a time when modernization was casting its shadows over the continent. A troubadour par excellence, the griot was an erudite poet whose knowledge and wisdom came not only from his function of historian and genealogist, but also from his role of diplomat and diviner. He retained sacred knowledge of the unmatched arts of praise-poetry, story collecting, reciting, and negotiating. The griot was traditionally a public servant, counselor, and artist at the service of the royal authority and the people that it governed. His fate depended on the survival and prosperity of the king or queen next to whom he would walk, ride, and run, even during wartime. This unity between the griot and royal personages was manifested in the continuing relationships www.abc-clio.com

between the families of the griots and royalty. In the empires that used to be in current Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and the Gambia, “it was understood that a son would succeed his father as griot to a particular line of kings.” When author Djibril Tamsir Niane went to collect information about the epic of Sunjata Keita, Guinean griot Djeli Mamadou Kouyate told him, “The hero’s father, Maghan Kon Fatta, the king of Mali, had as his griot a certain Gnankouman Doua; when the king died and Sunjata succeeded to the throne, he inherited as griot the son of Doua, Balla Fasseke Kouyate” (Niane, 1965, 9). Djeli Mamadou Kouyate rendered the exact words that Maghan Kon Fatta had spoken to his son Sunjata before he died: “In Manden each prince has a griot; the father of Doua [that is, Duga] was my father’s griot; Doua is my griot; the son of Doua, Balla Fasseke, is to be your griot” (cited in Austen, 1999, 34). These statements demonstrate the vital role that the griot plays as a historian and keeper of oral tradition in Africa. By transmitting unwritten knowledge of the past, the griot becomes the purveyor of African oral tradition. Djeli Kuyate’s repetition of the word griot, his emphasis on names, and the distinctive tonality, cadence, and rhythm in which he narrates Maghan Kon Fatta’s last words to his son are patterns of the old poetic tradition from which contemporary African oral strategies derived. The manner in which the griot recites or interprets traditional epics, such as that of Sunjata, helps us understand the origins and characteristics of African discursive strategies. In this epic, Sumanguru Kante, king of Sosso, old Mali, had a conversation with his new griot, Bala Faasege, whom he had taken from his rival, Sunjata. Sumanguru told Bala:

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FOLKLORE, AFRICAN What is your name? The griot replied, “My name is Nyankuma Dookha.” Sumanguru said, “I am going to take your name from you; And apart from those with special knowledge, No one will know your name any more. I shall name you after my xylophone. What I am going to do to you, That is what I shall make your name. The third will be your surname Your first name is Balo; I will cut your Achilles tendons; Your surname is Kuyate.” They call him Bala Faasege Kuyate. (cited in Austen, 1999, pp. 36–37)

This epic, which was narrated by Malian griot Demba Kanute in the early 1970s, reflects the importance of orality and understated meaning in traditional African poetry. As the tone of the conversation between Sumanguru and Bala Faasege suggests, in traditional African epic poetry, the importance of the word depends on the way meaning is encoded and expressed in a verbal exchange. When Sumanguru tells his new griot Balla, “I am going to take your name from you,” he intends to go further than just removing the civil name and identity that Bala had in the past. Sumanguru envisions to completely eradicate Bala’s previous status as griot of the Keita family by transforming him into the bard of the Kante household. This shift of identity requires substituting Bala’s previous allegiance to the “Dookha” for a new commitment to the “Kuyate.” Once complete, this transformation of Bala’s status, which shifts both his royal and ethnic loyalty, is irreversible. The unalterability of Balla’s new social position accounts for the seriousness and solemnity of Sumanguru’s tone when he says, “I will cut your Achilles tendons.” What Sumanguru does here is not to perform the act literally but to signify on his www.abc-clio.com

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intent to kill the old personality of his new griot in the same way a knife would have cut through the “Achilles tendons” of a person. While he has no intent to hurt Bala, Sumanguru wants to sever Bala’s “tendons” metaphorically, signifying his affective conviction that no one other than Bala deserves to become his griot. The understated meaning of Sumanguru’s words is a central feature in African oral poetry. Behind the literal aspect of words, the griots convey subtle and implicit meaning through the use of symbolic images. Because of the transatlantic slave trade, which resulted in the forced transportation of millions of Africans to the Western world, African folklore found its way in the Americas. In order to preserve the memory of their homelands, ancestors, and cultures, the enslaved Africans held tightly to the folktales and worldviews that they either brought from Africa or learned from their forbears in the Americas. These Africans passed down knowledge of the tales from generation to generation, making it possible for scholars to find their traces in the rich literature of blacks in the Americas. The African influence in the folklore of the Americas is visible in the similar ways in which tales are told on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. A few examples are in Zora Neale Hurston’s book of folklore, Mules and Men (1935). Here, Hurston’s storytellers develop rhetorical devices that are traceable to cultures and places in Africa. Such devices include opening formulas and calls-and-responses. Examples of opening formula in Mules are the sentences, “Well, once upon a time was a good time” in “The Turtle Watch” (p. 84) and “Ah got to say a piece of litery [literary] fust to git mah wind on” in “How Jack Beat the Devil” (p. 47). These phrases are analogous to the ones

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used in Wolof and Fulani folktales, where they serve to arouse the audience members to listen attentively and participate in the process of the storytelling. The Wolof storyteller begins his or her narrative in a similar way with the formula “leb-on” (there was a story) to which the audience responds “lup-on” (it happened here). Like the African American formula, the Wolof version invites the audience to listen attentively and participate actively in the process of storytelling by answering to the teller’s calls. In Talking and Testifying (1977), Geneva Smitherman found in the African American church a call-andresponse exchange in which the preacher tells the audience, “Y’all don’t want to hear dat so I’m gone leave it alone,” to which the congregation responds by saying “‘Naw, Tell it, Reb! Tell it! Tell it!” A similar verbal exchange occurs in Wolof storytelling. Here, the teller establishes a rapport of communication by saying “Am-on a fi” (it happened here) to which the audience responds by saying “da na am” (it was so). The sentence “Naw, Tell it, Reb! Tell it! Tell it!” that Smitherman described as a usual formula in African American sermon, rap, comedy, and storytelling is visible in James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), when the congregation in the Temple of the Fire Baptized responds to Gabriel’s call “Woe is me!” by shouting “‘Yes! Tell it! Amen! You preach it, boy.” This pattern of call-and-response in the African American sermon is consistent with the Wolof communicative exchange described earlier. Moreover, the African influence in the Americas is visible in the trickster figures of Brer Rabbit and Brer Dog that Hurston depicts in Mules to represent the unequal power relations between planters and slaves during slavery. One example is the tale www.abc-clio.com

“What the Rabbit Learned,” in which Brer Dog seeks revenge against Brer Rabbit, who had taken the former’s girlfriend, Miss Saphronie, from him and cut his tongue during their previous conflict in “How Brer Dog Lost His Beautiful Voice.” In “What the Rabbit Learned,” Brer Rabbit and Brer Dog were walking peacefully in the bush, as if no grudge existed between them, when, all of a sudden, the Rabbit heard the sound of barking dogs. Noting that Brer Rabbit was frightened by the sound of the hounds, Brer Dog told the Rabbit, “Ain’t we done held a convention and passed a law dogs run no mo’ rabbits? Don’t pay no ’tention to every lil’l bit of barkin’ you hear” (pp. 146–147). The Rabbit, who knew that some trick was being played against him, responded, “Yeah, but all de dogs ain’t been to no convention, and anyhow some of dese fool dogs ain’t got no better sense than to run over dat law and break it up.” Saying this, Brer Rabbit took off, remembering the old-time saying “Run every time de bush shake” (p. 147). The intelligence, charm, wisdom, and verbal dexterity that Brer Rabbit exhibits in his capacity to outsmart Brer Dog in the bush signifies on the subversive strategies that slaves developed to outwit the slaveholders and slave catchers who chased them when they ran away from plantations. The wisdom that makes Brer Rabbit “run every time de bush shakes” alludes to the intelligence that the African slaves in America such as Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup demonstrated by running away or hiding in secret places whenever they were chased by cruel slave owners. Such subversive strategies of resistance derive from the vigilance that African tricksters like Leuk, who is Brer Rabbit’s grandfather, used to survive oppression in the mythological

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world of Ndoumbelane. In Birago Diop’s “The Tricks of Leuk-the-Hare” (1966), Leuk charmed a princess and escaped her father’s plan to execute him by simply telling the king, “Bour [your majesty] . . . you cannot kill the father of your grandchild!” (81). The wisdom and verbal skill that Leuk used to subvert a stratified traditional Wolof society is the source from which Brer Rabbit and the African slaves in the Americas drew in order to outsmart their oppressors. African folklore has a rich history that is traceable from the traditional epic of Sunjata to the contemporary literature of blacks in the Americas. In both Africa and the Americas, folklore has served as an important means of entertainment, education, and cultural survival. The Africans who survived the Middle Passage have used it to preserve their past and resist domination. In this sense, black writers of the Americas have inherited the role of preservers of the past that griots used to play in Africa. Babacar M’Baye See also: Ananse; Dadié, Bernard Binlin; Exploration and Explorers, Africa; Flying Africans References Austen, Ralph A. In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature, and Performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: New American Library, 1953. Bascom, William R. African Folktales in the New World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Berry, Jack. West African Folktales. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. Cosentino, Donald. Defiant Maids and Stubborn Farmers: Tradition and Invention in Mende Story Performance. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

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Dadié, Bernard. The Black Cloth: A Collection of African Folktales. 1955. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Diop, Abdoulaye-Bara. La Société Wolof: Tradition et changement. Paris: Karthala, 1965. Diop, Birago. Tales of Amadou Koumba: Birago Diop. 1959. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Frobenius, Leo, and Douglas C. Fox. 1937. African Genesis. New York: Benjamin Bloom. 1966. Hale, Thomas. Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. 1935. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Niane, Djibril Tamsir. Sunjata: An Epic of Old Mali. Translated by G. D. Pickett. London: Longman, 1965. Okpewho, Isidore. African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

FRENCH EMPIRE The French Empire grew rapidly in the Atlantic between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, competing heavily with the British Empire. The French laid claim to substantial territories in North, West, and Central Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, particularly what is now the nation of Haiti. French merchants, in search of new markets and potential sources of raw materials, were attracted by Africa and the New World. The French Empire relied heavily on the transatlantic trade started by European merchants in the fifteenth century and involving the export of manufactured goods from Europe to Africa, the shipment of African slaves to the New World, and the sale of Americangrown crops to Europe.

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The early voyages of Jacques Cartier and other French explorers to the coasts of the New World that they hoped to make New France, as well as the frequent voyages of French fishermen to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland throughout the sixteenth century, were the precursors to French colonial expansion. France’s first major American colony was established on July 27, 1605, with the foundation of Port Royal in the colony of Acadia (present-day Nova Scotia, Canada). In 1608 Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City, which was to become the capital of New France (later called Canada). Areas of French settlement were generally limited to the St. Lawrence River valley. The territories of New France were developed as mercantile colonies because at that time in France there was relatively little interest in longterm settlements. In the 1680s, Cavelier de La Salle offered France another chance to carve out an empire in the New World. After several fruitless attempts, he reached the fork of the Mississippi Delta with his crew, and on April 9, 1682 he acquired the territory of Louisiana. Colonization efforts began in July 1684, but the region was so inhospitable and the living conditions so bad that French colonial ambitions ended in failure. At the same time, the French began to build a smaller but more profitable empire in the West Indies to enhance their American expansion. Settlements along South America’s northern coast in present-day French Guiana began in 1624, despite Amerindian hostility, widespread tropical diseases, and malnutrition. In 1643 the French colonists established a settlement at Cayenne along with some small-scale plantations. After the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which deprived France of almost all her www.abc-clio.com

possessions in the Americas other than Guiana and a few Caribbean islands, including Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Lucia. Louis XIV sent thousands of settlers to Guiana in the 1780s and 1790s. Exports of sugar, hardwood, Cayenne pepper, and other spices brought some prosperity to the colony for the first time. In these decades Cayenne became surrounded by plantations, some of which had several thousand slaves brought in from Africa. The Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique (Company of the American Islands) colonized in Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635. The French took possession of Guadeloupe, wiped out many of the native Caribs, and annexed the island to the kingdom of France in 1674. One indication of Guadeloupe’s prosperity at this time is that in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France decided to abandon its territorial claims in Canada in return for British recognition of French control of Guadeloupe. French control of Guadeloupe was finally acknowledged in the Treaty of Vienna (1815). Martinique was colonized in 1635 by the French occupying forces, who deported the native Caribs from the island and banned their return. The most important French Caribbean colonial possession was the colony of Saint Domingue (later Haiti), which was the western third of the Spanish island of Hispaniola. Saint Domingue was acquired in 1697, and soon afterwards French settlers began importing African slaves, who became the most numerous segment of the population. In the eighteenth century, Saint Domingue grew to be the richest sugar colony in the Caribbean and the French Empire’s most important territory. The colony was ruled by a small minority of Europeans and free people of color.

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On August 14, 1791, the first successful slave revolt in the Americas began in Saint Domingue. The slaves were led by Toussaint Louverture and then, following his capture by the French in 1801, by Jean Jacques Dessalines. They defeated French, Spanish, and British colonists and eventually achieved independence as Haiti on January 1, 1804. Haiti thus became the first black republic in the world. The Haitian example inspired numerous slave revolts in the Caribbean and the United States. As with other French colonies in the Americas, the settlers established large food-producing plantations sustained with a supply of African slaves. Though the Portuguese were the pioneers of the slave trade in Africa, Frenchmen later became active participants. French merchants exchanged brass, copper bracelets, and other Western goods for pepper, beads, salt, ivory, gold, and slaves, their most precious asset, who subsequently became Africa’s most extensive export industry; they were major commercial commodities in the transatlantic economic order. The growing demand for sugar and other tropical crops (cane sugar, tobacco, cotton, rum, cocoa, coffee, and tea) in the 1630s caused French entrepreneurs to step up production, which required additional laborers. Thus, the French became increasingly dependent on cheap African labor for the exploitation of their American plantations and estates and the development of their colonies in the Americas, especially in the West Indies and in Latin America, which employed about 90 percent of all the Africans taken to the New World. At the same time that French expansion was occurring in the Americas, French involvement in Africa was also growing as a consequence of economic expansion. www.abc-clio.com

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French merchants began trade relations with African kingdoms in the late fifteenth century, and by 1624 they had begun to establish trading posts along the African coast. France had many African colonies, most of which were acquired in the late 1880s after the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 that led to the “scramble for Africa.” Between 1880 and 1900, French control was established over much of Northern, Western, and Central Africa. Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Dahomey (presentday Benin), Gabon, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, as well as the east African coastal enclave of Djibouti (originally French Somaliland), were annexed as overseas territories of France. They served as reservoirs of needed raw materials and cheap labor for French ventures in the Americas. While the enclaved colonies provided the muchneeded raw materials and slaves, the coastal territories, while also serving those purposes, additionally provided embarkment points for the Americas. Besides the resource potential and investment opportunities offered by African territories, the sugar cane and slavery-based economy of the French possessions in the Americas justified French colonial ambition in Africa. The growing demand for slave labor in the Americas, particularly in the French West Indies, rapidly increased the volume of slave trade. French slave traders were particularly active in the Gulf of Guinea, the Senegambia, and Kongo. The suppliers of slaves for France’s New World colonies included the prosperous kingdom of Dahomey, which established slave trading relations with the French in the seventeenth century; it became a French colony in 1892. The coastal part of the kingdom

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became known as the Slave Coast, with Ouidah serving as one of the main supply points for the much-needed cheap labor for France’s West Indian plantations. Guinea also served as a slave collection point from the time Portuguese first came to the area and began the slave trade in the fifteenth century. Various European powers came to the Senegal area from the fifteenth century onward until France gained possession of Gorée in 1817, an important slave trade departure point. Though Côte d’Ivoire was not an active player in the transatlantic slave trade, its coastal towns of Assinie, Grand-Bassam, and San Pedro were important collection points of slave labor intended for American plantations owned by the French. Even after the trade had been abolished, some slave-trading activities persisted along the Ivorian coasts, with several African tribes and chiefs acting as agents for French traders. The coastal area of Kongo was a major source for the transatlantic slave trade, and French traders exported Gabonese slaves well into the 1870s, long after the trade had ended elsewhere on the West African coast. The French had established a trade port on the West African coast in what is present day Senegal as early as 1659, and from the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries became participants in the transatlantic slave trade, which was largely under the control of the British, Dutch, and Portuguese. During this period France exported hundreds of thousands of slaves a year to the Caribbean, Latin America, and North America. French penetration into Central Africa began in the late nineteenth century during the scramble for Africa in an attempt to expand the French Empire. France wished to expand the borders of the French Congo to www.abc-clio.com

link up with French territories in West Africa, North Africa, and East Africa and ultimately maximize the exploitation of the region’s human and natural resources. The French extended their influence to North Africa, establishing a protectorate over Algeria (1830), Tunisia (1881), and Morocco (1911) because of the economic potential of that region. The French colonial empire also included colonies and territories, namely Indochina (modern Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) and the South Pacific islands of New Caledonia and French Polynesia. The French made their last major colonial gains after World War I, when they gained mandates over the former territories of the Ottoman Empire that make up what is now Syria and Lebanon, as well as most of the former German colonies of Togo and Cameroon. When France abolished slavery in 1848, the former slaves fled into the rainforest and set up communities similar to the ones from which they had been stolen in Africa. These Maroons formed a buffer zone between the Europeans, who settled along the coast and main rivers, and the unconquered, and often hostile, native American tribes of the inland regions. Since no prior arrangements were made for their reintegration as free beings, these former slaves and their place in society became a pressing social issue. The French subsequently repatriated some of the freed slaves to France between 1859 and 1899 to work in subordinate capacities and others to resettlement communities in Cameroon, Gabon, and Côte d’Ivoire. French missionaries, fired by a profound enthusiasm and concerned with the spiritual welfare of freed blacks, established missions in these communities. The impacts of the French Empire in both the Western Hemisphere and Africa

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were very profound. France’s expansionist drive established significant relations between Africa and the Americas. The actions of the empire resulted in the creation of large African communities in the Americas and the West Indies. Armed with their African cultural background, the slaves started new ways of life, which entailed a combination of African culture and American elements. African settlements in the New World helped to produce a host of synergetic cultures that differ widely from one country to the next (for example, Guadeloupe as opposed to Haiti) and within different regions of the same territory (for example, southern versus northern areas of Guadeloupe). This acculturation operated in two directions, and strains of African culture have decidedly influenced many of the emergent cultures of the New World; master and slaves were mutually influenced. Whites depended on African skills to identify useful flora and fauna in Africa and the appropriate methods of agricultural production for African crops in America. Blacks also learned from the Indians while teaching them about medicinal herbs. The Africans brought with them their music, which has had a profound impact on the musical heritage of the world. Haitian popular music, for example, derives in large part from the chants and rhythms of African drums in the religious rituals of Dahomey and from the daily life songs that were so much a part of the African tradition. African slaves likewise carried their dances across the Atlantic. Many French Caribbean dances, including the popular soukous dance, came from African culture. Africans also left their mark on the literature and folklore of the New World. The popular tales and legends as well as the folk literature and literary works produced by Caribbean writers in www.abc-clio.com

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French are, in large part, of African origin. There is also a significant African influence on the French language spoken in the Caribbean, as demonstrated by the popular creole languages. Finally, Africans brought their religious beliefs—Voodoo, for example—into the West Indies, where they blended with Catholic Christianity. The French Empire also had a profound economic, social, cultural, and psychological impact on African societies and peoples. The French slavers deprived the continent of a large proportion of its ablebodied workforce, which was forcefully displaced from its natural setting to a completely new environment and culture. The psychological impact of this dehumanizing process was crippling, and the loss and dislocation of population to the transatlantic markets were detrimental to the economy of precolonial Africa. The French Empire also disrupted indigenous societies by damaging the social and economic fabric of the society and undermined the confidence of Africans in their historical evolution, which militated against economic progress and cultural development. On the other hand, while certain African areas suffered severely, others were little affected, or even derived economic benefit from relations with France. The French expansionist enterprise played a significant role in the capitalist transformation of North America and the emergence of dependency structures in Africa and the Caribbean by the mid-nineteenth century. The process gave rise to economic, social, and political structures and relations within which North America became developed and industrialized, while Africa and the Caribbean remained underdeveloped and agrarian. Thus, the effects of the expansionist drive of the French Empire were mixed

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490 FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW Inikori, Joseph E. “Africa in World History: The Export Slave Trade from Africa and the Emergence of the Atlantic Economic Order.” In UNESCO General History of Africa. Vol. 5. Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, edited by B. A. Ogot. London and Berkeley: Heinemann Educational Books and University of California Press, 1992. Parkman, Francis. Pioneers of France in the New World. 1907. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Patterson, Karl David. The Northern Gabon Coast to 1875. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Tissot, Jean-Michel. La Guyane telle quelle. Paris: Le Créations du Pélican, 1998. Vansina, Jan. “The Kongo Kingdom and its Neighbours.” In UNESCO General History of Africa. Vol. 5. Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, edited by B. A. Ogot. London and Berkeley: Heinemann Educational Books and University of California Press, 1992.

rather than entirely negative. Contact with France and the Americas opened new images of the world for Africans and presented them with products of Western civilization (including language, education, culture, goods, industry, and technology). For example, between 1548 and 1583, maize, manioc, tobacco and probably beans, groundnuts, and other New World plants were introduced into Africa. The crops from the New World transformed Africa’s agriculture in the seventeenth century by increasing yields and improving nutrition and health. These gains were, however, bought at a terrible price, and no balance sheet can ever present the full account of the role of the French Empire in creating relations between Africa and the Americas. Philip A. Ojo See also: Dessalines, Jean Jacques; Guinea; Haiti; Louverture, Toussaint Bréda; Senegal

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References Daget, Serge “The Abolition of the Slave Trade.” In UNESCO General History of Africa. Vol. 6. Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s, edited by J. F. Ade Ajayi. London and Berkeley: Heinemann Educational Books and University of California Press, 1989. Duignan, Peter, and Lewis H. Gann. The United States and Africa: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1984. Flint, John E., ed. The Cambridge History of Africa. Vol. 5. From c. 1790 to c. 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Harris, Joseph E. “The African Diaspora in the Old and the New Worlds.” In UNESCO General History of Africa. Vol. 5. Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, edited by B. A. Ogot. London and Berkeley: Heinemann Educational Books and University of California Press, 1992. Houk, James T. Spirits, Blood, and Drums: The Orisha Religion in Trinidad. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 protected U.S. slaveholding interests and increased sectional tension leading to the Civil War. The U.S. Constitution in its original form protected some slaveholding interests in a number of its clauses. Among them was the Fugitive Slave Clause, which prohibited free states from emancipating or harboring escaped slaves and required that runaways be returned to their owners on demand. Some northerners feared that free blacks would be unjustly confined and sent into slavery under the law. In response, many northern states passed laws designed to give accused fugitives legal rights to protect them from kidnapping, and some prohibited state officials from assisting in capturing fugitives. As antislavery sentiment grew in the North during the early nineteenth century, public resistance to southern attempts to

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An 1850 illustration condemns the Fugitive Slave Act, a law passed by Congress in September 1850 that increased federal and free-state responsibility for the recovery of fugitive slaves. The law provided for the appointment of federal commissioners empowered to issue warrants for the arrest of alleged fugitive slaves and to enlist the aid of posses and even civilian bystanders in their apprehension. (Library of Congress)

capture runaways increased, which was expressed in part by the creation of an underground network of free blacks and sympathetic whites who shuttled escaped southern slaves to freedom. Southerners looked to the federal government for further support in regaining fugitive slaves from free states. Recovery of runaways was not simply a practical interest for slaveholding southerners but a matter of principle, as they accused northern states of violating their constitutional responsibilities. The Compromise of 1850, designed to prevent secession by again balancing sectional interests, included the Fugitive Slave Law, which toughened provisions for recovering slaves. This law required U.S. marshals to help owners recover fugitives and imposed fines on any person found guilty of harboring a runaway. There was immediate www.abc-clio.com

outrage in some northern communities, particularly Boston, where vigilante groups arose to protect and rescue fugitives from capture. Overall, the Fugitive Slave Law increased tension between the North and South leading to the Civil War. It did so by helping to perpetuate slavery as the most volatile issue facing the country during the mid-nineteenth century. Ian M. Spurgeon See also: Dred Scott v. Sandford; Slavery (Economics); Slavery (History) References Campbell, Stanley W. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970. McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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FULANI The Fulani are a nomadic Muslim ethnic group located primarily in present-day Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The Fulani currently represent the largest nomadic population in the world. An ethnic group now spread across a large portion of West Africa, the Fulani are believed to have originated in North Africa or the Middle East. Converted to Islam by Arab jihadists, the Fulani themselves pursued jihads against the non-Muslim peoples in West Africa until they displaced or assimilated large portions of those populations. They established two significant empires in the first half of the nineteenth century: one centered in Massina, the other in Sokoto. They are credited with creating many of the important trade routes across the interior of West Africa. As they entered new regions, the Fulani established large cattle herds, driving them from one seasonal pasture to another. Traditionally, cattle have been the measure of wealth among the Fulani. But in recent decades, their nomadic way of life has been eroded by three factors: desertification, intensified by recurring drought, and the expansion of agriculture have combined to reduce grazing lands and have increasingly forced the Fulani into villages. Moreover, the greater availability of motorized transport has made the rhythms of the nomadic life seem increasingly anachronistic. The Fulani continue to adhere to a fairly rigid caste system. The major castes, in their order of stature, are the nobility,

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the traders, the tradesmen, and the descendants of slaves. The most prominent features of the Fulani culture are their emphasis on the stoic endurance of pain and the accentuation of beauty through tattooing. As part of their initiation into adulthood, Fulani boys traditionally endured a ceremony in which they viciously struck each other with staffs and laughed to demonstrate their contempt for the weapons being used against them. Although this violent ceremony has been banned in many places, the practice of ritual tattooing continues unabated. Fulani women especially stand out because they typically dye their lips black. Martin Kich

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References Adeleye, R. A. Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804–1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies. New York: Humanities, 1971. Hiskett, Mervyn. The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Johnston, Hugh Anthony Stephens. The Fulani Empire of Sokoto. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Last, Murray. The Sokoto Caliphate. Harlow, UK: Longmans, 1967. Smaldone, Joseph P. Warfare in the Sokoto Caliphate: Historical and Sociological Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Stilwell, Sean Arnold. Paradoxes of Power: The Kano “Mamluks” and Male Royal Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1804–1903. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004. Sulaiman, Ibraheem. The Islamic State and the Challenge of History: Ideals, Policies, and Operation of the Sokoto Caliphate. New York: Mansell, 1987.

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G GABON, REPUBLIC OF The African nation of Gabon, with a population of 1,425,000 and an area of 103,347 square miles (267 kilometers), has been shaped by the interaction of Africans, Europeans, and Americans. Gabon’s relations with the Americas date back to between 1809 and 1815, when the Portuguese shipped about 4,000 slaves from the Gabon coast to the New World, in spite of British and American antislave trade legislation at that period. A former French colony, Gabon became independent in 1960. The growing market for slave labor in the Americas, specifically in the Portuguese islands, Brazil, Cuba, and the French West Indies after 1860, acted as a stimulus both to the enslavement process and the volume of slave trade. Because of these new slave markets and because of their proximity, traders exported Gabonese slaves well into the 1870s, long after the trade had ended elsewhere on the West African coast. Slaves, recruited from most of the interior tribes, continued to be an important supplement to the trade in wood, ivory, and other forest products in the region until the 1870s. Nevertheless, a widely applied policy of concluding treaties with indigenous ethnic groups, combined with promoting British land occupation projects in Gabon under

French protection, had the effect of severely impeding the traffic in slaves. Another sphere of significant American influence in Gabon was in the fields of exploration and evangelization. American adventurers, explorers, and missionaries were among the first to investigate the mysteries of the African interior. Among the most notable was Paul Belloni du Chaillu, who went to Gabon in 1855 for the express purpose of scientific exploration in an area that was still terra incognita to the world at large. Du Chaillu penetrated the interior of west-central Africa, starting from the Gabon River, and then moved eastward. Another important influence came through missionary activities that related to trade. Captain Richard Lawlin, a veteran American trader, offered to take two American missionaries, the Reverends John Leighton Wilson and Benjamin Griswold, on trading voyages down the coast to check on possible new locations for missionary activity in Gabon. These two American missionaries, representing the Christian foreign mission agency, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, were among the pioneers in the effort to bring Christianity to the Mpongwe people of Gabon. They landed with Lawlin on June 22, 1842 at Glass near the Gabon estuary, a

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center of English, French, and American trade, a place where the coastal Mpongwe people had for centuries exchanged slaves and ivory with Europeans for manufactured goods. Gabon was attractive for these American missionaries because other than two British Baptists on Fernando Póo, there were no other missionaries in the entire region, and the population, while certainly heathen, seemed unusually promising. The American missionaries who began work in the Gabon estuary in 1842 made numerous short exploratory trips into the hinterland. In 1849 freed slaves from the Americas were settled in what became Libreville. This new development increased the need to cater to the physical and spiritual welfare of the former slaves. Unfortunately, the mission was not successful, and several missionaries died of disease. Consequently, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, a denomination comprised of Presbyterian churches in southern and border states that were proslavery, which had experienced considerable success in winning converts and creating an African clergy, took over the Gabon mission in 1870. Roman Catholic activity in Gabon also had its origins in the efforts of two American clergymen, Bishop Edward Barron and Father John Kelly, to establish missions in Africa. Given Africa’s new importance in global affairs and America’s deepening involvement in its fate from the Cold War period onward, the United States has adopted a two-pronged approach of economic development and democratization toward Africa, including Gabon. Starting in the 1990s, the United States elevated African democratization to a central priority and objective of its foreign policy toward the continent. The United States Agency for www.abc-clio.com

International Development (USAID) oversees the implementation of U.S. assistance programs in Gabon, and the agency has established an integrated focus for its central objectives, which include sustainable economic development, improved health and nutrition, recognition and protection of basic human rights, accountability, and strengthened environmental protection as well as democracy in Gabon. The results have, however, not been encouraging. Gabon’s president, El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba—one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world—introduced a nominal multiparty system and a new constitution in the early 1990s. This, however, is far below the level of democracy that the United States expects. In the economic sector, there are many American private investors in the Gabonese oil exploration and banking industries. The United States is a major supplier of imports to Gabon. Additionally, in the public sector, the United States and many other Western powers, the Republic of China, and the United Nations have provided foreign grants and assistance received by Gabon since independence. Emmanuel A. Odjo

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See also: Development, United States Agency for International; French Empire References Daget, S. “The Abolition of the Slave Trade.” In UNESCO General History of Africa. Vol. 6. Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s, edited by J. F. Ade Ajayi. London and Berkeley: Heinemann Educational Books and University of California Press, 1989. Harbeson, John W. “Externally Assisted Democratization.” In Africa in World Politics: The African State System in Flux, edited by John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000.

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GABRIEL Flint, John E., ed. The Cambridge History of Africa. Vol. 5. From c. 1790 to c. 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Patterson, K. David. The Northern Gabon Coast to 1875. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

GABRIEL (1776–1800) The black author of a failed slave rebellion in eighteenth-century Virginia, the enslaved revolutionary known only as Gabriel was born near Richmond, Virginia, at Brookfield, the Henrico County plantation of Thomas Prosser. Most likely, Gabriel’s father was a blacksmith, the occupation chosen for Gabriel; in Virginia, the offspring of skilled bondpersons frequently inherited their parent’s profession. Status as a craft artisan provided the young blacksmith with considerable standing in the slave community, as did his ability to read and write. As Gabriel grew to be an unusually tall young man, even older slaves looked to him for leadership, a habit uncommon in African culture. By the mid1790s, as he approached the age of twenty, Gabriel stood at about six feet, and the muscles in his arms and chest betrayed nearly a decade in Brookfield’s forge. According to the journalist James T. Callender, blacks and whites alike regarded him as “a fellow of courage and intellect above his rank in life” (Callender to Jefferson, Thomas, 17 October, 1800, cited in French, Scot, 16). In the fall of 1798 Gabriel’s old master died, and ownership of Brookfield passed to twenty-two-year-old Thomas Henry Prosser. An ambitious young man with a townhouse in Richmond and a lucrative auction business, Prosser increasingly maximized his profits by hiring out www.abc-clio.com

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his surplus slaves. Despite all of the work to be done at Brookfield, Gabriel spent a considerable part of each month smithing in Richmond for artisans long on orders and short on labor. Although still a slave under Virginia law, Gabriel enjoyed a rough form of freedom. Indeed, his ties to the plantation became so tenuous that several historians erroneously have identified him as a free man. Emboldened by this quasi-liberty, in September 1799 Gabriel moved toward overt rebellion. Caught in the act of stealing a pig, a delicacy slaves used to supply their families with protein, Gabriel refused to endure the verbal abuse of its owner, a white neighbor. Instead, he wrestled his tormentor to the ground and bit off the better “part of his left Ear.” Under Virginia law, slaves were not tried as whites. They were prosecuted under a colonial statute of 1692 that created special segregated tribunals known as courts of oyer and terminer, composed of five justices of the peace. No jury was empanelled and there was an appeal to the governor. On October 7 Gabriel was formally charged with attacking a white man, a capital crime. Although found guilty, Gabriel escaped the gallows through an antiquated “benefit of clergy” clause that since the Revolution had been denied to white defendants. Slaves still possessed the right to benefit of clergy, which allowed them to avoid hanging in exchange for being branded on the thumb with a small cross if they were able to recite a verse from the Bible. Gabriel’s branding and incarceration served as a brutal reminder that despite his literacy and special status, he remained a slave. By the early spring of 1800, his fury began to turn into a carefully considered plan to bring about his freedom, as well as

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the end of slavery in Virginia. As a literate man who moved among urban artisans, Gabriel surely knew that several states to the north had recently passed laws for gradual emancipation, and that New York had finally approved such a statute in 1799. As he explained it to his brothers, Solomon and Martin, slaves and free blacks from Henrico County would gather at Brookfield on the evening of August 30, 1800. As the small but determined band of insurgents— armed with crude swords fashioned from scythes—neared Richmond, it would split into three groups, each with clearly stated objectives. Governor James Monroe, who resided in the small executive mansion adjacent to the capitol building, was to be seized as a hostage but otherwise left unharmed. A small number of whites, including Thomas Henry Prosser, were to die, but most would live as hostages in order to force the Virginia elite to grant the rebels’ demands, which included their freedom and an equitable division of white property. “Quakers, Methodists and French people,” three groups who had earned a sometimes undeserved reputation as foes of slavery, were not to be harmed. Gabriel hoped that the “poor white people,” who had no more political power than did the slaves, “would also join” the rebels. If Monroe and the town leaders agreed to Gabriel’s demands, the slave general intended to “hoist a white flag” and drink a toast “with the merchants of the city” (Egerton, 1993, 26). The uprising collapsed just before sunset on the appointed day, when a severe thunderstorm hit the Richmond area. Creeks rose, washing away fragile wooden bridges and severing communications between Brookfield and the city. Perhaps only a dozen slaves reached the blacksmith shop. The chaos of the storm convinced two www.abc-clio.com

Henrico slaves, Tom and Pharaoh, that the revolt could not succeed. They informed their owner of the conspiracy, and he hurried word to Governor Monroe. As the state militia closed in, Gabriel escaped south by way of the swampy Chickahominy River. Gabriel was finally betrayed by a slave, who had heard of Monroe’s $300 reward for Gabriel’s capture. Returned to Richmond under heavy guard, Gabriel was quickly tried and found guilty of “conspiracy and insurrection.” On October 10, 1800, the young revolutionary died with quiet composure at the town gallows. He was twentyfour years old. In all, twenty-six slaves, including Gabriel and his two brothers, were hanged for their part in the conspiracy. Another bondman allegedly hanged himself while in custody. Eight more rebels, including Gabriel’s chief lieutenant, Jack Ditcher, were transported to Spanish New Orleans; at least thirty-two others were found not guilty. Reliable sources placed the number of slaves who knew of the plot to be between five and six hundred. Douglas R. Egerton

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See also: Slavery (History); Slave Revolts/Maronnage; Turner, Nat; Vesey, Denmark

References Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. French, Scot. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Mullin, Gerald W. Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth Century Virginia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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GAMBIA,THE The Gambia, located on either side of the River Gambia, is surrounded on three sides by Senegal and on the west by the Atlantic Ocean. A fifth of its surface area is occupied by the River Gambia, and it has a largely Muslim population of about 1.5 million. The Gambia was colonized by the British in the seventeenth century. In 1661 they seized a fort built at the mouth of the river by the duke of Kurland, from modern-day Latvia, and renamed it James Fort. It was controlled by various British chartered companies and captured by the French in 1779, who returned it to the British in 1816. From 1843 until 1866 The Gambia was a separate colony, but from 1866 until 1888 it was administered from Sierra Leone. The latter did not work well, however, and from 1888 The Gambia was a separate colony again. In 1894 it was enlarged to include the “Protectorate,” land further upriver. On February 18, 1965, The Gambia became an independent republic within the British Commonwealth as the Republic of The Gambia. The Gambia was a major source of slaves. The English established the Guinea Company in the early seventeenth century, which became known formally as the Royal Africa Company in 1660 to trade with the region. They were originally interested in gold, but after running up losses, they quickly turned to the slave trade, and the company may have been involved in taking slaves to Virginia as early as May 1628. Those enslaved were then sold to plantations there in return for tobacco, which was brought back to England. The Royal Adventurers Company, formed in London during the 1660s, which included Prince Rupert and his brother Maurice, was also involved in the region, with the www.abc-clio.com

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prince (who had fought in the English Civil War twenty years earlier) and his brother sailing to The Gambia. They were the first members of a European royal family to visit West Africa, and the only royalty to visit until the nineteenth century. Once again, buying slaves and transporting them to the Americas became a lucrative business. Soon a new company, the Gambia Adventurers, was also established, and in 1672 the Royal African Company was founded. One of the slaves from The Gambia who was transported to the Americas was Kunta Kinte, from the village of Juffure. At the age of sixteen he was taken on the Lord Ligonier to Virginia where he was sold to a planter. His story, and that of his descendants, form the basis of Alex Haley’s Roots (1977). As the slave trade grew during the seventeenth century, demand for slaves from The Gambia continued unabated, as disease and overwork took the lives of many slaves in the American plantations and even as other sources of slaves became available. William Fitz William Owen (1774– 1857), a Canadian surveyor, charted the Gambia River in the 1820s. In 1831 the Barra War resulted from Britain’s determination to extend its influence upriver into Ashanti territory; this same year, Britain annexed these lands and designated them a crown colony. From 1831 to 1841, Sir Henry Vere Huntley (1796–1864) was next-to-last lieutenant governor of The Gambia; later, he became governor of Prince Edward Island. The governor from 1847 until 1852, Richard Graves McDonnell (1814–1881), who had been chief justice of The Gambia from 1843, also later served in Canada—in his case as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia in 1864–1865.

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McDonnell’s nominated successor, Arthur Edward Kennedy (1809–1883), also later worked in Canada, as governor of British Columbia. Kennedy, however, never actually served in The Gambia, because instead he managed to get an appointment as governor to Sierra Leone. Many of the governors of The Gambia also served in the West Indies or the South Atlantic. Jeremiah Callaghan, administrator of The Gambia from 1871 to 1873, went on to serve as governor of the Falkland Islands and the Bahamas; Cornelius Kortwright, administrator from 1873 to 1875, had been governor of the British Virgin Islands, Granada, and Tobago, and was later governor of British Guiana; Valesius Gouldsbury, administrator from 1877 to 1884, later was governor of St. Lucia; Cornelius Moloney, administrator from 1884 to 1886, was later governor of British Honduras, the Windward Islands, and Trinidad; James Shaw Hay, administrator from 1886 to 1888, was later governor of Barbados; Gilbert Carter; administrator from 1881 to 1888, was later governor of the Bahamas and Barbados; and Robert Baxter Llewellyn, administrator from 1891 to 1900, had previously been governor of Turks and Caicos Islands, Tobago, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia, and was later governor of the Windward Islands. Of the fourteen governors of The Gambia from 1901 until 1965, seven had also served, or later served, in the West Indies or the South Atlantic: Henry Gallwey had been governor of St. Helena; Edward Cameron had been governor of the British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia; John Middleton had been governor of the Falkland Islands; Edward Denham had been governor of

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British Guiana and Jamaica; Arthur Richards went on to become governor of Jamaica; Hilary Blood had been governor of Grenada and went on to become governor of Barbados; and John Warburton Paul, the last governor of The Gambia and its first governor-general, went on to be the governor of British Honduras. The Gambia has had a variety of political and cultural connections to the United States. Franklin Roosevelt stopped in The Gambia on his way to and again going from the Casablanca Conference with Winston Churchill in January 1943, during World War II. A U.S. delegation attended celebrations for the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Gambia’s independence. The delegation included George W. Bush, later governor of Texas, and after his inauguration in 2001, the forty-third president of the United States. It was one of only three visits overseas made by Bush before he entered politics. In his speech to the United Nations on November 10, 2001, Bush mentioned The Gambia, noting that one of its citizens had been killed in the September 11 attacks and that his wife spent the following day, their fourth wedding anniversary, helping look through the debris for her husband. In the realm of music, New York–based Gambian musician Foday Musa Suso, a prominent Kora player, has helped popularize West African music in the United States. Justin Corfield

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See also: British Empire; Haley, Alex References Gailey, Harry A. A History of Gambia. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Haley, Alex. Roots. London: Hutchinson, 1977. Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

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GARVEY, AMY JACQUES (1885–1973) Jamaican-born Amy Jacques Garvey served Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) as secretary, legal adviser, journalist, and associate editor of the organization’s weekly newspaper, the Negro World. In 1922 Jacques Garvey married the movement’s leader, Marcus Garvey, and when he was convicted of mail fraud by the U.S. government and imprisoned in 1925, she took charge of his legal defense campaign and the management of the UNIA headquarters in Harlem. She was widely regarded as the unofficial leader of the movement. Historians of the Garvey movement that mention Jacques Garvey have traditionally focused on her role as the wife and helpmate of Marcus rather than on her own intellectual contribution to Black Nationalism. More recently she has been seen as an important feminist leader. Jacques Garvey’s own account of the movement suggests that she chose to invest her strength in Garveyism rather than the man. Published in 1963, her Garvey and Garveyism is essentially a memoir in which she claims much of the credit for sustaining Marcus Garvey’s legacy through his years in prison and for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, she compiled and edited a collection of Marcus Garvey’s speeches, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1922), which inspired scholars and leaders of Black Nationalist movements across the globe. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, on December 31, 1895, Jacques Garvey’s great-great grandfather was the first mayor of that city, the Jamaican capital, and her father, George Jacques, had a secure managerial position at La Paloma Cigar Factory. An

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educated woman, Jacques Garvey’s mother, Charlotte Henrietta, was the daughter of a black woman named Jane and an English farmer, Frank South. As a member of the brown middle class, Jacques Garvey had an elite secondary school education at the exclusive Wolmers Girls’ School, an education denied most Jamaicans. As a member of the middle class, she also was exposed to, and for a time internalized, the Eurocentric and racist values of Jamaica’s caste system from her distinct position in the hierarchy, which incorporated eight categories representing varying shades of blackness. Indeed, Jacques Garvey later recalled her shame at her father coming to her school because of his darker color. Jacques Garvey’s father was disappointed that she was not a boy and educated her as if she was, encouraging her intellectual development through the reading of foreign newspapers and study of current affairs. Although Jacques Garvey was keen to enter the law profession, her father was unwilling to allow her to work in an office where she might be exposed to the wiles of young men and so decided she would train as a nurse. However, her father’s sudden death allowed Jacques to work as a clerk in a legal office for four years before deciding to leave for England in 1918. Prevented from sailing there by World War I, Jacques Garvey chose instead to go to the United States, a land much spoken of by her father as one mixed with opportunity and restrictions. The circumstances in which Jacques Garvey and her future husband met have been buried beneath the contradictory reports of his first and second wives and subsequent speculation on the part of biographers. Marcus Garvey’s first wife, Amy Ashwood, claimed that she and Jacques

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Garvey had been best friends in Jamaica, while Jacques Garvey stated that she did not know Ashwood until she moved to America. Either way, Jacques served as Ashwood’s bridesmaid on the latter’s marriage to Garvey just two and a half years before her own marriage to him in 1922. The two women remained enemies throughout their lives. It was between 1924 and 1927, the period, significantly, when her husband was in prison, that Jacques Garvey edited the Women’s page in the Negro World, titled “Our Women and What They Think.” The title was misleading, as Jacques Garvey wrote much of the page herself while continually pleading with her readers to contribute their poems, stories, and political pieces. The page allowed Jacques Garvey to articulate her burgeoning feminism and draw attention to the liberation struggles of black women across the world. Her editorials are generally regarded as her most important intellectual contribution. Jacques Garvey campaigned for the Pan-African cause throughout her life. Returning to Jamaica with her husband following his deportation, Jacques Garvey supported her husband’s establishment of a UNIA branch in London. She gave birth to a son, Marcus, in 1930 and another son, Julius Winston, in 1933. Marcus Garvey relocated to London in 1935, while Amy Jacques Garvey remained in Jamaica with her two sons. Jacques Garvey continued to promote Garveyism and her husband’s legacy after his death in 1940. In addition to editing a second volume of Garvey’s Philosophy and Opinions in 1967, Jacques Garvey continued to write and publish in Pan-African magazines and in the 1940s actively supported the People’s National Party in Jamaica. She died in 1973, disillusioned www.abc-clio.com

with postindependence Jamaican politics but still promoting Garvey’s legacy. Kate Dossett See also: Garvey, Marcus; Jamaica, Women’s Role in; Pan-Africanism; Universal Negro Improvement Association, The References Jacques Garvey, Amy. Garvey and Garveyism. New York: Collier Books, 1963. Jacques Garvey, Amy, ed. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey; or, Africa for the Africans. 1922. Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1986. Taylor, Ula Y. The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

GARVEY, MARCUS (1887–1940) Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican-born black cultural nationalist and the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Black Star Line, a shipping firm. Marcus Garvey was born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, on August 17, 1887. He grew up in a decaying environment and peasant economy marked by poverty, hurricanes, and weak family bonds of affection. In the British colonial school that he attended until just the sixth grade, Garvey was exposed to racial separation and prejudice, which influenced his consciousness. At the age of sixteen he became an apprentice printer in Kingston, Jamaica. There, he became impressed with the power of oratory and developed an interest in political organization and struggle. During the Jamaican printers’ strike of 1907, he was blacklisted and fired for being the only foreman who supported the workers. Following the vast emigration of Jamaicans to South America and Europe in the 1910s, Garvey arrived in Britain in 1912.

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Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and a leading proponent of voluntary African American return and resettlement in Africa. (Library of Congress)

In England he attended Birkbeck College and met with members of Britain’s cosmopolitan black elite, including the Guianese T. Ras Makonnen and the Sudanese-Egyptian Mohamed Ali. These men taught Garvey the importance of wealth and knowledge for the development of African people worldwide. Inspired by the teachings of Makonnen and Ali, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League in Jamaica on August 1, 1914. The goal of the organization was to promote fraternity, assistance, Christian worship, education, commerce, and industry among blacks. On March 23, 1916, Garvey arrived in Harlem to seek support from African Americans. Booker T. Washington, whom he greatly admired, had died in 1915 without having met or given support to Garvey. Despite unsuccessful attempts to convince www.abc-clio.com

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African American leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph to help him fund his projects, Garvey continued to give public lectures, at which he was often booed. The catalyst of Garvey’s political fame in North America was the violence that blacks faced in northern cities during the early twentieth century. Following the migration of thousands of African Americans from the South during World War I, poor northern whites felt greater hostility toward newly arrived black migrants whom they were taught to perceive as the cause of their predicament of low wages or unemployment and poor living conditions. From these circumstances emerged a white racism that resulted in a deadly riot in East St. Louis on July 2, 1917. Angry white mobs attacked defenseless black migrants whom they accused of taking their jobs in the city’s industrial plants. The riot ended after thirty-nine blacks and nine whites were killed. Garvey intervened promptly by denouncing the massacre as part of “America’s continuous round of oppression of black people who for three hundred years had given their life blood to help build the republic” (Levine, 1993, p. 118). Garvey’s activism in the United States was curtailed as J. Edgar Hoover led a campaign accusing him for mail fraud. In January 1922 Garvey and three of his associates were arrested and, in February, were indicted “on twelve counts of fraudulent use of the mails to sell Black Star stocks” (Levine, 1993, p. 134). Garvey was tried in June 1923 and was imprisoned until December 1927, when he was deported as an undesirable alien. On June 10, 1940, Garvey passed away at his West Kensington residence in London. Babacar M’baye

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502 GATES JR., HENRY LOUIS See also: Garvey, Amy Jacques; Pan-Africanism; Universal Negro Improvement Association, The References Cronon, Edmund David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1955. Levine, Lawrence. The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History. New York: Oxford Universal Press, 1993. Lewis, Rupert. Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988. Martin, Tony. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976. Stein, Judith. The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

GATES JR., HENRY LOUIS (1950–) Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Chair and the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and also the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. As such, he is one of the most influential writers and thinkers concerning “race” in contemporary America. Indeed, Time magazine considered Gates to be one of America’s most influential people, placing him within the top twenty-five. Born in the quiet mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, Gates demonstrated an academic prowess that was to be exercised during his candidature at Yale. Graduating summa cum laude in 1973 in the field of history, he was to return briefly to Yale as an assistant professor in both the English and African American Studies departments after completing his PhD in English at www.abc-clio.com

Cambridge University on a Mellon Fellowship. Gates’s scholarship has always been premised on a deep interest in his own family’s genealogy and history. The descendant of slaves exported from Africa to America, Gates has made it clear that he feels an immense loss at not being able to trace his genealogy through an African history that defines so much of his personal identity. In his PBS documentary, Wonders of the African World (1999), Gates explains how this inherited distance from Africa and African history came at the hands of America’s Eurocentric ideological imperative. Since the European tradition was considered the only significant contributor to America’s intellectual cultural life—a point that Gates critiques in his well-known revision of the “white” canon of literature, Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984)—many academic disciplines exhibited an unacknowledged Eurocentricism that, at worst, manifested itself as a kind of institutionalized racism. So it was that such unmediated racism in the academy resulted in generations of Americans being taught erroneously that history began for the African American only with the first footfall of African slaves on the soil of the New World. To ask what lay before the artificial historical marker of the first slave ship, or to want to understand the kind of history that Africa offers the African American, is to join the project of recovery that has dominated Gates’s professional and private life. For Gates’s personal interest in recovering his own family’s history translates into the grander act of reclaiming the production of history from the marginalizing and impoverishing dictums of Eurocentric thought. It is perhaps for this reason—of exposing the artificiality of historical markers while also

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reclaiming the act of its production—that Gates still considers his 1983 rediscovery of Harriet E. Wilson’s novel, Our Nig (1859), his finest achievement among the numerous books, articles, essays, and reviews that he has published. Certainly, it is one of his most significant publications since the rediscovery of what is considered the first novel published in America by an African American extended the African American literary tradition by more than thirty years. It was a feat of literary detection that Gates improbably repeated in 2001 with his acquisition of a handwritten manuscript dating from the 1850s that might prove to be the earliest known novel by a female African American slave, The Bondswoman’s Narrative: A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina, by Hannah Crafts. Grant Hamilton See also: Africa, Precolonial; Afrocentrism; Race, History of References Gates Jr., Henry Louis. Interview with Eldridge Cleaver, 1997. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ pages/frontline/shows/race/interviews/ ecleaver.html Gates Jr., Henry Louis. Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 1990 [1984]. Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Critisicm. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Gates Jr., Henry Louis. Wonders of the African World. New York: Knopf, 1999.

GAY, LESBIAN, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER MOVEMENTS,AFRICA AND AFRICAN DIASPORIC All too frequently, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) movements are characterized as Western or white, but that www.abc-clio.com

stereotype, however unfortunately true at times, ignores the array of African and African diasporan contributions to global efforts at expanding the definition of person and citizen, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. That stereotype has its roots in the persistent myth that African societies were and are inherently free of homosexuality and androgyny. This misconception was created by European pundits after Atlantic contacts had begun in the fifteenth century and was rooted in the mischaracterization of Africans as savages living close to nature. Since universal heterosexuality was considered the epitome of being uncorrupted by luxury and civilization, the perceived backwardness of Africans was supposed to inoculate them from civilized vices such as sodomy. This lie has been ironically recast by African nationalists such as President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to this day to distinguish themselves as being morally and inherently superior to effete colonizers and their westernized dupes. Given this entrenched discourse of misinformation, it is important to note that sexual and gender diversity were tolerated and celebrated in long-standing African traditions, which generally featured same-sex relationships marked by differences in rank, age, and gender identity. Frequently, unlike in contemporary northwestern European and North American cultures, such same-sex relationships are complemented by participation in heterosexual marriage and parenthood. For instance, in the Hausa city of Kano, as anthropologist Rudolf P. Gaudio has observed, the transgendered and transvestited prostitutes called the ‘dan dauda carry on pre-Islamic religious possession practices in the heavily Muslim city, while the

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k’wazo, older, straight-acting, and wealthier men who are the penetrators, and their younger and anally passive partners, baja, maintain patron-client connections that remain alongside heterosexual familial obligations and love maintained by both k’wazo and baja. Only sex between two ‘dan dauda is frowned upon in part because such intimate behavior requires at least one person acting as a man privately and, much more importantly, publicly. Even sex between k’wazo is not seen as a problem as long as both participants act in a conventionally masculine way outside the bedroom. While the Hausa are nearly unique in having male homosexuality stratified by both age and gender identity or appearance, most African societies would feature such relationships based either on perceived differences of age or gender identity or appearance. Examples of cultures with male homosexuality organized by one partner being conventionally masculine and the other dressing and acting as a woman would include the Akan, Dahomey, Fanti, Mombasan, Umbundu, Yoruba, and Zulu. Examples of cultures with male homosexuality organized by both partners being publicly masculine, with the younger partner presumably acting as the woman in private, would include the Anyin, Eritrean, Mossi, Nzema, Ondonga, Rwandan, Tsonga, and Zande. Stateless hunters and gatherers with the least social stratification had the most egalitarian relationships between men having sex with men. Female homosexuality in traditional African cultures, however less documented, was no less ubiquitous and varied. For instance, among the Nandi of Kenya, the female husband, generally an older and childless matron, would be promoted to male status without completely dressing as www.abc-clio.com

a man. Occasionally a conventional wife earlier in her life, the female husband would allow her younger partner to have a male consort in order to have children. Relations between the female husband and her wife resembled and still resemble that of a Victorian romantic friendship in Britain or America, yet that outward chastity never necessarily ruled out genital sex between the women in private. Like male homosexuality, lesbian relationships in Africa tended to rest upon inequalities of power based upon age and/or gender identity and appearance, with older and more masculine women holding the upper hand. This was and is especially true of the Mummy-Baby couplings among boardingschool girls in Lesotho. In those cultures such as the Mombasan, where female homosexuality was the most prevalent—if still stratified by age and/or gender identity or appearance—female status and autonomy was the greatest. Slave trades within Africa and, in particular, the transatlantic slave trade did nothing to diminish this sexual and gender diversity. In Cuba, for example, enslaved Africans paired the Yoruban warrior-god Shango with Catholic Saint Barbara or even changed him into her, in part because both figures triumphed over slavery and death through the force of their spiritual convictions. Both of their transcendent journeys involved lightning and fire; both the African orisha and the Catholic saint were thus connected to the colors white and red. Both stories involved overly dramatic familial tragedies: father killing daughter and, in Shango’s case, brother pitting brother against brother. Yet their stories also displayed the functional aspects of androgyny. In Barbara’s case, she was a young woman who acted as men should; in

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Shango’s case, he was a male god who tempered his manly zeal for truth with “feminine” mercy. For instance, Barbara was a demure, “feminine” virgin who had the “masculine” strength to die for what is right; Shango was a strong, “masculine” monarch who is redeemed by “feminine” virtue. The implications of Shango’s pairing and/or sex change show the inventiveness of the enslaved Africans confronted with dealing with a strange new monotheism. It was expedient for those confronted with accusations of heresy and witchcraft in colonial Latin America to hide or to mix their worship of Shango with their devotion to Barbara. Yet for many, this pairing and/or transformation was not merely a cover for illegal activity, but a deepening of the relevant meanings embedded in both the Yoruban and Catholic narratives. Good spirits can come in many forms, whether male or female. All those who believe can overcome slavery and death. It makes no difference whether they are male or female, white or black. This pragmatic and unexacting stance was in opposition to the orthodox doctrines put forth by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. To the hierarchy, women priestesses, “false” and foreign gods, direct contacts with the dead and divine while still alive, and androgyny in general was just plain evil. To the official church, evil was absolute evil and was not a necessary balancing force in the universe. To the official church, these Afro-Atlantic heresies threatened to turn their world of fixed categories upside down, with slaves triumphing over slaveholders, women acting as men, and men acting as women. Although the Inquisition was far easier on suspected “witches” drawing from the Yoruban orishas www.abc-clio.com

than its Protestant contemporaries, its court records frequently show the contempt and fear of Catholic authorities faced with Shango becoming Saint Barbara. Unlike official Christian teaching and like the Afro-Atlantic religions, some Native American cultures shared this positive view of spiritual androgyny. As historian Ramon A. Gutierrez has noted in When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (1991), even though men in many Mesoamerican, Arawak, and Andean cultures kept women away during religious ceremonies as not to be distracted, they needed a feminine entity present during worship to maintain the essential balance of gender characteristics in the universe. The “third-sex” berdache in these cultures appeared to meet this need, a berdache being both a spiritual leader and a homosexual male who took on the appearance and work of an adult woman. Gay and transgendered men served similar purposes in many cultures of western and central Africa. The best summoners of the divine were women, but men living as women were perfectly acceptable. The transatlantic slave trade made their role even more significant than before because it enslaved far more men than women, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, spirit mediums themselves embodied the legitimacy and indeed the necessity of androgyny, of which the Shango-to-Barbara transformation was the most famous and conventional example. Even more revealing are other sex changes in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé that did not require the presence of a Catholic saint. As historian James Sweet reports in “Male Homosexuality and Spiritism in the African Diaspora: The Legacies of a Link” (1996), two deities—Oxumare and

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Logum-Ede—are men for six months and women for the next six months. They both then turn back into men. Logum-Ede, in particular, is a macho hunter who lives alone in the forest and who suddenly and regularly becomes a flirtatious and vain wood nymph. Christianity and creolization tended to turn African diasporan cultures homophobic in the Americas. For example, a strongly heterosexual former slave, Estaban Montejo, recalled in 1963 that male homosexuality was organized by gender identity or appearance and age in Cuba before emancipation. Passive and effeminate partners would act as housewives and gardeners, while the masculine husband would sell the couple’s produce at market. While the womanizing Montejo was never challenged by these couples, he did find that older men in slave communities hated the samesex couplings. Montejo concluded that this distaste among the older and presumably less acculturated slaves indicated that these practices had not been found in Africa. Just the opposite was true, however. These practices with male homosexuality stratified by gender identity or appearance and age were widespread throughout western Africa. Internalizing Catholic stigmas surrounding sodomy was just a small part of the European cultural baggage accumulated after the Middle Passage. Christianity and creolization would both strengthen and, eventually, weaken slavery, but the association of homosexuality with possession cults and uneven sex ratios of barracks-like sugar plantations made it very unattractive to those blacks seeking both approval from and equality with middle and upper class whites and justification in the context of their own nineteenth-century ideology of heterosexual domesticity. www.abc-clio.com

Corresponding urbanization, nevertheless, tended to facilitate clandestine homosexual coteries of all kinds, and this was particularly true of the largest American city, New York. African American migration to New York accelerated after 1900 and turned the Harlem district of Manhattan into a primarily African American neighborhood. Because of the links between urbanization and organized gay communities, the Harlem Renaissance became both a black and homosexual movement, as the noted literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. has discerned. These elements of race and sexuality were carefully intertwined. As critic A. B. Christa Schwartz has uncovered, the poet laureate of the Renaissance, Countee Cullen, mixed various tropes in his works to appeal to different kinds of people: traditional white and black elites who liked his attachment to traditional form over modernist chaos; race men and women who appreciated his explicit exploration of the humiliation created by Jim Crow; and homosexuals of any race who applauded his daring verses about same-sex love. Both Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, however sexually ambiguous, also dared to include relatively positive versions of gay and bisexual men in their search for black manhood. Richard Bruce Nugent went further in pushing the envelope of sexual dissidence and was rewarded by posthumous obscurity. Lesbians were portrayed in a much more negative light by gay and bisexual male Renaissance writers, even if Alain Locke, the almost openly homosexual guru of “the New Negro,” endorsed feminist tones in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston; nevertheless, there was an undercurrent of Sapphic voices, such as those of Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas

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Johnson, and, of course, Bessie Smith that failed to be drowned out by a double standard among contemporary African Americans that held women to a stricter adherence to Victorian standards of morality than men. While the Harlem Renaissance was both black and gay if largely male, the next cycle of literary and cultural creativity after World War II would eventually lead to unrestrained celebrations of blackness and queerness of whatever gender, if not always side by side. In the 1950s and 1960s, two gay African American men—novelist James Baldwin and organizer Bayard Rustin—as well as playwright Lorraine Hansberry (who wrote A Raisin in the Sun [1959]) would contribute to the civil rights movement that, in turn, would help to shape the modern gay rights movement in America. Black drag queens led the ragtag rebels at Stonewall in 1969, the iconic epiphany of gay liberation. Jamaican wordsmith Audre Lorde would inspire feminist zeal and Sapphic introspection. Mel Boozer, the African American head of the mainly white Gay Activist Alliance in Washington, D.C., became the first openly GLBT person to run for vice-president at the Democratic National Convention in 1980. Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas, however closeted, was an anchor of 1970s sensibility whose baritone voice stood for the oppressed and downtrodden. Yet that did not prevent gay whites, whether men or women or transgendered, from discriminating against their compatriots who happened to be African American. As late as the 1970s, for example, whiteowned gay bars in Norfolk, Virginia, discouraged black customers with higher cover charges and requests for multiple forms of identification. These discriminatory www.abc-clio.com

practices, long after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, were not restricted to this region, however. Such persistent and pervasive racism among white gays and lesbians led to the development of organizations that looked out for the interests of queer African Americans, one being the National Coalition of Black Gays that became the National Coalition of Black Gays and Lesbians. On the local level during the 1970s, these were complemented by UMOJA-UNITY in Norfolk and the Memphis Committee in Tennessee. By the 1980s, Black and White Men Together still held out the promise of integrated intimacy, but it became less political and more social as the years went by. Most recently, the National Black Justice Coalition has advocated on behalf of marriage rights for, among others, same-sex couples, mobilizing African American clergy, journalists, and other opinion shapers to combat rightwing white attempts to prevent the extension of equality by courting conservative black churches. Indeed, while dealing with the Scylla of exceptionally virulent racism among some white gays, GLBT movements among peoples of African descent have also had to confront the Charbydis of especially rabid homophobia in their own communities. In the United States, from Adam Clayton Powell through the young Molefi Asante (who changed his views in the 1990s) through the Nation of Islam (until very recently), influential black nationalists and Afrocentrists have used GLBT identities as a useful foil in creating the universally heterosexual and, thus, “superior” Pan-African identity. As the sexual and gender diversity of African cultures is more widely known now in America than even a decade ago, however, this extreme

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position has been less tenable. More generally, black churches and communities have been supportive of individual GLBT people of color within their ranks as long as they remained marginal politically and closeted socially. Nevertheless, this widespread ambivalence and occasional hostility should not obscure the fact that African American representatives have long been the strongest advocates for GLBT rights even when their own base (or more conservative white colleagues) has been opposed to or offended by such advocacy. However fractured by class, gender, gender identity, and race, GLBT movements in America and Europe would first spread to South Africa and then, after 1995, go continentwide in Africa. In South Africa, the first GLBT movements emerging after the late 1960s were restricted to middle- and upper-class whites, reflecting the apartheid mores of the P. W. Botha regime and the National Party. Their apolitical avoidance of racial issues rendered them politically irrelevant both before and after the fall of apartheid in the early 1990s. Among middle-class blacks, gay male and, less frequently, lesbian groups sprang up in the wake of the Soweto revolt in 1976. A decade later, these groups embraced the Freedom Charter of the African National Congress (ANC), opposing discrimination of all kinds. The ANC repaid its GLBT supporters by first formally acknowledging their right to legal equality. Then, it supported the inclusion of sexual orientation among the basic rights of all human beings to be shielded from legal disabilities in the interim constitution of December 1993 and then in the new Bill of Rights of May 1996. With the passing of the great Nelson Mandela from the scene and his replacement as www.abc-clio.com

president by the much more cramped Thabo Mbeki, who has denied the etiology of HIV/AIDS, the ANC’s support for GLBT rights has diminished somewhat. Only Desmond Tutu regularly places homosexual rights alongside other expressive freedoms; nevertheless, South Africa under black leadership was the first country in the world to guarantee GLBT peoples legal equality in its constitution. Most other African nations have been far less willing even to tolerate selfidentified GLBT cultures, let alone movements; they have used old British colonial laws or made new ones to hassle and to persecute. A witch’s brew of traditional and Christian opposition to perceived sexual deviancy has shored up flagging secular dictatorships in Zimbabwe and Namibia. Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), with it estimated 300 members, still continues to meet and to speak out despite the obvious danger of state-sanctioned pogroms. Most recently, in Nigeria, the Archbishop Peter Akinola and the Nigerian Anglican Church have joined with that country’s president, Olusegun Obasanjo, to draft a law that would make same-sex relationships or the act of defending them by any heterosexual person crimes punishable by an automatic five years in prison. The Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association of Nigeria has courageously opposed this curtailment of civil rights, but it has few supporters in the religiously and ethnically polarized country. Indeed, the Anglican bishops of Uganda have been equally as active in enshrining discrimination against GLBT peoples at home as they violently opposed the consecration of an openly gay Episcopal bishop in America in 2003. Elsewhere, there have been few victories for GLBT movements. In 2005 Cameroon witnessed

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periodic detention of young men on sodomy charges, the expulsion of teenaged girls from high schools based upon perceived lesbian tendencies, and a rash of homophobic rhetoric targeted at opposition figures. With no evidence presented against young men accused of sodomy in their trial in 2006, they were finally set free. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has both weakened and galvanized GLBT movements in both Africa and the Americas. In the United States, AIDS service organizations such as Us Helping Us in Washington, D.C., were founded in the 1980s, and some, such as US Helping Us, were led by middleclass black gay men and provided education and case management to their largely African American clients. HIV/AIDS took an increasing toll among African Americans by the turn of the century as it became the leading killer of young black adults and was especially virulent among black gay and bisexual men. One of the recommendations by black GLBT leaders to this phenomenon is for those men having sex with men to avoid the “down-low” stance of denial or self-denial that encourages risky behaviors, a stance predicated on trying to cater to heterosexual supremacy. In African countries such as Zimbabwe and Botswana, in which the general population has been ravaged by HIV, GLBT organizations have been at the forefront in trying to distribute medicine and information to prevent national collapse. While enemies such as President Obasanjo still see homosexual and transgendered people as scourges in themselves that are most un-African, the GLBT movements have been instrumental in drawing global attention to HIV/AIDS, a plague that threatens African civilizations to the core. Thus, these movements could be no more biblical, Christian, and, yes, www.abc-clio.com

traditionally African in their community service. Charles Ford See also: Harlem Renaissance; Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Prevention References Barnet, Miguel. Biography of a Runaway Slave. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1994. Boykin, Keith. One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Gevisser, Mark, and Edwin Cameron, eds. Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa. London: Routledge, 1995. Gutierrez, Ramon A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. New York: Hargrave, 1998. Muzzy, Frank. Gay and Lesbian Washington, D.C.: Images of America. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2005. Palmberg, Mai. “Emerging Visibility of Gays and Lesbians in Southern Africa: Contrasting Contexts.” In The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement, edited by Barry D. Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Andre Krouwel. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. Schwartz, A. B. Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Sears, James T. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Sweet, James H. “Male Homosexuality and Spiritism in the African Diaspora: The Legacies of a Link.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7 (1996): 184–202.

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GENOCIDE Genocide refers to the systematic eradication of a people who are identified by some set of shared racial, national, linguistic, religious, or political attributes. The word was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin in response to the Holocaust and given political weight by documents such as the UN Convention on Genocide of 1948. Genocide has been a part of colonialism and its aftermath on both sides of the Atlantic. The problem of genocide, in Africa and elsewhere, in the postcolonial era has raised the question of whether or not international powers, particularly the United States, have either the duty or the capacity to intervene effectively in genocidal conflicts. Genocidal strife in Rwanda, in 1994, and the Darfur region of Sudan, at the start of the twenty-first century, have made visible the transatlantic importance of the problem of genocide at a time when the United States has placed a high priority on African stability and development. Although the bulk of conflicts in Africa, Latin America, and North America have not been genocidal, the histories of European colonialism, westward U.S. expansion, and postcolonial Africa are, nevertheless, punctuated by conflicts that were either overtly genocidal or resulted in the destruction of peoples. No single explanation can be given for why genocides have taken place. Beginning in the fifteenth century, early Spanish colonialism in the New World was often genocidal, either through deliberate conflict with indigenous peoples, as in the case of the conquest of the Caribbean documented by the monk Bartolemé De Las Casas in his Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies (1542), or unintentionally, by the transmission of European diseases such as smallpox, www.abc-clio.com

against which many indigenous peoples had no immunity. According to some estimates, many indigenous groups lost 90 percent or more of their population, effectively destroying them as viable cultural or social entities. Writing in the early sixteenth century, Las Casas noted that the indigenous population of the island of Hispaniola, now the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, had been reduced from approximately 400,000 to a mere 200 within a few decades of Spanish rule. One consequence of such destruction was the subsequent importation of African slaves as a new source of labor in New World mines and plantations. It is difficult to measure the destruction of the indigenous populations of the Americas over the centuries of colonialism and westward U.S. expansion, from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Rough estimates suggest a reduction of 70 percent or more of the indigenous population, estimated at between 40 and 50 million people, with many groups completely destroyed. In assessing the history of the westward expansion of the United States, considered by some scholars a form of colonial expansion, much controversy exists over whether or not U.S. government policies toward Native North American peoples were deliberately genocidal. Nonetheless, in many instances, those policies were genocidal in their consequences, even if the extermination was neither intended nor desired by the federal government. In 1824 President James Monroe created the Office of Indian Affairs (later the Bureau of Indian Affairs) within the Department of War. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, and the first major task of the Office of Indian Affairs became the removal of Native Americans from the southeastern

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United States. A well-known example of the removal process was the forced relocation of the Cherokee people from their land in Georgia in 1838, resulting in what has become known as the “Trail of Tears.” Several thousand died en route. Other destructive policies included the extermination of the buffalo, a central part of the economic and cultural life of the Lakota, and the erasure of Native American cultures through Indian boarding schools and other educational institutions, from the 1880s to the 1930s, that severed the ties of Native American children to their cultural, religious, and linguistic heritage. Because these policies entailed the destruction of group identities, as well as the loss of life, some scholars classify them as genocidal in their consequences. In the modern era, mass killings by governments in Latin America, while they are frequently intended to suppress political opposition and are not intentionally genocidal, often indirectly target ethnic groups such as Mayans or economically marginalized groups such as peasants. In the twentieth century, the fear of Communist insurgency played a significant role. Prior to the cold war, the military government of El Salvador in 1932 slaughtered rebellious peasants, often Mayan highlanders, who were viewed as Communist insurgents. The most visible genocides in the Americas in the cold war era have taken place in Guatemala. Beginning in the late 1960s, the military pursued people perceived as Communist insurgents, resulting in mass killings in outlying villages that were seen as potential recruiting grounds, resources for guerillas, or hiding areas. Approximately 100,000 people were killed between 1966 and 1968. www.abc-clio.com

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In 1976 a large earthquake rocked the region and Guatemala saw the growth of new, nonviolent popular groups focused on recovery efforts. These efforts led to broad collective interactions between Latino and indigenous groups, as well as between city dwellers and rural farmers. Authorities saw this new, broad union, which empowered the impoverished and helped educate others on the growing gap of power and profit between rich and poor, as a danger to their power. Violence resumed in 1978, when counterinsurgency death squads began preemptive killings, assaulting a wide range of groups perceived as insurgents and their allies. Over the next ten years, Guatemala witnessed massacres of campesino villages. New, radical death squads formed, the most notorious being the Ejercito Secreto Anti-Communista (ESA), which existed independently of government operations, relying on direct guidance from Guatemala’s head of state, General Romeo Lucas García. Roving death squads proceeded on a systematic destruction of the indigenous highland population in a total scorchedearth policy. This aggressive policy claimed the lives of between 100,000 to 150,000 of Mayan Indians and campesinos. The history of genocide in Africa differs from genocide in the Americas in terms of the perpetrators, causes, and victims; however, genocides in Africa have also been part of the broader context of the violence inherent in colonialism and the problems of cold war-era political violence. The colonial period in Africa ran from the late nineteenth century to approximately the early post-World War II era. In contrast to the experience of native peoples in the Americas, African peoples often became subjugated as a colonial labor pool. In a sense, this was a colonial continuation of

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transatlantic slavery, with African peoples nominally free, but often removed from their own land and engaged in forced labor under brutal conditions with few rights or protections. Systematic genocide entered the history of colonialism in Africa with the extermination of the Herero people in German South West Africa (now Namibia). Responding to the brutality of German settlers, a Herero rebellion took place in 1904; farms were attacked and some 100 German settlers were killed. German soldiers, led by General Lothar von Trotha, appointed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, retaliated by driving approximately 65,000 Herero out of Namibia to the edge of the Kalahari Desert. Many Herero who attempted to escape were killed by machine guns, while those who remained at the edge of the desert died of thirst and starvation. Only some 15,000 survived. Some captured Herero were also sent to labor camps in which over half of the prisoners died. In the post–World War II era of the cold war and African independence, the majority of African and Latin American genocides have been the result of conflicts erupting from failures to transfer power peacefully or from the expression of a ruling group’s dominance. In Sudan, conflicts have originated from the divisions between north and south; the north, close to Egypt and the Red Sea, is primarily Muslim, while the south is home to many diverse cultures and languages. While this division is not a recent development, under British colonialism rifts between the two were forged. The north disregarded the south’s agricultural and industrial development. When faced with an uprising from the south over the control of water, grazing lands, and development funds, the north responded with repressive civil war. The www.abc-clio.com

first such war lasted from 1952 to 1972, and fighting resumed in 1983. In 1989, following a military coup, the northern government declared Sudan an Islamic state and instituted the severe repression of Christians and animists. Peace talks began in 2005, by which time between 100,000 and 500,000 people were dead or displaced. The second war led to over 2 million deaths, and despite peace talks the fighting continues. Since 2003, further conflict has arisen in Sudan’s Darfur region in the west. Rebel groups rose up in Darfur, citing discrimination against black Africans in favor of Arabs and a neglect of regional development by the government. The Sudanese regime retaliated by creating the militia known as Janjaweed (in Arabic, a man with a gun on a horse), which began a wide-scale slaughter of black African men and women. The conflict in Darfur has claimed over 200,000 lives and displaced approximately 3 million people. A large number of young survivors fled to Kenya. Aid workers labeled many of the young orphans the “Lost Boys of Sudan”; several thousand of the young men were subsequently sent to the United States and Europe. In some instances, xenophobia and the attempt to consolidate power have led to forms of genocide. Tanzania, Nigeria, and Uganda offer examples of this path to genocide at the end of the colonial era. Though Tanzania is approximately onethird Muslim and Arabic is a widely spoken language, a purge of Arabs occurred in Zanzibar shortly before its merger with Tanganyika in 1964. They were seen as a threat to the young African nation’s autonomy. Nigeria witnessed true genocide from 1966 to 1970, when the dominant group of Hausa-Fulani Muslims mobilized

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as the Nigerian Federal Military Government (FMG). Thousands of Ibo in the east were massacred after a failed coup. Their persecution by Hausa-Fulani Muslims acting with federal power led to a short-lived Ibo secession as the nation of Biafra. The nation collapsed due to a lack of food and support. An estimated one million starved to death, while hundreds of thousands more were internally displaced. In Uganda during the early 1970s, Idi Amin’s dictatorship was characterized by mass killings of indigenous peoples; Asians; Catholic clergy; the Karamojong, Acholi, and Lango tribes; and any political opponents. Mass deportations of Asians also took place. Half a million people were butchered by Amin’s regime. In 1972 the United States cut off aid to Uganda in protest against Amin’s violence. Nonetheless, the unique diversity of Asian-Ugandan culture was completely eliminated during Amin’s regime. Following his departure in 1979, Milton Obote’s rule would see the genocidal persecution of the Baganda, Madi, and again the Karamojong people, stopping only when the existence of a stable workforce was threatened. At least 50,000 were killed. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda of the Tutsi people by the Hutu is Africa’s most visible genocide of the postcolonial era, notable for both its sheer size as well as the speed with which it took place. Under Belgian colonialism, Tutsis were favored, politically and economically, over the Hutu majority. The Rwandan genocide was preceded by the overthrow of Tutsi monarchic rule in 1959, while Rwanda was formally still a Belgian territory. At that time, thousands of Tutsis were slaughtered and 150,000 were exiled into neighboring Burundi. Many Tutsi leaders did not find www.abc-clio.com

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safe haven in Burundi and were exterminated when that nation fell into civil war between 1965 and 1973, and again following the assassination of its first democratically elected president in 1993. These conflicts led to the formation of the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in Burundi, which engaged in periphery combat in Rwanda in 1990. Although the scale of the killing in 1994 was unprecedented, a climate of chronic violence against Tutsis existed in Rwanda well before the genocide. Rwandan Hutu leaders began arming selected individuals in each town and village in 1991; created the Radio des Milles Collines (Radio of a Thousand Hills), an ambitious, countrywide radio network, the only such network for the expedient broadcast of propaganda, command directives, and other strategic information; and conducted militia training for several years. A supremacist ideology called “Hutu Power” was actively espoused by the government. On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down over the Rwandan capital of Kigali. This resulted in the mobilization of the trained Hutu militias, causing the immediate killing of from 40,000 to 50,000 in Kigali, including both Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Immediate localized exterminations occurred in the northeastern and eastern regions of Rwanda, areas of RPF activity; this was evidence of a well-prepared and well-communicated strategy formed by the Hutu leaders. Violence continued through July 1994, with 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu lives lost, a massive extermination when one considers that previously, the Tutsi made up only some 14 percent of the nation of 7.5 million residents. Subsequently, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, led

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by Paul Kagame, invaded Rwanda and took control of it following the cessation of the initial conflict. Some 2 million Hutus fled the country, fearing reprisals. The history of European colonialism and the U.S.’s economic, military, and political prominence in the Western Hemisphere has raised substantial questions about the Western responsibilities for genocide in Africa and the Americas. Although the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs has issued an apology for the destruction of native North American peoples, the federal government as a whole has not yet issued one. Whether any form of reparation for North American genocide is possible remains an open question. In the case of Guatemala, questions have been raised as to whether or not the United States can be considered complicit in supporting death squads because of the military aid given to the government, despite an awareness of the death squads’ actions. In September 2004 U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell deemed the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region to be a genocide, against the objections of the Sudanese government and in contrast to a subsequent UN report that failed to identify the conflict in Darfur as genocidal. The U.S. declaration was given in the context of lingering concerns over the United States’ inaction a decade earlier in the case of the Rwandan genocide. The U.S. relationship to the Rwandan genocide was part of a larger context of diplomatic activity and the prior interventions of the United States into Africa. Although on April 11, 1994, a memo warning of the impending mass slaughter was sent to Undersecretary of Defense Frank Wisner, the U.S. called for UN peacekeepers to be withdrawn from Rwanda on April 14. In the subsequent week, the UN Security Council voted to do just that. www.abc-clio.com

Although mass killings were underway, a Pentagon memo was issued in May cautioning against the use of the term “genocide.” The memo noted concern that such a finding could obligate the United States to intervene militarily, according to the UN Convention on Genocide of 1948. This military reluctance was attributed, by some, to the recent memory of the U.S.’s disastrous military intervention in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, in 1993. Part of larger military and humanitarian operations during Somalia’s civil war, an attempt to capture supporters of the warlord Muhammad Aideed led to a seventeen-hour battle in which eighteen U.S. Army Rangers and many Somalis were killed. In this larger context, the responsibility of the United States for addressing the problem of genocide remains an open question. Richard Juang Josiah Baker Matthew Shannon

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See also: America, Central; Casas, Bartolemé De Las; Ethnicity; Insurgency and Counterinsurgency; Lost Boys of Sudan; Rwanda; Sudan (Darfur Region); Truth and Reconciliation Commissions; Uganda References Burton, John W. “Development and Cultural Genocide in the Sudan.” Journal of Modern African Studies 29, no. 3 (September 1991): 511–520. Ching, Erik, and Virginia Tilley. “Indians, the Military, and the Rebellion of 1932 in El Salvador.” Journal of Latin American Studies 30, no. 1 (February 1998): 121–156. Destexhe, Alain. “The Third Genocide.” Foreign Policy, no. 97 (Winter 1994–1995): 3–17. Jonas, Susanne. “Democratization through Peace: The Difficult Case of Guatemala.” Special issue, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 42, no. 4 (Winter, 2000): v, 9–38. Mamdani, Mahmood. “A Brief History of Genocide.” Transition 10, no. 3 (2001): 26–47.

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GEORGIA’S SEA ISLANDS McClintock, Michael. The American Connection. Vol. 1. State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador. London: Zed Books, 1985. Morrison, Andrew R., and Rachel A. May. “Escape from Terror: Violence and Migration in Post-Revolutionary Guatemala.” Latin American Research Review 29, no. 2 (1994): 111–132. Newbury, David. “Understanding Genocide.” African Studies Review 41, no. 1 (April 1998): 73–97.

GEORGIA’S SEA ISLANDS Also known as Georgia’s Golden Isles, the Sea Islands of Georgia are semitropical barrier islands that stretch from Cumberland Island near Florida up to Ossabaw Island near Savannah. The islands house a distinct fusion of African and American language, and cultural practices developed there as a result of slavery, including Gullah culture and language. Functioning today as pristine wildlife sanctuaries and as tourist hubs complete with luxurious resorts, Georgia’s Sea Islands boast beautiful beaches, diverse flora and fauna, and a rich history that extends back to Native American inhabitants and the 1500s, when Spanish exploration of the New World flourished. Due to their abundant plant and animal resources, their immense agricultural possibilities, and their potential to serve as both defensive barriers and trading outposts, the Spanish, English, and French laid claim over the centuries to various Sea Islands until the American Revolution landed them securely in American hands. As early as 1749, the year that Georgia lifted its ban on slavery, African slaves began arriving in Georgia’s Sea Islands to cultivate such labor-intensive crops as rice, indigo, sugar cane, and the world-renowned sea island cotton. Wealthy plantation owners www.abc-clio.com

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like Major Pierce Butler, from whom Butler Island takes its name, often required hundreds of slaves to convert marshlands into lucrative cash crops. So many Africans were brought to the islands, in fact, that by 1860 slaves outnumbered whites on Cumberland Island by a ratio of seven to one. These proportionately large African populations, as well as several absentee owners who lived much of the year on the mainland, allowed Sea Island slaves to maintain more of their West African traditions and languages than their mainland counterparts. By November 1858, when the Wanderer deposited the U.S.’s last shipment of slaves on Jekyll Island, the Gullah—also referred to as Geechee— culture and language were already firmly rooted throughout the Sea Islands. The Wanderer was the last ship to bring human cargo from Africa to the Americas. Sapelo Island, for instance, is still home to a Gullah village founded in 1834 called Hog Hammock. Comprising over 400 acres, Hog Hammock was evacuated during the Civil War, but once emancipated, freedpersons returned to Sapelo and built a remarkable village that combined some American customs, especially Christian religious practices, with the freedpersons’ West African heritage so that a distinct language and tradition emerged. Under the leadership of Tunis G. Campbell, the Freedmen’s Bureau encouraged former slaves to resettle in the Sea Islands after the Civil War, but the process was largely undermined by entrenched white supremacy and natural disasters. Former slaves who returned to Skidaway Island after the Confederate defeat, for example, were forced to abandon it again after a tidal wave in 1889 ruined the fresh water supply and rendered the land infertile. Also complicating the reestablishment of African

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Americans, wealthy northerners began to buy Sea Islands that would make good private hunting grounds and winter homes. Jekyll Island sold in 1886 for $125,000 to a group of powerful millionaires, the socalled Jekyll Island Club. Names on the club’s roster included Rockefeller, Macy, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Pulitzer, and Goodyear. Likewise, Wassaw Island was purchased by New England businessman George Parsons in 1866 as a getaway for his family and guests. Now it serves as a national wildlife refuge and is a safe haven for the endangered loggerhead sea turtle. Dana Nichols See also: Diaspora, Demography of; Gullah References Granger, Mary, ed. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940. Lenz, Richard J. Longstreet Highroad Guide to the Georgia Coast & Okefenokee. Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1999. Parrish, Lydia, ed. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

GHANA The present-day African nation of Ghana was an economically pivotal location for the transatlantic slave trade. Later, it was an important part of the history of African colonialism and independence as a British crown colony that gained its independence in 1957, under the leadership of Kwame N’Krumah and his Convention Peoples’ Party (CPP). The country took its name from the ancient precolonial kingdom of the western Sudan as it became the first European colony south of the Sahara to achieve its independence. Generally considered one of the best administered and stable countries in West Africa, Ghana has www.abc-clio.com

not suffered as extensively from ethnic or civil conflict as some of its neighbors, but neither has it been without historical turmoil. Prior to European arrival, the region was dominated by a number of powerful precolonial states, including the Akan kingdom of Bono, the Mamprusi kingdom, the coastal kingdoms of Ga and Ewe, the Fante kingdom, and the powerful inland Akan kingdom of Asante. Hausa traders were also active among these kingdoms from the north. The Portuguese were the first to arrive on the coast in 1471, quickly establishing a fort to trade firearms and slaves for gold. The wealth of the inland gold fields quickly drew other Europeans to the region, the Dutch in 1642 and the Danes in 1670. In the latter year, England established a trading fort on the coast. The region quickly was incorporated into the growing transatlantic slave trade as Europeans traded firearms for slaves, resulting in increased conflict in the region to fuel the trade via prisoners of war. As a result of the growing instability and the introduction of firearms, a centralization of power resulted in the Akan kingdom of Akwamu expanding into the coastal regions and the emergence of the Asante as a major power. In the coastal cities an independent African merchant class emerged as intermediaries between Europeans and the inland kingdoms, which further connected the region to the transatlantic economic system. Intermarriage between European traders and local women resulted in a commercial class that was westernized and participated in the development of plantation agriculture and manufacturing on the coast. The region was deeply integrated into the transatlantic slave economy as the vast majority of the slaves taken from Africa

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came from the region where Ghana, Cameroon, Angola, and Congo are located. The region became known as the Slave Coast and was quickly incorporated into a slave trade that transformed the practice of slavery in Africa and widened the number of groups susceptible to being enslaved. So extensive was the slave trade in the region that when it was ultimately banned by Britain, the result was an economic and political crisis and a power shift from the coast inland to the Asante. Coastal states lost their economic mainstay and access to firearms due to abolition and the British demand for a transition to legitimate trade. The Asante, who had never fully transferred the main focus of their economy to slaving, still had gold fields to finance continued imports. By the 1880s the Asante Empire controlled most of the territory of what is today modern Ghana. Able to rely on their control of inland gold fields, the Asante traded with Europeans in the south and Muslims in the north. The Asante’s hegemony over the region, however, was challenged by a growing European presence along the coast. The British had established a series of settlements along the Gold Coast from the early nineteenth century on. The Asante began to resent the increasing interference of Great Britain in the region, especially with the introduction of legitimate trade. When the British took over administrative control of the Gold Coast settlements from the African Company of Merchants, the two powers came into direct conflict. Direct hostilities broke out with the first BritishAsante War (1822–1826). A peace treaty in 1831 eased tensions temporarily as the Asante agreed to withdraw their coastal claims, which opened the coastal region up to increased trade and Christian missionary www.abc-clio.com

activity. The British continued to consolidate their hold upon the coastal area by negotiating a protectorate treaty with the Fante in 1844 and by buying out Danish interests in the region in 1850. The British established the seat of colonial government in the coastal port of Accra. The two powers came into conflict again as the British moved into Asante inland territory. The Second British-Asante War was fought over a ten-year period between 1863 and 1873. The final result was a British victory as its troops pushed into the Asante capital of Kumasi and burned it to the ground. The British formally annexed the coastal states and declared the Gold Coast a crown colony. Despite the burning of their capital, the Asante refused to accept British protectorate status and refused to pay the reparations demanded by Britain from the second war as laid out in the 1874 treaty. The British forced the Asante king into exile but were faced with a third conflict in 1900, organized by Yaa Asantewa, an Asante noblewoman. The British defeated the Asante and exiled the leadership of the rebellion and the kingdom. In 1902, without organized opposition, the British annexed the Asante kingdom and its northern territories. The British consolidated their control over what is today the entire territory of modern Ghana after World War I, when Germany’s former colonies were divided among the Allies, Britain gaining a part of German Togoland. The Gold Coast colony’s economy was based on British investment in the extraction of gold, diamonds, manganese, bauxite, and timber and on the Gold Coast’s role in the slave trade, which provided the basis of England’s industrial development. The indigenous economy focused on palm oil until the 1890s and cocoa after 1890.

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Commercial agriculture was introduced and tended to benefit those who controlled the land: chiefs and lineage heads of families. The coastal elite continued to westernize, sending its children to missionary schools and producing a class of professionals who generally found work as mid-level civil servants in the colonial bureaucracy. The northern territories of the colony, lacking any easily extractable resource, were neglected by the colonial administration, and the economy there remained underdeveloped and dependent on subsistence agriculture. Colonial economic infrastructure development focused on the extraction of raw materials. The first railway was built in 1898 to connect the inland gold fields to the coast and expanded in the 1920s to connect Accra to cocoa-producing regions. In 1928 the British constructed the Gold Coast’s first deepwater port at Takoradi and extended the road system through the 1930s. The Gold Coast colony was considered by the British to be the model colony, and after World War I they felt that it would move slowly and naturally toward independence under British tutelage. It was in the 1920s, however, that the first signs of nationalist opposition to colonialism began to emerge in the colony. To slow the process and ensure continued colonial control, Britain introduced indirect rule, empowering even more the “traditional” authorities. While this did not have much impact in central and northern regions, it upset the coastal mercantile and professional elites who became increasingly frustrated with the lack of social and political advancement in the colonial system. Desire for independence continued to grow through the 1940s. The British seemed open to the process, and in 1946 a new constitution for the colony provided for a www.abc-clio.com

legislative council with an elected majority. But the slow transition to independence hit a roadblock in the form of World War II. The resulting high commodity prices and shortage of consumer goods created discontent, and when the cocoa industry was devastated by a virus that killed the trees, public suspicion arose that the colonial government was out to ruin farmers while European merchants benefited from high prices and market shortages. Added into the mix were the returning Africans who had served in Britain’s military and who had listened to the wartime rhetoric of democracy and liberty. Such experiences certainly challenged notions of colonialism, in addition to which two world wars had produced generations of veterans who had witnessed the barbarity and uncivilized behavior of Europeans in the theaters of war. When India and Pakistan sought independence, their efforts and successes were inspirational. Politicized Africans acquired a growing audience as increasing urbanization concentrated mounting numbers of people in cities, where they found shrinking opportunities for advancement. Riots and boycotts became common. Merchant A. G. Grant and newspaper editor Joseph Danquah and other nationalists founded the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) in 1947. They were arrested for sedition, but the time was not yet ripe for a popular challenge to the status quo. The UGCC needed someone who could bridge the gap between their elitist and exclusive leadership and the growing discontent of the masses. The British response to increasing disturbances included setting up a number of investigative commissions. The Coussey Commission actually concluded that the process of bringing independence to the Gold Coast was too

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slow and that the British should establish representative and responsible government as soon as practically possible. Fearing the loss of leadership, the UGCC invited Kwame N’krumah to lead the campaign for self-government. N’Krumah, a charismatic and natural leader, had been active in England, co-organizing the Fifth PanAfrican Congress and advocating radical populism and African socialism. N’Krumah sought to push the independence movement forward through organizing the popular classes and crippling the colonial system through strikes and boycotts. Under the banner “Self Government Now,” N’Krumah quickly radicalized and nationalized the movement, much to the alarm of the more conservative UGCC leadership. When a 1948 strike turned violent and British troops fired on demonstrators, riots broke out. The colonial authorities moved against the UGCC, jailing N’krumah, Danquah, and others. As a result, N’krumah left the UGCC and a split emerged in the independence movement. N’krumah founded his own political party in 1949, the Convention People’s Party (CPP). Ultimately, 70 percent of Gold Coast voters, in a national plebiscite held in 1956, chose the CPP’s vision of independence, and in 1957 the Gold Coast gained its independence and emerged as the newly named country of Ghana under the presidency of Kwame N’Krumah. Ghana achieved its independence during the cold war, and Kwame N’Krumah firmly placed the new nation in the nonaligned movement. Domestically, he implemented a kind of African socialism, nationalized foreign holdings, and pursued industrialization and infrastructure development. He oversaw the construction of the Akosombo Dam to develop Ghana’s www.abc-clio.com

hydroelectric power. He expanded the state through the provision of health and social services and free and compulsory primary education programs. Internationally, N’Krumah became a powerful and vocal advocate for Pan-Africanism, playing an instrumental role in the creation of the Organization of African Unity in 1963. During the 1950s, Ghana’s rich mineral resources sustained the economic demands of N’Krumah’s policies, but when the price of cocoa dropped in the 1960s and the popularity of the CPP wore away, such policies were harder to maintain. Patronage and mismanagement were rife and the national debt soared while living standards declined. N’Krumah, sensing his vision endangered, responded with increasing restrictions on opposition parties, which joined in the United Party under Kofi Busia. The political climate deteriorated as N’Krumah became increasingly autocratic and government critics found themselves subjected to detention and torture. To offset the growing political turmoil and to consolidate his political hold over the country, N’Krumah declared Ghana a republic in 1960 with himself the head of the state and head of the government. He was in sole control of the CPP and banned all opposition within the party. Final consolidation of N’Krumah’s control occurred in a 1964 referendum that declared Ghana a one-party state under the CPP. With political opposition banned and economic crisis growing, N’Krumah was overthrown in 1966 by a joint military-police coup d’état. This inaugurated many decades of mostly military rule in the country. At first, the new National Liberation Council (NLC) appeared sincere in its attempts to stabilize the country. While the NLC suspended N’Krumah’s projects, it

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released detainees, investigated political corruption, and returned Ghana to market capitalism. In response to pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the NLC implemented an austerity program but in doing so caused unemployment and economic hardship for lower classes. The country was rocked in 1968 and 1969 by a series of worker strikes and demands for the return to democracy. The NLC agreed to draft a new constitution for the return of civilian government and in 1969 elections were held, although N’Krumah and his supporters were banned from running. In 1969 Kofi Busia was elected prime minister in an election that banned Nkrumah’s supporters, and with a coalition of southern elites and traditional Akan chiefs, he perpetuated the conservative NLC’s economic policies. The 1971 drop in cocoa prices, however, facilitated another round of unrest and financial crisis, and the following year, the military once again intervened. The National Redemption Council (NRC) was established under the leadership of Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong. The new government excluded the leadership of the earlier military junta of the NLC. Acheampong’s government nationalized a number of private companies in 1972, including the largest gold mining firm in Ghana, and declared a moratorium on Ghana’s foreign debt. Opposition was suppressed in the name of national security and stability. In 1975 Acheampong consolidated his control through the Supreme Military Council (SMC), excluding his NRC rivals from its membership. Like those before him, Acheampong’s government was characterized by corruption, mismanagement, and environmental and economic crisis. In www.abc-clio.com

response, students and professionals paralyzed the country with a series of strikes and work stoppages in the late 1970s, again demanding a return to civilian rule. While the military dictatorship initially agreed to new elections, in 1978 it rigged a referendum to retain power. Another wave of strikes led to an internal coup as General Frederick Akuffo replaced Acheampong that year and appointed a constitutional assembly calling for elections for the upcoming year. But Ghana’s return to civilian rule would not be a peaceful one, as on the eve of the 1979 elections, a group of young army officers lead by Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings overthrew the government and formed the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). While elections took place, the AFRC purged the bureaucracy of SMC appointees and oversaw the executions of Acheampong and Akuffo. Ultimately, civilian rule was restored, but the new government under Hilla Limann inherited a ruined economy and was poorly prepared to deal with another drop in cocoa prices. Inflation skyrocketed and food shortages resulted in famine. The country verged once again on bankruptcy and political chaos. In 1981 Ghana, despite its hopeful beginnings, looked like another failed African state, and in response Lieutenant Rawlings staged a second coup. Initially a self-styled populist, Rawlings pledged to end corruption and in 1982 established the National Defense Council, but in doing so he also dissolved parliament, banned all political parties, and appointed radical leftists to his ruling council. Local government was turned over to Revolutionary Defense Committees. This did little to stabilize the country. In addition to continued political and economic turmoil, environmental disasters of drought and

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wildfires led to widespread famine. As opposition grew, Rawlings swung to the right and courted the International Monetary Fund. He introduced market economy reforms and a strict austerity plan to curb government expenditures. While the policies slowed Ghana’s economic decline, the austerity plans were not popular among the working class and student organizations. Most importantly, they were not accompanied by political liberalization. In addition to internal pressure, Rawlings also experienced pressure from the international community to reestablish democracy in Ghana. As a result, he promised to restore parliamentary democracy to the country and national elections were held in 1992, followed by a referendum on a new constitution. In what were called “free and fair” elections by a report of the Commonwealth Observer Group, released before all ballots had been accounted for, Rawlings and his National Democratic Congress (NDC) defeated the National Patriotic Party (NPP). The new constitution committed Ghana to a multiparty system and a free press. Once again the euphoria accompanying a return to democracy was diminished as Ghana experienced budget deficits, political patronage, and growing poverty. Rawlings held on to power but the opposition charged him with fraud and corruption. Rawlings stabilized the country’s economy through increased foreign investment, and as the country experienced renewed economic growth, political opposition decreased. Tensions over land issues in the northeastern region of the country took on ethnic overtones and broke out in violent clashes, but generally Ghana began to stabilize. Harkening back to Ghana’s regional and continental influence during the N’Krumah and Pan-African era, Rawlings sought to increase Ghana’s www.abc-clio.com

influence by taking on high profile peacekeeping roles in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Ghanaian peacekeeping troops have been deployed in the Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As the 1990s came to a close, Ghana was no longer considered a failed state but rather a model of successful reform. Despite such successes, Rawlings and the NDC were again charged with corruption, and the NDC experienced internal dissent, and, after the 1996 elections, had to contend with the formidable Parliamentary opposition bloc, the breakaway New Patriotic Party. Rawlings responded to student demonstrations with repression. His term as president ended, and at the end of 2000, Vice President John Atta Mills faced off against the NPP’s John Kufour. Kufour and the NPP won the election and oversaw the first democratic transfer of power since independence. But the euphoria again was short lived as the country experienced further national and natural disasters. Extensive flooding in Accra and ethnic violence in the north inaugurated a state of emergency that lasted until August 2004. Again an IMF and World Bank debt relief plan was negotiated, and Kufour dedicated his government to regaining economic stability and maintaining Ghana’s regional leadership role in ECOWAS. One of the most progressive acts of Kufour’s government was the establishment of a reconciliation commission to investigate alleged human rights abuses during military rule. Former president Rawlings was called to testify in February 2004. Perhaps as a result of the inquiry, a group of army personnel were detained on suspicion of planning to destabilize the government prior to national elections. The plot was foiled, and Kufour

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was reelected to a second term in 2004. Today, Ghana appears to have regained its economic and political stability and is showing the characteristics of a modern democracy. Its nascent economic recovery and political stability, however, was endangered during April and May of 2005 by a flood of Togolese refugees displaced by political violence in their homeland. Ghana clearly has an interest in decreasing the instability and political violence in West Africa and most likely will continue to play a leading role in developing regional solutions through agencies such as ECOWAS. Transatlantic connections have been and continue to be strong between North America and Ghana despite some periods of tension, primarily during the 1980s. Ghana received the first Peace Corps workers from the United States in 1961 and the two countries have long-standing economic and trade ties formalized through cooperative agreements and treaties. Ghanaian immigrants are among the largest African groups settling in the United States, and their vibrant West African culture and music have become increasingly popular globally. Ghana has become a “motherland” of sorts for returning diasporan visitors and repatriates. In 2001 Ghana’s parliament passed legislation that allows any person of African Diasporan descent to live and work in Ghana indefinitely, although this has not always resulted in seamless integration or acceptance. Heather Thiessen-Reily See also: Akan; Annan, Kofi; British Empire; Economic Community of West African States; International Monetary Fund; N’Krumah, Kwame; World Bank References Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1988.

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Birmingham, David. Kwame Nkruma: The Father of African Nationalism. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1998. Ellis, A. B. A History of the Gold Coast of West Africa. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1971. Gocking, Roger S. The History of Ghana. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Kimble, David. A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850–1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

GHANA EMPIRE The Ghana Empire was a West African empire that was built on trade in salt and gold. It is difficult to trace the exact origins of the empire, but most historians believe the Soninke people started to build it during the fourth century AD. The empire’s governmental system depended on a strong central authority controlled by a king, who was believed to be semidivine by the Soninke people. The security of the Ghana Empire was dependent on a strong military force, which was needed to guard its borders from enemies and maintain Soninke control over neighboring tribes. The government of the Ghana Empire was able to develop the power of its military by collecting tribute and soldiers from the tribes under its control. A strong military and central government formed the foundation for the future growth of the Ghana Empire, as these institutions guaranteed traders a certain degree of security when conducting business within its territory. The rise of the Ghana Empire is attributed to the trade conducted with the Muslims who resided in the Maghreb during the eighth century AD. It was this trade that led to the further development of the empire, as the central government was able to collect taxes on imports and exports.

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Salt and gold were two of the main resources used by the Ghana Empire to amass its wealth. The central government instituted a monopoly on all of the gold found in order to control the circulation of this precious metal within the empire. After 1050, the wealth of the Ghana Empire attracted a number of enemies who came to plunder. Muslim Berbers, who were called the Almoravids, also declared a religious war against the Soninke pagans and captured the capital of Ghana in 1076. This led to a great deal of instability in the empire as the states of Takrur, Diara, and Kaniaga broke away from the central government’s control. A division among the Soninke people allowed the nation of Susu to conquer Diara and the city of Kumbi Saleh, but the Susu were not able to maintain control over this land. The Susu were defeated in 1235 by a tribe from Mali, which captured the capital of Ghana in 1240. Brian de Ruiter See also: Ghana; Mali References Davidson, Basil. A History of West Africa, 1000–1800. London: Longman, 1977. Davidson, Basil. Africa in History. New York: Touchstone, 1995. Stride, G. T., and Caroline Ifeka. Peoples and Empires of West Africa: West Africa in History, 1000–1800. New York: Africana Publishing, 1971.

GILROY, BERYL AGATHA (1924–2001) Beryl Gilroy was a Jamaican-British novelist, essayist, and educator. Gilroy is wellknown in Britain as a pioneering black teacher. In her writing, she explores individual histories of persons in the AfricanCaribbean diaspora and pursues the theme of cultural identity. Her son, Paul Gilroy, www.abc-clio.com

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would later deal with this issue theoretically in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Like many of her contemporary colonial Caribbean migrants, she invested in the future through radical writing for children. She also published fiction, autobiography, poetry, and reminiscences and analyzed her own writing in a collection of essays, Leaves in the Wind (1998). British critics have been reluctant to appraise her creative output; she has received much more recognition in the United States, where she was honored by the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars in 1996 in Florida. Her final novel, The Green Grass Tango, was published shortly after her death in 2001. Born in then-British Guiana in 1924 into a gifted family, she was inspired to write by her maternal grandmother’s storytelling. She attended Georgetown’s teachers’ training college, leaving with a firstclass diploma in 1945. Later, she went on to gain a bachelor of science degree in psychology in 1956, took a masters degree at Sussex University in 1970, and was awarded a PhD in ethno-psychology from Century University in New Mexico in 1987. Recognized as a gifted teacher in British Guiana, she traveled to London University in 1951 to study for an advanced diploma in child development, awarded in 1953. In London during the early 1950s, she had little choice but to support herself through menial jobs in a factory, as a maid, and as a dishwasher at Joe Lyons Café. Institutional racism fueled her determination to find employment as a teacher, and she was eventually sent to a poor Catholic school where Gilroy wrote her groundbreaking autobiography, Black Teacher (1976). She became the first black principal in 1969. Fueled by anger,

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Gilroy’s woman’s version of her black experience as an educator, presented in Black Teacher, is still much less well-known than the contemporary experience of E. R. Brathwaite as described in his To Sir With Love (1959) and remembered through Sidney Poitier’s remarkable performance in the film of the same name. Gilroy’s refusal to teach from middleclass Eurocentric materials led her to publish over sixteen award-winning readers for children throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Gilroy’s services to education were marked by an honorary doctorate from the University of North London in 1995. Her drive for professional recognition was matched by a battle to get her work accepted by the patriarchal publishing houses of the 1960s. Publishers rejected her work at a time when Caribbean fiction from writers like Sam Selvon, George Lamming, and V. S. Naipaul was blooming. Her writing was “out of place” in publishers’ lists and rejected for being colonial and unknowing as well as psychological and strange. She refused to fictionalize her reminiscences, Sunlight on Sweet Water (eventually published in 1994), and thereby preserved her memory of life in an African-Guyanese village for future generations of British-born Caribbean children. She also submitted a “final passage” novel, in the 1960s, depicting the migration of the Caribbean colonial subject to the metropole of London, but the book had to wait over thirty years to find a publisher. In Praise of Love and Children (1996) brings a focus on the transfer to London through a female protagonist, Melda Hayley, who nurtures the damaged children of her fellow black settlers in Britain of the 1950s. When publishing opportunities opened up for women in the 1980s, her fictional concerns marked her as www.abc-clio.com

an innovative writer, and she began to attract some critical attention. Frangipani House (1986), which won the Greater London Council’s Literature Prize, explores the theme of ageing when traditional Caribbean models of caring have been displaced by patterns of transnationality. Boy Sandwich (1989) is the story of Tyrone Grainger, a nineteen-year-old black British male and his family’s return to Guyana. Later, she was able to pursue her interest in historical fiction through Stedman and Joanna—A Love in Bondage (1991) and Inkle and Yarico (1996). The novels are based on narratives of encounters between slaves and Carib Indians from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She experimented with form in an epistolary novel, Gather the Faces (1996). Her creative explorations have been matched by a practitioner element in her authorship and her life. Both in her writing and through her later work as an ethno-therapist in London, she attempted to heal some of the deep psychic wounds inflicted by the African diasporic condition. Sandra Courtman

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See also: Atlantic World; Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Caribbean Literature References Bradshaw, Roxann. “Beryl Gilroy’s ‘FactFiction’ through the Lens of the ‘Quiet Old Lady.’” Callaloo: A Journal of AfricanAmerican Arts and Letters 25, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 381–400. Courtman, Sandra. “A Black British Canon? The Uses of Beryl Gilroy’s Black Teacher and its Recovery as Literature.” Wasafiri 36 (Summer 2002): 51–55. Gilroy, Beryl. Black Teacher. London: Cassell, 1976. Kemp, Yakini Belinda, and Janice Liddell, eds. Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1999.

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GLISSANT, EDOUARD Newson, Adele S., and Linda Strong-Leek, eds. Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Writers and Scholars. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

GLISSANT, EDOUARD (1928–) Eduoard Glissant is Martinique’s most prestigious novelist and an important poet, theorist, and academic, celebrated for his theories of relationality and of antillanité (Caribbeanness). Glissant has successfully challenged Aimé Césaire’s claims that Caribbean identity has African “roots,” but without denying the fundamental importance of slavery and Africa in Caribbean historical consciousness. Indeed, despite his celebration of diversity, Glissant is, as Peter Hallward has argued in Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (2001), a profoundly Hegelian thinker concerned with founding a new notion of totality, which Glissant has called “relation.” In opposition to Césaire’s metaphor of roots— evident as much in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939; Notebook of a Return to the Homeland) as throughout Césaire’s work—Glissant’s monumental and mammoth essay, Caribbean Discourse (1981) openly borrows from French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari the competing metaphor of the “rhizome.” The rhizome metaphor suggests that beneath singularity, diversity, and specific identity (in Glissant’s case, antillanité), there lies a more fundamental relational link. Thus, Glissant is quick to see this relation as part of a wider Caribbean and Atlantic identity, pulling in the pre-Columbian Americas as well as Louisiana. He is also critical of the burying of Caribbean folklore and the disparaging treatment of creole language, for all their attachment to African culture. www.abc-clio.com

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But Glissant’s theories and novels do not fall into a cultural hermeticism that is abstracted from real historical determinants: not only does he cautiously extend the metaphor out of and away from créolité to embrace the tout-monde (whole world) of human interculturalism, but he also negotiates the specificity of Caribbeanness in relation to Atlantic history. Thus, his second novel, The Fourth Century (1964)— winner of the Charles Veillon Prize in 1965—though it is a proto-Roots search for Caribbean history, opens with a powerful narrative of two African slaves on board a slave ship who are dueling before reaching the Caribbean. It then recounts their marooning exploits and their progeny over two centuries: two Martinican families’ intertwined genealogies are thus traced back to a foundational (though not alldetermining) moment of Middle Passage history. The characters in the novel, one an African-style oral storyteller, recur at regular intervals in Glissant’s prose fiction. A later novel, Malemort (1975), works through history in the other direction, backwards, looking for the mythical figure of Odono, transported from Africa. Glissant’s most recent writing celebrates chaos and posits a world free from conflict. Though Glissant is often heralded as the contemporary champion of Caribbeanness, his theoretical and creative work regularly engages with what he has called “detour.” Following Toussaint Louverture’s move across the Atlantic toward imprisonment and subsequent death in Napoleon’s dungeon in the Jura region of France, Glissant—in his play, Monsieur Toussaint (1961)—recognizes the importance of climbing back through history, of going through the triangular trade backwards, from the Caribbean to Africa, and then

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from Africa to Europe (in his case, France, where he was a left-wing intellectual in the 1950s arguing for Caribbean independence), as a way of defining the specificity of Caribbeanness. He has a deeply ambivalent link to the ocean that carried its human cargo from Africa and into chains: “The Atlantic which we must cross is the chaotic darkness which our very own lights make” (1998 ), he says of Caribbeans contemplating their ancestry. This is linked to today’s realities in the French-dominated region of Martinique and Guadeloupe. He thus uses “slave trade in reverse” to describe the large movement of Caribbeans toward France in a further exile to find jobs, but insists that this Atlantic voyage is—like its Middle Passage counterpart in the other direction—a crucial moment in their discovery of Caribbeanness. This deeply Atlanticist consciousness is of course not an impediment to his theory of “relation,” of intercultural connectedness. Quoting “The Sea is History,” by Saint Lucian poet and Nobel Prize–winner Derek Walcott, Glissant has recently incorporated the Middle Passage into his literary work in his short story, “The First Voyage” (1994). Thus, it is not surprising that Glissant’s earliest poetry, during the early 1950s, owes much to the oceanic consciousness of a Saint-Jean Perse. His Atlanticist consciousness has remained remarkably constant throughout his literary and theoretical voyages. Andrew Stafford References Britton, Celia. Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Dash, Michael. Edouard Glissant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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Glissant, Edouard. Monsieur Toussaint. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005. Stafford, Andy. “Travel in the French Black Atlantic: Dialoguing and Diverging, between Aimé Césaire and Edouard Glissant.” ASCALF Critical Studies in Postcolonial Literature and Culture 1 (2001): 15–30.

GLOBALIZATION Globalization refers to a large set of economic, social, cultural, and political transformations that lead to the lives and environments of people living in distant places becoming intimately connected. Globalization is a significant dimension of the transatlantic experience beginning, some suggest, with the emergence of colonial slavery. Cultures, environments, and economic systems in Africa and the Americas were dramatically transformed through the European transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. Globalization also refers to processes of transformation specific to the late twentieth century, after World War II. In this second sense, globalization refers to processes of change and connection across political boundaries that are tied to the sizable cultural, economic, and political role of the United States in the transatlantic world. Through slavery and colonialism, new plants, agricultural methods, economic systems, social structures, and diseases were brought to the New World and spread rapidly. Some of these early transformations have been typically called the Columbian Exchange. Additionally, Africans further transformed the cultural landscape of the Americas by creating new religious traditions, such as Santeria and Candomblé. Africans also brought new technologies, knowledge, and skills, adapting them to New World conditions.

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In terms of more recent changes, since the end of World War II the United States has spearheaded the effort to diminish trade barriers between national and other political boundaries. The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 outlined a global economic order that would promote free trade economics internationally, including both Latin America and Africa. In the cold war period of the twentieth century, U.S. commercial ambitions were threatened by conflicts that drew in developing Latin American and African nations. However, when the Soviet system collapsed in 1991, U.S. commercial goals became dominant in global politics. Rapid deregulation and mass privatization of state-owned enterprises took place in formerly Communist and socialist economies. Competitive market forces, unfettered by government controls, contributed to globalization. Technological advances created rapid changes and connections. By 2006, the global distribution of goods such as satellite dishes and cellular phones had reached many rural parts of Africa and Latin America. U.S. culture was exported through television programs, music, the Internet, and movies. Innovations in telecommunications dramatically reduced social and cultural barriers and offered foreign investors unprecedented Latin American and African commercial opportunities. Major African and Latin American cities such as Johannesburg, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, alongside North American cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City, and Toronto, are now “global” cities, with complex international migration patterns, substantial foreign investments, and a multitude of cultures. The ease of transport assists migration, immigration, and resettlement activities. www.abc-clio.com

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Increasing numbers of Latin Americans have either lived in Europe or North America. For Africa, increased immigration from South Asia has occurred. African immigration to the U.S. has also grown. Globalization carries significant complications and costs that include issues involving security, sovereignty, the environment, and national identity. Some argue that because of the vast economic disparities between the United States, Africa, and Latin America, economic and cultural globalization is a new form of colonialism, often termed neocolonialism, in which wealthy nations exploit the lower labor and resource extraction costs and the lack of regulation found in poorer nations. Transatlantic human migration has meant that public health issues now can cross geographic borders with relative ease. Rapid economic changes have led to substantial environmental concerns that nations are not always prepared to address. In Africa, many states cannot initiate environmental reforms because of more immediate problems of basic subsistence and political turmoil. Such pressures can also provide opportunities, however. In recent years, Latin American countries such as Bolivia and Venezuela have become increasingly aware of their ability to contribute their natural resources to the global economy. Some African states realize the value of their special wildlife resources and have increased attempts to preserve them. Loss of species from Amazonian and Congo deforestation are substantial environmental concerns. At the social level, losses of traditional cultural identity are often feared. Globalization increases social exchanges and intensifies racial and ethnic intermingling. This leads local and national cultures to reconsider their collective identity. In Africa, for

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example, traditional cultural forms such as African music have been dramatically mixed with cultural forms from abroad such as hip-hop. What counts as “African music” is then greatly transformed. Traditional and isolated tribal life, as well as life in cities, is becoming more connected to global networks of cultural and economic exchange. Cultural and social changes also provide opportunities. The mixing of traditional music with Pan-American forms of music such as reggae, rock, and hip-hop and access to new communications and recording technology has meant new creative opportunities and a global visibility for African music and musicians. Globalization has also meant the transatlantic circulation of new ideas about feminism, fair trade practices, gay and lesbian rights, human rights, and public health and education, particularly concerning HIV prevention. The global circulation of ideas makes it possible for people to explore common, as well as divergent, political, social, and economic interests across vast geographic divides. Josiah Baker See also: Candomblé; Cold War; Columbian Exchange; Environmentalism; Ethnicity; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Movements, Africa and African Diasporic; Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Prevention; Human Rights; Immigration, United States; International Monetary Fund; Neocolonialism; Popular Music, American influences on African; Technology Transfers; Trade, Fair; World Bank

References Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. Fukuyama, Francis. The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order. New York: Free Press, 1999.

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GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY The Good Neighbor Policy is the earlytwentieth-century U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America that was based on the principle of nonintervention and recognition of nations’ sovereignty. In his first inaugural address in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt told the American people, “I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and . . . respects the rights of others . . . the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors” (Roosevelt, Franklin D. “First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933.” The Avalon Project at Yale Law School). U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America would now be based on the principle of nonintervention and a respect for neighboring nations’ sovereignty. The real architect of this policy, however, was Henry Stimson, President Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state. During 1927 in Nicaragua, Stimson had seen firsthand how the almost continual deployment of U.S. troops there had failed to advance longterm American interests in the region. In Stimson’s assessment, the “Big Stick” policy of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Roosevelt Corollary not only violated the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 but also led to instability and rising anti-American sentiment in the region. In 1928 Reuban Clarke, legal counsel for the U.S. State Department, formalized Stimson’s rethinking of U.S. foreign policy in the 1928 Clarke Memorandum. It stated that the U.S. should not automatically send troops into civil conflicts in Latin America, even if the lives and property of U.S. citizens were endangered. It was upon this foundation that FDR developed his Good Neighbor Policy. The

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new policy was based on neutrality, without abandoning U.S. national interests in Latin America. Instead of invasion and occupation, U.S. interests in the region were pursued through reciprocal trade agreements, formal military bases, shared military intelligence, and closer personal ties cemented through multilateral meetings and mutual defense treaties. Heather Thiessen-Reily See also: Monroe Doctrine; Nicaragua References Green, David. The Containment of Latin America: A History of the Myths and Realities of the Good Neighbor Policy. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971. Pike, Fredrick B. FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Roosevelt, Franklin D. “First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933.” The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. http://www.yale .edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/inaug/ froosl.htm.

GOYEMIDE, ETIENNE (1942–1997) Etienne Goyemide was a versatile African writer who wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry in French and who won the competition for the best francophone short story on several occasions. Born in 1942 in Central African Republic (RCA), he studied education science, earned a Certificate of English, and pursued a career in education. Goyemide was a secondary school principal who then served as the RCA’s general director of education and its minister of education and research. His two best-known novels, both set in rural areas of his country, are Le silence de la forêt (1984) and Le dernier survivant de la caravane (The Last Survivor of the Caravan) (1985). The first narrates the initiatory journey of a top civil servant www.abc-clio.com

who, after many years of study and estrangement, decides to leave civilization to travel through the forest, hoping to find his real self and give his life meaning through an encounter with the Babinga pygmies. It is also an explorer’s study of the Babinga as well as an intercultural narrative revealing the deleterious effects of Western education on Africans and encouraging a return to traditional values. The film made from the novel was the only African film presented at the Cannes festival in 2003 and was awarded the jury’s prize at the Namur festival in Belgium the same year. The second novel, a mythical story written like an oral epic and intertwined with folktales, songs, and speeches, is set in the last years of the nineteenth century and records a dark episode of the age-old northern slave trade. Through the last words of a griot to the displaced children he has been addressing, the conclusion of the novel identifies Goyemide’s targeted public as a generation keen to know its history—a clear allusion to a wide diaspora in search of its roots and of a lost identity. Françoise Parent Ugochukwu See also: Dongala, Emmanuel Boundzeki; Film (Africa) References Goyemide, Etienne. Le silence de la forêt. Paris: Hatier, 1984. Goyemide, Etienne. “Le théâtre existe.” In Littérature centrafricaine, edited by Pierre Sammy-Mackfoy. Paris: Notre Librairie 97, 1989. Goyemide, Etienne. Le dernier survivant de la caravane. 1985. Paris: Le Serpent à plumes, 1998. Mbalimbi, Marie-Florence. Les différents visages de la femme dans l’œuvre d’Etienne Goyemide, Mémoire de maîtrise. Bangui, Central African Republic: University of Bangui, 2003. Ugochukwu, Françoise. “La dynamique des rapports interculturels chez Etienne Goyemide.” Ethiopiques 74 (2005): 29–45.

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GREEN REVOLUTION Historians term the increase in crop yields in the developing world between 1960 and 2000 the Green Revolution. As early as 1917, scientists bred hybrid corn. Further efforts yielded corn, rice, and wheat with sturdy stalks to prevent lodging of insects, and with resistance to pathogens and insects. Agronomists coupled these crops with fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and irrigation to double yields on test plots. The prospect of extending these gains to farmers worldwide led the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture in 1943 to fund what would in 1966 become the International Center for Wheat and Maize Improvement (known by its Mexican acronym, CIMMYT) in Mexico. In 1960 the Rockefeller Foundation founded the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and in 1967 established the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria. The achievements of the Green Revolution were not uniform. Between 1961 and 2000 the yield per acre of grains, root crops, tubers, and legumes increased 2.5 percent per year in sub-Saharan Africa; 2.4 percent in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean (Latin America); and 2.3 percent in North Africa. These data refute the perception that the Green Revolution bypassed sub-Saharan Africa. Rather, sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind Latin America and North Africa in yield gains until 1980. Between 1961 and 1980 yields per acre increased 3.1 percent in Latin America and 2.5 percent in North Africa, whereas they increased only 1.7 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. After 1980, however, sub-Saharan Africa surpassed Latin America and North Africa. Between 1981 and 2000, sub-Saharan Africa tallied annual www.abc-clio.com

gains in yields per acre of 3.2 percent compared to 2.1 percent in North Africa and 1.6 percent in Latin America. Biology, politics, and geography explain the initial success of the Green Revolution in Latin America and North Africa. From the outset, the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture gave CIMMYT money to establish experiment stations and test plots throughout Mexico. Scientists used these stations to breed varieties of corn and wheat specific to local environments. The performance of these crops on test plots enticed farmers to plant them in their fields. North Africa and the lower South of the United States share similar latitudes, easing the transfer of high-yielding cultivars from the latter region to North Africa. These cultivars yielded well in North Africa, a region of few crop diseases. Since 1980, biological and ecological constraints have slowed the increase in crop yields in Latin America and North Africa. First, several decades of breeding have brought corn, wheat, and rice near the maximum yield. Even under ideal conditions, new varieties of corn boost yields only 2 percent per year; wheat and rice cultivars increase yields 1 percent per year. Second, the evolution of new strains of pathogens has checked yields. A new strain of the fungal disease Late Blight of Potato, for example, originated in Ecuador in 1997 and has spread throughout South America. Annual losses total 15 percent of the potato crop and the aggregate loss is $3 billion. Third, intensive farming has brought the land near maximum productivity. Farmers have saturated the land with fertilizers, the excess leeching into groundwater. Farmers have already brought good land under cultivation. Marginal land remains on average only half as productive as fertile land.

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A student at the African Center for Crop Improvement of the University of Kwa-Zulu-Natal, South Africa, inspects her maize project in July 2006. The Center is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. (Sharon Farmer/Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)

In contrast to Latin America and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa benefited little from the Green Revolution before 1980. Until the 1990s cultivars were vulnerable to the pathogens and parasites endemic to sub-Saharan Africa. The parasitic plant witchweed, for example, reduced the yield of grains and legumes by as much as two-thirds in sub-Saharan Africa. The need for control of pathogens and parasites made essential the establishment of experiment stations for the breeding of resistant crops. Unlike Mexico, the countries of subSaharan Africa were slow to build a network of stations. Political instability further hampered the initial efforts of the Green Revolution. CIMMYT refused to conduct research in nations it deemed unstable. Only in 1995, for example, did it begin research in Mozambique. Moreover, research in the 1960s and 1970s focused on corn, www.abc-clio.com

wheat, and rice rather than on teff, sorghum, millet, and yams, crops grown by small farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Poverty compounded these problems. Poor farmers could not afford the agrochemicals that boosted yields. Although tardy, the Green Revolution has come to sub-Saharan Africa. In 1986 Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa created Sasakawa Global 2000, a philanthropic organization to fund agricultural research in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1991 agronomists bred the first high-yielding sorghum and in 1995 the first witchweedresistant sorghum. In 1999, some 200,000 farmers in twelve sub-Saharan countries grew witchweed-resistant sorghum. At the twentieth-century’s end, Sasakawa Global 2000 had established 400,000 experiment stations and test plots throughout subSaharan Africa for the breeding of crops.

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Although famine still threatens sub-Saharan Africa, some countries—Ethiopia, for example—now export grain. Christopher Cumo See also: Agriculture; Rice in the African Diaspora References Conway, Gordon. The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Evenson, Robert E., and Douglas Gollin. “Assessing the Impact of the Green Revolution, 1960–2000.” Science, May 2, 2003. Mann, Charles. “Reseeding the Green Revolution.” Science, August 22, 1997.

English towns of Colchester and Kidderminster, first as a slave and then as a povertystricken head of a household. As a child, Gronniosaw was skeptical of his native religion and became convinced of the existence of a sole creator that transcends the visible world. The Narrative is an account of how God providentially led him to Christ through enslavement and numerous afflictions. Isaiah 42:16, which is used as the epigraph, fittingly summarizes the theme of Gronniosaw’s narrative: God’s deliverance from darkness into light and His divine protection of the faithful. John J. Han See also: Enlightenment Philosophy; Equiano, Olaudah; Marrant, John; Religion (Africa); Slave Narratives

GRONNIOSAW, UKAWSAW (CA. 1710–?) Ukawsaw Gronniosaw authored A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince (1772), the first slave narrative in English. Alongside John Marrant, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, and John Jea, Gronniosaw is considered a pioneer in the development of slave narratives during the Enlightenment period. He told his life stories to a young lady in England, who committed them to writing for her private satisfaction. Then, in 1772, they were published in book form for the edification of Christian readers. The Narrative records the author’s turbulent lifelong journey, including his birth, childhood, and youth; his enslavement; and his spiritual growth. He was born in the city of Baurnou in Nigeria as a grandson of the reigning king. At age fifteen he was sold in Guinea to a Dutch captain, who transported him to Barbados. Thereafter, he lived in New York, the Netherlands, and the www.abc-clio.com

References Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “James Gronniosaw and the Trope of the Talking Book.” In African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by William L. Andrews. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw. A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince. Bath, UK: Samuel Hazard, 1774.

GUILLÉN, NICOLÁS (1902–1989) Nicolás Guillén was the most influential Caribbean Spanish-language poet of the twentieth century and one of the leading literary figures of the African Diaspora. A proponent of the Négritude movement in the 1930s and 1940s, Guillén emerged as the poet laureate of the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s. The author of more than a dozen collections of poetry invoking social justice and racial equality, Guillén remains the island’s most celebrated writer since José Martí.

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Born in Camagüey, Cuba, in 1902 to parents of Afro-Hispanic descent, Guillén’s social convictions were influenced at an early age by the political activism of his journalist father. It was during this period that Guillén published his first poems, compositions reflecting the Modernist aesthetic of Rubén Darío. In 1926, after moving to Havana to work in the civil service, Guillén began to develop the poetic style for which he would become best known. Drawing on the West African–based popular dance known as son, he combined rhythmic form with the speech and folklore of the island’s black population to create the collection Motivos de son (1930; Motifs of Son). He further articulated his Afrocentric vision of Cuba with the more polemical Sóngoro consongo: poemas mulatos (Songoro Cosongo: Mulatto Poems) (1931). Following Fulgencio Batista’s coup in 1952 and subsequent U.S. military intervention, Guillén raised the banner of antiimperialism and pan-Caribbean nationalism in West Indies, Inc. (1934) and Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas (1937; Songs for soldiers and sones for tourists). Now a significant figure in the leftist intelligentsia, Guillén spent much of 1937 attending revolutionary congresses in Spain and Mexico, where contact with such politically committed writers as Pablo Neruda and Diego Rivera brought him to the Communist Party. Over the next two decades, he devoted himself almost entirely to politics, including an unsuccessful campaign for mayor of his native Camagüey in 1940 and editorship of the leftist newspaper Hoy from 1941 to 1945. With the end of World War II and the onset of the cold war, Guillén’s Communist affiliations forced him into self-imposed exile. He traveled to Haiti to meet Jacques www.abc-clio.com

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Roumain, one of the seminal figures of francophone Négritude, and championed the cause of Pan-Caribbean Afrocentrism in the subsequent collection, El son entero (1947; The complete son). Now widely viewed as one of Communism’s most powerful voices in the nonaligned world, Guillén saw his status confirmed when he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1954. Following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Guillén returned home to lend his support to the new regime. Elected president-for-life of the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers (Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos) in 1961, he played a central role in the revalorization of the country’s African heritage. Among his later collections, Elegías (1958; Elegies), Tengo (1964; I have), and La rueda dentada (1972; The toothed wheel) contain some of Guillén’s most powerful polemics against the legacy of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Eric L. Reinholtz See also: Afrocentrism; Caribbean Literature; Cuba; Latin American Literature; Martí, José; Négritude References Márquez, Roberto, and David Arthur McMurray. Man-Making Words. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972. Smart, Ian Isidore. Nicolás Guillén: Popular Poet of the Caribbean. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990.

GUINEA The Republic of Guinea was previously French Guinea, occupied by the Compagnie de Sénégal, a French chartered company of the eighteenth century. Guinea has a population of 9,246,000, most of whom live in rural areas. For many centuries “Guinea” was a generic term for any place

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on the West African coast between Senegal and the Côte d’Ivoire—with several places being designated with the name “Guinea,” such as Portuguese Guinea (Guinea-Bissau) and Spanish Guinea (Equatorial Guinea). Over several centuries, many people were enslaved in Guinea and transported to the Americas, and a significant number of the early English voyagers to the Americas had been to Guinea. Guinea is connected to the Americas through patterns of slavery and early exploration. Martin Frobisher (ca. 1539–1596), who sought out the “Northwest Passage” in the late sixteenth century, had spent the 1550s sailing off the coast of Guinea and in 1554 had been held as a hostage by a local chief. Francis (later Sir Francis) Drake (c. 1540–1596) went to South America and on his return passed Guinea. Sir Bernard Drake (c. 1537–1586), who led the English expedition to Newfoundland in the 1580s, managed to capture a French ship from Guinea with a significant amount of gold on board. French connections between Guinea and the Americas were also important. Morillon du Bourg (d. 1670) was the French commissioner who carried out negotiations for the Treaty of Breda in French Canada. He died on a subsequent voyage to Guinea. Joseph de Fleury de la Gorgendière (1676–1755) was a prominent merchant in Canada who probably made his early fortune from the slave trade with Guinea. Jean-Baptiste Curatteau (1729–1790) and Jacques Bedout (1751–1818) both made trips to Guinea as teenagers in the 1740s and 1760s, respectively. The former became a prominent religious figure in Montreal, and the latter a French naval officer involved in the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781. Mention should also be made of www.abc-clio.com

Olivier Le Jeune (d. 1654), a slave who probably came from Guinea (although some sources claim he was from Madagascar) and was the first black to live in the St. Lawrence Valley in Canada. From 1850 the French government managed to make treaties with local rulers, and these pacts became formalized between 1882 and 1893 as the Rivières du Sud, a colonial division, which became French Guinea in 1893. Camille Lucien Xavier Guy, who was lieuteant governor of French Guinea from 1910 until 1913, went on to become governor of Martinique in the Caribbean; his successor, Jean Jules Émile Peuvergne, had been governor of Guadeloupe before moving to French Guinea. Robert Paul Marie de Guise, who was the penultimate lieutenant governor of French Guinea, had served in the West Indies, in his case as governor of Martinique. After World War II it was clear that— despite attempts to retain their colonial empire—the French would have to negotiate an agreement with African nationalists. The plan was drawn up by General Charles de Gaulle and the former French ambassador to Argentina, Bernard Cornut-Gentille, who had been appointed minister of Overseas France. It set up the framework for referendums to be held in French Africa. In the 1958 referendum, Guinea was the only French colony to vote for complete and immediate independence. It became the independent Republic of Guinea on October 2, 1958. The nationalist hero who led Guinea to independence was Sékou Touré (1922–1984), a longtime trade unionist who formed the Democratic Party of Guinea in 1947 and rose to become mayor of Conakry, the city that became the capital of Guinea. Sékou Touré led his country

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as it confronted France several times, with the former colonial master being implicated in a 1960 coup attempt. The government also managed to survive an invasion by exiles ten years later. By that time Sékou Touré was a leading spokesman for the third world and viewed by many as a supporter of the Soviet Union, which had awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1960. The government was increasingly accused of becoming out of touch with the people, and in 1971 Karim Bangoura, Guinea’s ambassador to the United States from 1969, was arrested and executed, without a trial, the following year for his role in an attempted coup in 1970 that was led by Guinean exiles and assisted by Portugese troops. He was replaced as ambassador by Sékou Touré’s distant cousin, Sadan Moussa Touré (d. 1988). In 1976 Boubacar Telli Diallo, who had been Guinea’s first ambassador to the United States, was arrested for involvement in a plot to topple Sékou Touré. He died in captivity after fourteen days in prison. Eight years later, in March 1984, Sékou Touré traveled to the United States for medical treatment but died of a heart attack on March 26, 1984, during surgery at a hospital in Cleveland. In recent years trouble in neighboring Sierra Leone has sent many refugees into Guinea, where U.S. and Canadian aid groups have been active. Justin Corfield See also: French Empire; Slavery (History) References O’Toole, Thomas, and Janice E. Baker. Historical Dictionary of Guinea. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

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GUINEA DANCE Guinea dance illustrates the development, fusion, and dispersal of African art forms throughout the continent and to the Americas through dance. Guinea dance is wellknown for its highly stylized, exciting, and virtuoso movement while being less-known for its subtle, reserved, yet simplistic spiritual dance. The dynamism and powerful images of African dance owe much to Guinean traditions and to its status as home to the first national dance company for all of Africa, Les Ballets Africains. Les Ballets Africains was created out of a need to preserve African culture and counter the denigrated and maligned images of Africa as the “dark continent.” The creation of Les Ballets Africains later spawned other national ballets of Africa, introduced the djembe drum orchestra and dance to the world, and helped father a rhythm nation in Guinea that gave birth to creative fusions of African movement. These fusions have added resources to the research, preservation, pedagogy, performance, practice, and entertainment of African cultural art forms through out the world. Out of his disappointment with Europeans’ stereotypic criticisms of Africa as savage and oversexualized, Keita Fodeba of upper Guinea envisaged creating a vehicle that would send the right message from Africa. First studying in Senegal and then in France, Fodeba was a poetry student, dancer, choreographer, and musician. While in France, shortly after 1948 he began a poetry group consisting of Africans of the diaspora from Guadaloupe, Martinique, Guinea, Cameroon, and so on. This group gradually transformed itself into a drum, dance, and storytelling group that called itself the African Theater Ballet of Keita Fodeba and which was renamed in

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1954 as Les Ballets Africains de Keita Fodeba. Among the first members were Kante Facely, composer and choreographer; Raphael Wigbert, who later became a diplomat; Conte Seydou; and Toure Ismael. The African Theater Ballet of Keita Fodeba traveled throughout Europe as an African theater. In the early 1950s notable artists were recruited, such as Italo Zambo of Guinea and Papa Ladji of Mali, the latter being one of the most famous drummers of Mali (and later to become the first teacher of djembe drum and its dances in the United States). Between 1951 and 1955, they traveled to Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, France, Belgium, and Switzerland, and later they expanded the tour. Les Ballets Africains first visited the United States in 1953. Fodeba also took a political stance and was involved in fighting for Guinea’s independence. He became famous throughout West Africa, with taxi drivers carrying his picture in their windows and his lyrical poetry played on radio. The songs composed by Fodeba, which celebrate the history and culture of Africa, became true classics, for example, “Minuit,” “Aure Africaine,” “Chanson de Djoliba,” and “SineMory.” Les Ballets Africains de Keita Fodeba acquired so much wealth that Fodeba was able to make substantial contributions to Guinea’s economy. When Guinea became independent in 1958, Keita Fodeba officially declared Les Ballets Africains a gift to Guinea, and from then on the ballet became a national symbol. At the time of Guinea’s independence the nation’s leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré, emphasized the preservation of African culture through a broad rehabilitation of the arts and the reinstitution of traditional languages, dance, art, and drumming in the www.abc-clio.com

school curriculum. In 1962 Touré created a second ballet, Ballet Djoliba. Even a military ballet was established in 1958. It had no commercial function, its purpose being purely educational, to serve as a commentary on social wrongs and rights for the well-being of the people of Guinea and West Africa; it ended with the conclusion of Touré presidency. The Ballet Djoliba was created with purposes similar to those of Les Ballets Africains: to represent the culture of Africa by being an ambassador of love and truth through presenting the folklore of Guinea to the world, preserving the traditions that were being forgotten by urban city youth, and reuniting peoples across ethnic barriers. The ballets were effective in creating a strong national identity that integrated elements of different ethnic dance forms in a way that established uniformity and provided a criteria or standard of African theater performance that has served as a model for all of Africa. Members of Guinea’s national ballets helped create other African national dance troupes, such as the National Ballet of Senegal, whose first director, from 1959 to 1961, was Guinean Italo Zambo, who has been the artistic director for Les Ballets Africains since 1987. Although the primary repertoire of the ballets draws from the legends and folklore of Guinea, the repertoire has also reflected rhythms and dances from other countries in West Africa—Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso— that date back to the thirteenth century of the old Malian Empire. As part of the process of preparing artists, acrobats received training in other countries such as Russia, China, and Korea. A notable artist, choreographer, and director, Sekouba

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Camara—who performed with Djoliba and later became its artistic director— reported training as an acrobat in China. In 1966 Djoliba spent six months studying Chinese acrobats and integrated their style with its own. At the same time, an exchange in the cultural arts took place, with the Africans teaching their Chinese counterparts to sing in Malinke and Sousou. General modifications in the dances and rhythms have been made, such as limiting those aspects of ritual dances designated inappropriate, while assuring dynamic stage presentations. A mélange of movements from various ethnic dances were incorporated inside the choreography of a particular dance. For example, inside of Dundunba (a Malinke dance of the strong man, strong woman), movements from Jolie, Sorsorne, Kassa, and other dances are placed within its choreography for stage. Progressively, the national ballets have modernized Guinea folklore, emphasizing style and artistic license in creating new dance versions and fast rhythmic compositions. In comparison, village tradition continues to preserve ritual dance that is evolving to reflect the youth’s reinvention and assertion of their folklore. Lamban is a dance that perfectly exemplifies changes in presentation for stage. Lamban is traditionally a dance of the griots, the oral historians and praise singers who recite family lineages and serve as keepers of the traditional arts using the art of the spoken word. In its village context, Lamban is played for weddings and is also a ritual healing dance, with movements and tempo that are graceful, simple in form and sound. But as adapted for the stage, Lamban becomes highly vigorous, with an exaggerated nuance of spinning head motion and postural movement and abrupt, staccato www.abc-clio.com

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rhythmic accents. These changes in movement bring out the accents and nuance of the dance, making it more visible for stage, while emphasizing an up-tempo cadence. These changes illustrate how the national ballets are increasingly integrating modern influences into African dance theater presentation. Although officially, Guinea folklore came with the touring of the national ballets, the presence and initial appearances of African arts in the Americas came with the dispersal of Africans in bondage during the Atlantic slave trade. Early forms of African dance are seen in showgirls’ dancing, the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, the Black Bottom, and other popular dances. In fact, Jazz Dancing in particular contains Guinean retentions. Derivatives of Guinea dance can be found in the Haitian, Cuban, Brazilian, and diasporic African cultures spread through out the Americas. In Haiti, for example, a relatively significant amount of Guineans were enslaved, and retentions are therefore reflected in Haitian dance; Katherine Dunham’s technique, an infusion of modern and traditional Haitian dance, represents the connection. Correlations have been made between Cuban rhumba and salsa dance forms to, for example, Macarou and Koukou of the Sousou and forest peoples (Sekouba and Camara) of Guinea. In Brazilian samba movement there is a resemblance to a Malinke marchlike movement in a dance called Saa of upper Guinea. Today, the Umfundalai technique of Kariamu Welsh Asante represents an African-inspired and modern dance fusion. With the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement taking place at the same time that the independence movement was giving birth to Les Ballets Africains and the Djoliba National Ballet,

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black youth and practitioners of the arts made connection with the African dance that these companies presented as a part of reclaiming their heritage and rights to an African identity and sense of self. When Les Ballets Africains first came to the United States, it was immediately received with great enthusiasm by its African American counterparts. Strong connections across cultural and linguistic barriers were made with the first appearances of the national ballets of Guinea. The first pioneer of the Guinean master teachers to come to the United States was Papa Ladji Camara, who came to the United States in 1958. Starting in 1959 he had encounters with artists like Chief Bey and Charles Moore. In 1962 Katherine Dunham of the Bamboise Dance Company invited Papa to perform with that troupe. Papa since then has worked with Babatunde Olutunji, Pearl Primus, Constance Santi De, Yusef Lateef, Mango Santamaria, Nina Simone, Art Blakey, and many more. His message of “African people for Americans and Americans for Africans” reached many across all ethnic barriers. Papa Ladji has the distinction of being the first master artist and folklorist of Guinea to base himself in the United States and teach the folklore and rhythms of the djembe drum. The protégé student of Papa Ladji, the late Babatunde Olutunji, led the first generation of traditional African folk artists and djembe players to teach the ensuing generations. Papa Ladji taught his students only from the folkloric traditions of his people in Norussaba, Guinea, and Mali. A focus on the repertoires of the national ballets would come later, but Papa Ladji taught ancient ritual folklore called by many “fetish” music and dance. He was also one of the first to teach other nationalities and www.abc-clio.com

women the secrets of the drum. Protégé students of Papa Ladji were left to carry on his mission to disseminate the ancient healing ritual magic of the drum and dance. Aziz Ahmed continues to teach from Papa Ladji’s repertoire of folklore with Nanfoule, a name given to his group by Papa himself. The first traditional African cultural arts schools emerged out of the Pan-African movement. One of the first schools or dance companies to come out of this era of African decolonization and independence movements was the International African American Ballet (IAAB), established around 1974. The IAAB consisted of members who would later spread out through the country and become master teachers Baba Olukose Wiles was a founding member, senior artistic director, and music director of the group. The current artistic director for Muntu Dance Theater of Chicago, which started up in 1972, is Amaniyea Payne, a former member of IAAB; so is Chuck Davis, who is the founder of Dance Africa and the African American Dance Ensemble, started in 1968 and based in Durham, North Carolina. Melvin Deal’s African Heritage Dancers and Drummers is another example of a generation that has taught youth since the early 1960s. African American legends, such as Baba Robert Crowder, Arthur Hall, the Ishangi Family African Dancers, and other related djembe traditional ensembles, have raised the appreciation for African culture in the U.S. Although it was Guinea that played the leading role in introducing the djembe drum and dance traditions to the world, groups based in other West African nations where the djembe orchestra is featured have made vast contributions. The djembe drum originates from within the Mande world,

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which includes the ethnic groups who speak a Mande language as their mother tongue and those interacting with them: Bamana, Malinke, Baga, Sousou, Dyula, Soninke, Konyaka, Loma, Kpelle, and Koranko, as well as Wolof, Fula, Senufo, Minianka, Dogon, and Gur, among others. Artists from these ethnic groups were in prominent dance troupes such as the National Ballet of Senegal; Ballet Africaines de Diebel Guee of Dakar; and dance groups from Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and other countries, which began to spread themselves throughout the world. In the United States, Mor Thiam, Abdul Kunta, Assane Konte, Dan Gueye, Zack Diof, Marie Basse, the late Djibi Traore of Senegal, and Papa Djimo Kouyate’s Memory of African Culture Inc. school are significant in the establishing of African cultural centers. As the government for Guinea changed after the death of Ahmed Sekou Toure in 1984 and Lansana Conte’s liberation of political prisoners and encouragement of exiles to return, the nation also opened its doors to the world for interested artists from outside to enter and study. In 1986 Mohammed Kemoko Sano—director of Ballet National Djoliba from 1973 to 1986 and dynamic choreographer for Les Ballets Africains—founded Les Merveilles de Guinee, composed of master Guinean artists. Mamady Keita, a former artistic director and lead percussionist of the Djoliba National Ballet, and Famadou Konate, a master of Malinke drumming and former lead djembe soloist for Les Ballets Africaines, burst on to the world scene in the mid-1980s, establishing themselves as teachers and performers in Europe, spreading universal messages about the power of the djembe drum, and attracting many www.abc-clio.com

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people to Guinea. In 1991 a documentary titled Djembefola, about Mamady Keita’s return to his native village after twenty-six years, brought him international acclaim as an artist while increasing awareness of the djembe. Mamady Keita has recorded several compact discs on the Fonti Musicali label: Nankama, Wasolon (1989), Mogobalu (1995), Hamanah (1996), and Afo (1998). New CDs of his are continually coming out. Keita also founded a percussion school, Tam Tam Mandingue, in Belgium, and eleven other schools in Europe, Japan, and the United States. In a conversation with the author in 1998, Keita talked about the music of the djembe having the power to open a person up and bring out whatever is inside. He has also written a book titled My Life with the Djembe: Traditional Rhythms of the Malinke (1999). Artists like Keita have brought the djembe to the world, the result being that numerous groups have emerged on the world scene playing djembe music and performing Guinea repertoire in collaborative fusions of African diasporan music and dance. Fatala from Guinea and Farafina of Burkina Faso are two such djembe-based groups. The latest addition of national artistic companies began in 1987 when a French percussionist, François Kokolaea, came to Guinea by way of Brazil to study djembe drumming. The following year he became the first manager of Les Percussion de Guinee, consisting of the seven best percussionist of Guinea. The artistic vision of the national companies of Guinea is now following the vision of Mamoudou Conde, who is the official representative of Les Ballets Africaines, to continue the great legacy of Guinea’s ancestral heritage that Keita Fodeba so wanted to proclaim to the world. The continued challenges of language barriers,

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misconceptions or misinterpretations across cultural barriers, and minimal codification of oral traditions play a role in the continued ignorance of African cultural art forms and their accessibility through teaching. Further understanding and awareness about traditional African drum and dance traditions has been promoted by notable percussionists or dancers turned scholars. Eric Charry of the United States, Yaya Diallo of Mali, Alphonse Tierou of Côte d’Ivoire, and many other practitioners of these arts have begun to document the deeper significance, healing attributes, and critical idiom of the arts, thus translating orally based traditions into codified forms. Their efforts substantiate a communal as well as academic means of facilitating continued preservation and teaching of the African and African diasporic aesthetic of rhythm and movement. Angela Watson References Billmeier, U., and M. Keita. My Life with the Djembe: Traditional Rhythms of the Malinke. Brussels: ARUN-VERLAG, 1999. Diallo, Y., and M. Hall. The Healing Drum: African Wisdom Teachings. Rochester, NY: Destiny Books, 1989.

GUINEA-BISSAU The Republic of Guinea-Bissau has approximately 1.4 million people (2005) living in an area of 13,948 square miles (33,700 square kilometers), 5,046 square miles of which is water. This small West African country, with its capital in Bissau, has cultural ties extending well beyond its national borders; it is a member state of several international institutions, including the African Union (AU), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa www.abc-clio.com

(CPLP; Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries), and the French “franc zone.” Population displacement, colonial “pacification,” revolutionary independence, and political and economic insecurity have contributed to the shaping of this country. Guinea-Bissau achieved independence from Portuguese colonial rule on September 10, 1974. João Bernardo “Nino” Vieira successfully ousted Luís Cabral, Guinea-Bissau’s first president after independence, in a 1980 coup d’état. The coup broke up the union of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau in part due to GuineaBissauan resentment toward the protracted legacy of Cape Verdean political domination. Disputes over economic policies led to another political crossroads. After nineteen years of authoritarian rule, the former chief of military staff, Ansumane Mané, overthrew Vieira. In 2005 Guinea-Bissau returned to multiparty, democratic elections, restoring Vieira’s power after he had spent six years exiled in Portugal. Coups and attempted coups, military putsches, and a bloody civil war in 1998–1999 hindered political development and economic stability. Guinea-Bissau is one of the poorest countries in the world, ranking 172 out of the 177 countries listed on the United Nations Human Development Index of 2005. Fifty-nine years of Portuguese colonial rule, followed by three decades of national instability, crippled Guinea-Bissau’s economy and infrastructure. Agriculture continues to dominate the economy and is estimated to have contributed 62 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 1999, with rice as the main staple crop. Guinea-Bissau’s production and export of cashew nuts ranks among the top ten in the world. Fishing, timber, and tourism are all avenues of future development. As of 2002,

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mining played an insignificant role in the country’s economy, although potential mineral deposits include phosphate in the Farim district, bauxite from the Boé district, diamonds, and offshore oil. The 1998–1999 civil war was partially instigated by a dispute over offshore oil rights between Senegal and Guinea-Bissau; the conflict led to a sharp drop in the latter’s GDP. Structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and international aid from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) have been financing the country’s restabilization since December 2003. Physical and social isolation from its former French colonial neighbors is also a factor influencing Guinea-Bissau’s economic development. Guinea-Bissau’s eastern and southern areas border on the Futa Jallon highlands and the much larger Republic of Guinea, while Senegal’s Casamance region runs along its northern reaches. Guinea-Bissau is bisected by numerous rivers that are regularly flooded along the ria, or sunken coastline. The offshore islands, islets, inlets, and estuaries, such as the Bissagos Archipelago, have promoted transatlantic anchorage and trade since the fifteenth century. The harsh environment of Guinea-Bissau, including thick forests, a humid climate, and a complex river system has contributed to rampant disease (including a 2005–2006 cholera epidemic affecting 25,000 people). This geography, with its complex river system, is what ultimately encouraged the influx of refugees from the hinterland seeking a safe haven from invaders: the Mandinka of the kingdom of Kabu, a Mali Empire tributary persisting from the eleventh century to the eighteenth century, and Islamic Fula from the southeast by the thirteenth century. www.abc-clio.com

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Guinea-Bissau has approximately thirtythree different ethnic groups, the five largest being the Balanta, Fula, Mandinka, Manjaco, and Papel. Long-term population displacement has left ethnolinguistic settlement patterns marked by overlapping culture and history, including a shared lingua franca (Kriol), although Portuguese remains the official national language. As early as 1441, Portuguese explorertraders such as Nuño Tristão were able to reach the West African coast on behalf of state and religious backers such as Prince Henry the Navigator. Scattered data from European accounts describe Guinea-Bissau as a hodgepodge of ethnic groups, languages, sociopolitical structures, and religious affiliations. The country remains diverse today. The legacies of Portuguese creolization (linguistic and cultural), indigenous noncentralized religious and political structures, a historical precedence of blurred, fluid cultural group boundaries, and the ideology of inclusion of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido Africano da Independência ga Guiné e Cabo Verde) (PAIGC), established in Guinea-Bissau’s constitution of 1984 all highlight the paradoxical nature of GuineaBissau’s civil society. Brandon Lundy See also: African Union; Economic Community of West African States; International Monetary Fund; Portuguese Empire; World Bank References Bowman, Joye. Ominous Transition: Commerce and Colonial Expansion in the Senegambia and Guinea, 1857–1919. Brookfield, VT: Avebury, 1997. Brooks, George. Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003.

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542 GULLAH Chabal, Patrick. Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1983. Forrest, Joshua B. Guinea-Bissau: Power, Conflict, and Renewal in a West African Nation. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. Forrest, Joshua B. Lineages of State Fragility: Rural Civil Society in Guinea-Bissau. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Galli, Rosemary E., and Jocelyn Jones. GuineaBissau: Politics, Economics, and Society. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987. Lobban Jr., Richard Andrew, and Peter Karibe Mendy. Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997. MacQueen, Norrie. “A Community of Illusions? Portugal, the CPLP, and Peacemaking in Guiné-Bissau.” International Peacekeeping 10, no. 2 (2003): 1–26. Rodney, Walter. A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970. Straaten, Peter van. Rocks for Crops: Agrominerals of Sub-Saharan Africa. Nairobi, Kenya: International Centre for Research in Agroforestry, 2002.

GULLAH Gullah is a term that describes the language and the descendants of African slaves who live in the Carolina low country and on the coastal islands off South Carolina and Georgia. In 1680 African slaves were first brought from the West Indies to these areas for a number of reasons. Foremost was the need for labor on land that was ideally suited for the cultivation of rice, indigo, and cotton. Since there was a limited supply of American-born slaves, African-born slaves supplied the demand. They were not only available, but many had a knowledge of rice cultivation as well as a natural immunity to tropical diseases. www.abc-clio.com

From their first arrival, African slaves had limited association with whites and, consequently, minimal contact with European culture. Plantations required a large number of slaves but only a small number of white overseers. After the Civil War, when former slaves were allowed to purchase land from the Freedmen’s Bureau at $1.25 per acre, many of the Gullah became landowners and were thus further isolated from white influences. Gullahs were also geographically isolated; until roads and bridges were built in the 1930s, many of the Sea Islands could be reached only by boat. Because of this isolation, however, the Gullah people have maintained much of their African heritage, and over time they have developed their own culture and language. The Gullah language is a combination of English and West African words. Its unique characteristics come not only in the use of African words and expressions, but also in the employment of various aspects of African grammar. For example, the language makes use of pronouns that are not gender specific, verbs that do not indicate tense, and nouns that do not use standard plural forms. Aside from language, other instances of African influences abound in Gullah culture. Family life reflects distinctive African concepts of the extended family. Gullah religious practices—which include spirituals, shouting, clapping, and foot stomping— are mostly a mixture of African ceremonies and Baptist beliefs. African traditions are reflected in burial customs by the manner in which graves are decorated with shells and broken household items, as well as in the way graves are positioned. African influences can also be found in the many trickster tales found in Gullah storytelling. Various techniques and forms brought

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from Africa are retained in crafts, such as coiled sweetgrass baskets. Another important feature of African influence is seen in the foods that are prepared, such as benne (sesame), okra, rice, yams, peanuts, and black-eyed peas. Today, Gullah is considered an endangered culture. Rising taxes on Sea Island property are forcing many people to sell their land, often below its value, and to move away. Also, as many Gullah go to the mainland seeking work, they lose touch with their distinctive language and culture. Efforts, however, are being made to preserve Gullah history and culture for future generations—for example, by the Penn Center, originally one of the first schools for freed slaves on St. Helena Island. Kathy A. Campbell See also: Burial, African Practices in the Americas; Creole/Criollo; Diaspora, Demography of; Georgia’s Sea Islands References Branch, Muriel Miller. The Water Brought Us: The Story of the Gullah-Speaking People. New York: Cobblehill Books/Dutton, 1995. McFeely, William S. Sapelo’s People: A Long Walk into Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Pollitzer, William S. Gullah People and Their African Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999.

GUYANA Guyana sits on the north-central coast of South America, east of Venezuela, north of Amazonian Brazil, and west of Suriname. The population is about 706,000, roughly half of them Christian, 35 percent Hindu, and 10 percent Muslim. Much of the coast of Guyana was under Dutch colonial rule until the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth www.abc-clio.com

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century. These settlements were economically dependent on sugar plantations and slave labor, with Demerara sugar becoming a household name around the world. Guyana’s terrain allowed for a substantial number of slaves to escape bondage and form autonomous communities, often referred to as Maroon communities (from “maronnage,” the Spanish word for escape). Maroons waged a form of guerilla war against planters. The possibility of resistance against slavery was substantial, and in 1763, slaves in Berbice took part in a major revolt that undermined the whole of the Dutch plantation system, leading to its decline and fall in the latter half of the eighteenth century. After the Napoleonic Wars, the British took over the settlements of Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo. The British began recording the numbers of slaves in 1823 and found 34,462 African-born slaves and 39,956 creole black slaves (slaves born in the Americas). These numbers suggest that very large numbers of slaves had been brought to the area during the early years of the Napoleonic Wars despite Britain’s abolition of the importation of slaves from Africa in 1807. The three settlements taken from the Dutch were merged in 1831 to form the colony of British Guiana. Seven years later, slavery was abolished in the British Empire. Planters in Guiana fought the abolition of slavery, but many former slaves left the plantations to establish their own smallholdings. This led to a shortage of labor on the sugar plantations, forcing some planters to offer land near plantations in return for men to work on the sugar cane. Many of the newly emancipated established small villages of sixty or seventy people by pooling their resources to buy an abandoned

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plantation and divide up the land. These “free Negro villages,” as they were called, led to a dramatic change that enabled many to work on self-sufficient farms. Plantation owners tried importing German, Portuguese, and Irish laborers and eventually organized a large-scale migration of Chinese and Indian laborers. British Guiana gained its independence on May 26, 1966, becoming the Cooperative Republic of Guyana. Its first prime minister was Forbes Burnham. Today, many families of African descent in Guyana still live in the villages established in the years after emancipation, between 1838 and the 1850s. Justin Corfield

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See also: Abolitionism, British; British Empire; Slave Revolts/Maronnage References Crookall, L. British Guiana: or, Work and Wanderings among the Creoles and Coolies, the Africans, and Indians of the Wild Country. London: T. F. Unwin, 1898. Price, Richard. The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Smith, Raymond T. British Guiana. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Thompson, Alvin O. Unprofitable Servants: Crown Slaves in Berbice, Guyana, 1803–1831. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002.

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H HAIR The essential qualities of black hair tend to include coarse texture and a finely-spiraled curl. Described as kinky, because the hair is inclined to wrap around surrounding strands, its matting properties lend themselves to an array of hairstyles. The Nuer of East Africa use mud to flatten the curl. Masaai men in Kenya braid their hair into long tendrils and women shave theirs clean. These styles reflect ethnicity, lifestyle, and worldview. From pastoral groups to desert nomads to nation-state urbanites, and coastal dwellers, hairstyles underscore group distinctions. They carry symbolic meanings as invocations of the head where power resides, part of a cultural statement that encodes social, economic, and moral status. They can indicate one’s age group, marital status, or family lineage. Female powers are invoked among the Tchrkin of Brazil, where reproductive status is conveyed through hair. Nigerians consider newborns with matted hair a sacred gift and refer to them as Dada children. Associated with costuming, hairstyles sometimes serve as a communicative feature with ancestors. They illuminate social ideas that employ concepts of nature and architecture, the engineering of mathematical patterns found on pineapples, baskets,

or beehives. The Ibo and Yoruba ritualize headdress in festivals to the river goddess. The cylindrical shaped braids of the West African Mangbetu duplicate their statue art. Bakonga people symbolize their spiritual worldview in styles that resemble the kodya shell’s spiral. In Zaire, coiffures are named after significant figures. These practices have origins in ancient eras when young Egyptian rulers wore a single braid on their scalp called the “lock of youth.” The goddess Isis, generally depicted wearing braids, is described in The Book of the Dead as the “lady of hair.” Braiding is one of Africa’s most universal creations, traveling across cultures throughout history. Hindu women braided their straight hair to create waves. Braids were attributed to women’s power over karma in Homer’s “Circe of the Braided Tresses,” and appear as early as the twelfth century in drawings of European women. A resurgence of braided styles in twentieth-century America led to what some call “ancientfuture designs,” contemporary innovations on tradition. A transcultural exchange is evident as women of the Diaspora share and borrow ideas. Microbraids, twists, dredlocks, and goddess braids have become practical alternatives to pressing or relaxing kinky locks.

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Professional athletes and entertainers who don Afrocentric hairstyles have increased their fashionable popularity around the world. For many, these styles reduce negative associations generated in folk belief of curly hair as bad and straight styles as good. A holdover from racial oppression, social acceptance in many societies afforded more privileges to blacks with straight hair. Modern technologies in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds made these styles readily attainable. In the United States, African Americans built fortunes in the hairdressing trade. Marie Laveau, Annie Malone, Anthony Overton, and C. J. Walker employed techniques that beautified black hair. Walker, a woman, most noted for creating a line of hair growers, cosmetics, and straightening combs, is celebrated as the one of the first self-made millionaires. Iset Anuakan Reference Anuakan, R. Iset. “Hairpins, Head Raps and Kinky Stories: African American Women in Folklore, and Cornrows as a Mediator of Aesthetics.” MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1993.

HAITI Haiti, a country located on the western part of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, with San Domingo on the east, is a former French colony that achieved independence in 1804. With the exception of preColumbian times, the history of Haiti and that of its African inhabitants are virtually undistinguishable. Today, about 90 percent of the seven million Haitians are of pure black ancestry (called authentiques, or nègres), while the remaining 10 percent are mulâtres (mulattos). The native Indian www.abc-clio.com

population disappeared within forty years of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage in 1492; most European settlers fled or were executed shortly after the declaration of independence in 1804. The first shipment of African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1510. They and their successors were put to work in the mines and on plantations. Slave imports continued throughout Spanish rule, partly as a result of the local Indian population’s dwindling numbers, partly to heed Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas’s advice that slavery was a humane way to alleviate the Indians’ woes. But with the conquest of Mexico and Peru, Hispaniola became a backwater area of the Spanish Empire, and the number of slaves stagnated at a few thousand in the western part of the island. The number of Africans living in the island increased dramatically with France’s takeover of the western third of Hispaniola, which was renamed Saint Domingue. French smugglers and buccaneers had been present in the island throughout the 1600s (particularly at La Tortue), but the official takeover took place at the Treaty of Ryswick on September 20, 1697. The French, initially reliant on hunting and privateering, soon turned to the cultivation of sugarcane, coffee, cacao, indigo, bananas, and cotton, most of which were then exported to Europe. Since these crops were labor intensive, the slave trade reached significant proportions, particularly during the late eighteenth century. Numbering 4,000 in the 1720s, annual slave imports grew to 10,000 in 1771, 27,000 in 1786, and 40,000 in 1789. As a result of this rapidly growing trade, according to Moreau de Saint Méry, who visited Saint Domingue on the eve of the revolution, 60 percent of

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all French slaves in the Americas lived in Saint Domingue by the 1780s; of those, two-thirds were born in Africa. Slaves came primarily from the Congo and Angola, followed by modern-day Guinea, Nigeria, and Ghana. Since French women were in limited supply, particularly in the early years of the colony, miscegenation was widespread. As described by Saint Méry, people of African ancestry were classified according to a complex taxonomy that held that each human being’s blood is made of 128 equal parts (corresponding to the number of greatgreat-great-great-great grandparents). Based on the content of white blood, Haitians could be described as sacatra, griffe, marabout, mulâtre, quarteron, métis, mamelouque, quarteronné, or sang-mêlé (from blackest to whitest, respectively). The vast majority of Haitians were slaves, numbering half a million by 1790. They were theoretically regulated by the relatively benevolent Code Noir, promulgated by Louis XIV in 1685; but, in practice, abuses flourished as slaves were left at the mercy of each individual planter. Numerous accounts relate stories of slaves being burned alive in boiling sugarcane, devoured by red ants, mutilated, and branded. The need to constantly import new slaves vividly illustrates the high death rate the slaves suffered. Despite the appalling cruelty, the slave system proved economically efficient, and Haiti became France’s most profitable colony, widely known as the Pearl of the Antilles. Slaves enjoyed little of this prosperity, but free blacks and mulattos (approximately 30,000 people in 1790), many of whom owned slaves, often rivaled whites (about 20,000 people) in wealth. They complained, however, that as their ranks www.abc-clio.com

swelled in the eighteenth century, racial discrimination turned them into secondclass citizens forced to provide free military service, banned from many public positions, and suffering from numerous inequities in the courts. In 1791, Vincent Ogé led a failed mulatto revolt that aimed at gaining full citizenship rights. As slaves came to outnumber the free ten to one, resistance was always a feature of colonial Saint Domingue. Some slaves chose suicide; others marooned; others poisoned their masters. In 1758, Mackandal, a maroon and houngan (Voodoo priest), organized a slave network that managed to poison several hundred planters before Mackandal was arrested and executed. The largest, and only successful, revolt broke out on August 21, 1791, when the Jamaican-born slave and Voodoo priest Dutty Boukman organized a ceremony at Bois Caïman, outside Cap Français (today’s Cap Haïtien) during which slaves vowed to revolt against their masters. Over the following days, a thousand planters were killed in the neighboring plains, marking the beginning of the Haitian war of independence. The conflict, lasting until November 1803, pitted white planters nostalgic of the old regime against French revolutionary and Napoleonic troops, Spanish and British expeditionary forces, slave armies led by Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe, and mulatto armies led by André Rigaud, Alexandre Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer (actual alliances shifted over time). By the time the victorious slaves declared the country’s independence in January 1804, renaming it Haiti in the process, at least 200,000 people had died in a conflict that was particularly brutal even by the standards of the time. Most white Frenchmen

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who had not fled by that time were killed in the spring of 1804. Racial and national pride was high after independence, as the former slaves had defeated Spain, England, and France (including 50,000 of Napoleon’s best troops), then proceeded to found the first independent black republic in the world. Revivals of such racial nationalism took place in the 1930s with the Noirisme movement, in the 1960s under François Duvalier, and the 1990s under JeanBertrand Aristide. Independent rule, however, proved a political and economic disappointment. Haiti was ruled by a series of dictators, including Henri Christophe (1807–1820), Faustin Soulouque (1847–1859), François Duvalier (1957–1971), and Jean-Claude Duvalier (1971–1986). Political instability was endemic, with 102 revolts, civil wars, and revolutions from 1843 to 1915 alone. Racial tensions persisted, as the black majority (mostly poor, but frequently able to seize the top office) resented the economic and political influence of the mulatto minority. The United States occupied Haiti twice (1915–1934, 1994–2000). Haiti, once the richest colony in the Western Hemisphere, is now the hemisphere’s poorest country (with a per capita gross domestic product [GDP] of approximately $400) and suffers from a variety of development woes (AIDS, emigration, land erosion, cocaine trafficking, political stalemate, and child slavery). Philippe R. Girard See also: Aristide, Jean-Bertrand; Christophe, Henri; Code Noir; Creole/Criollo; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; Dutty, Boukman; Duvalier, François; Duvalier, Jean-Claude; Louverture, Toussaint Bréda; Noirisme; Pétion, Alexandre Sabès; Price-Mars, Jean; Restavek; Slave Revolts/Maronnage; Soulouque, Faustin; Voodoo

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References Barros, Jacques. Haïti de 1804 à nos jours. 2 vols. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1984. Gold, Herbert. Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Heinl, Robert D., Nancy G. Heinl, and Michael Heinl. Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995. New York: University Press of America, 1996.

HALEY, ALEX (1921–1992) Alex Haley was an African American author of the landmark texts The Autobiography of Malcolm X (with Malcolm X) and Roots. Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921. He spent his childhood in Henning, Tennessee, before enlisting in the Coast Guard in 1939. Haley began writing short stories in his early twenties and eventually became chief

Scenes from the television miniseries, Roots, based on Alex Haley’s famous book by the same name. Both the television miniseries and the book brought stories of African American life during and after the era of slavery into American popular culture. It remains among the most-watched programs in the history of television. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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journalist of the Coast Guard before retiring in 1959. Haley then began a career as an author, working as a feature writer for Reader’s Digest and Playboy. In 1965, he wrote his first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, which was translated into eight languages and made Haley an international celebrity. In 1964, Haley embarked on a twelve-year quest to tell the story of his maternal ancestors. The result was the landmark novel Roots: Saga of an American Family. The work, which celebrated Haley’s African heritage and his family’s determination to survive the ravages of two hundred years of slavery, took the world by storm, selling over one million copies in its first year and earning Haley both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Made into a television miniseries in 1977, Roots was at the time the highest rated program in American history. Haley would go on to write two more novels, A Different Kind of Christmas (1988) and Queen (1992), which chronicle the history of African Americans in the antebellum United States. Queen is Haley’s attempt to tell the story of his paternal ancestors. He died of a heart attack in Seattle on February 10, 1992. Donald Deardorff See also: Brooks, Gwendolyn References Gonzales, Doreen. Alex Haley: Author of Roots. Hillside, NJ: Enslow, 1994. Shirley, David. Alex Haley. New York: Chelsea House, 1994.

HANSBERRY, LORRAINE (1930–1969) Lorraine Hansberry was an African American female dramatist, activist, and educator, and the author of A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by an African American woman to www.abc-clio.com

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Lorraine Hansberry, a playwright and civil rights activist, wrote the first play by an African American woman to appear on Broadway. (Library of Congress)

reach Broadway. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry’s work was the by-product of a protest tradition that took root in the 1940s. She was born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, to Nannie Perry, a former schoolteacher and Republican ward committeewoman; and Carl Hansberry, an inventor and former U.S. deputy marshal who later ran for Congress. Her family lived in a segregated ghetto of Chicago—the setting of A Raisin in the Sun (1959)—since rigid housing segregation confined all blacks to the same neighborhood regardless of economic status. The reality of American racism also hit Hansberry in the Jim Crow grade schools she attended, and, in 1948, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she fell victim to restrictive housing policies. So, rather than find shelter and comfort within personal luxuries, Hansberry developed a dramatic vision that dealt with

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African American themes, but she did not restrict her focus to this subject. Hansberry was deeply influenced by her parents’ promotion of race pride, commitment to civil rights programs, and involvement with the NAACP and the Urban League. Although she was acquainted with political movements at her family home, Hansberry’s personal political life began in 1948 when she was a student at the University of Wisconsin. She came in contact with political groups, one of which was the Young Progressives of America (YPA), and joined the campus chapter of YPA in 1949. Dissatisfied with the educational prospects offered by the University of Wisconsin, she departed for New York where, between 1950 and 1963, Harlem offered a huge intellectual and cultural attraction. The cultural and artistic consciousness promoted by the Harlem Renaissance, about thirty years earlier, still seemed to have a powerful pull on the community. During her Harlem years, especially 1961 through 1964, Hansberry spoke at antiracist street corner rallies and marched in picket lines. In 1964, while hospitalized in failing health, she completed the text for a photographic document on the Civil Rights Movement titled The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964). In 1951, Hansberry joined the staff of Freedom, a monthly newspaper founded the same year in New York by renowned black actor, Paul Robeson. The paper became a voice of, and political weapon for, the masses of blacks and all progressive Americans. Hansberry remained on the staff of the magazine for nearly five years. Aside from encouraging Hansberry’s commitment to desegregation and equal opportunity, Robeson aroused her interest in African affairs and, between 1951 and 1953, she www.abc-clio.com

wrote a number of articles that focused on reconciling Africa and black America. Through the offices of Freedom Hansberry met with and had lengthy discussions with students and politicians from Southern Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. In the early 1950s, when the offices of the Council on African Affairs were located in the same building as Freedom, Hansberry maintained close contact with Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and distinguished Africans, all of whom had a powerful political, intellectual, and philosophical impact on her dramatic vision. When, therefore, Africa is encountered in Hansberry’s drama, the reference is supported by her genuine interest and profound research on the arts, histories, politics, and traditions of a number of its major ethnic groups. Rejecting the notion of Africa as an obscure region, Hansberry became more emotionally attached to the continent in the 1950s when, because of its independence struggles, it had become more visible in black American literature and politics. In two of her works, A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs (1970), Africa materializes as a direct aesthetic and sociopolitical symbol, while in a third play, The Drinking Gourd (1960), Africa emerges indirectly through oral traditions. In spite of the angle through which it is presented, Africa is either conjured as a distant myth or as a tangible socio-geographic setting in relation to a number of related subjects. These include the essence of the region to Hansberry, its political and cultural relevance, relations between Africans and African Americans, and the adaptation of African values that serve key theatrical and cultural roles. A Raisin in the Sun marked the beginning of a more confrontational era in the

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black theater. In the play, Hansberry calls on Africans and diasporic blacks to develop the sense of belonging to a cohesive family. Set in the South Side slums of Chicago, the play is about the economic and social effects of racism on members of the Younger family who strive to attain fulfillment through singular aspirations. Against this background, the play is structured on African images and family values that recapture this influence. A direct reference to Africa is reached through the Nigerian character, Asagai, who represents the first appearance of an intellectual African as a major character in black American drama. Asagai introduces a relatively new insight on Africa. Through him Hansberry creates a particularized African whom she uses to dissipate the myth that Africa does not accept its descendants in America. At the other extreme is George Murchison, the African American who spurns Africa. He personifies those conventional and uninformed facts about Africa that are still largely predictable, and is the classic victim of cultural rape. Irrespective of how laudable some of the images of Africa are in A Raisin, Hansberry does not romanticize the yearning for a culturally rich, viable, and spiritual homeland. In the end, Africa also surfaces as a background afflicted by political and neocolonial weaknesses that have existed for generations, many of which continue to exist. Hansberry began drafting Les Blancs (The Whites) as early as 1960. But it was not until 1970 that Robert Nemiroff, her ex-husband, put together the published version of the play. In Les Blancs Hansberry expands on the attention given to Africa in A Raisin. The play is the first major play by an African American to translate into www.abc-clio.com

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dramatic form the European exploitation of the lands and peoples of Africa, and the ensuing rebellion against European rule. When Les Blancs was drafted in 1960, African nationalist movements had assumed vast and powerful proportions. In recreating an African colonial scene in the play, Hansberry advances the need for dialogue between the oppressed and the oppressor, yet insists on action and commitment, and advocates the attainment of sovereignty at any cost. The play does not resolve any issue but raises thoughtprovoking questions about history, Africa, America, anger, and confrontation. Hansberry finally argues for humanism even as she visualizes the genesis of a new black world and directs her themes through a predominantly African historical and socio-artistic experience. African-based folklore, customary practices, chanting, drumming, and dancing in Les Blancs energize the action and tempo of the plot, heighten the tone and moods disseminated through dialogue, and celebrate indigenous African practices. Herein lies the peculiarity of Hansberry’s dramatic vision: her success at re-evoking and reenacting history through an essentially Western model, yet ritualizing and mythologizing history through the use of certain African cultural and folkloric paradigms. Like A Raisin, Les Blancs expands thematically, finally addressing global concerns along with black issues within and beyond Africa. Without making direct references to Africa in The Drinking Gourd, Hansberry exploits African-based aesthetic and indigenous forms by using folk material for contemporary dramatic creativity. Whereas characterization and setting sustain a tangible African presence in A Raisin and

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Les Blancs, the crux of Drinking Gourd lies in Hansberry’s ability to recapture African sensibilities within an ancestral oral experience. Published a year after A Raisin, Drinking Gourd shifts from issues of the family, integration, and colonialism to the relevance of communal art and slave freedom. The recreation of a slave world in Drinking Gourd is anchored to a folk background and group consciousness that are fortified by the components of folk article. This folk idiom is realized in music, song, and dance-drama. As she keeps slave history alive, Hansberry also highlights the rich musical tradition arising out of this history. Movement, music, folksongs, spirituals, and folklore are thus used to reinvigorate the overall tone of Drinking Gourd. Although African American like African drama has steered from its rudimentary source, the innovative importance of folk material has not been lost. In Drinking Gourd this truth is apparent in a musical tradition where song, music, and dance are tools for the type of group participation that strengthens communal bonding, especially in the face of a crisis. Action and rhythm are direct results of dance and music in the play, and unfold not only as key elements of folk drama but as factors that intensify the themes and overall theatricality of the play. Because she invokes Africa from different perspectives, Hansberry has succeeded in opening up a channel through which several themes affecting Africans and African Americans are inquired into. Beyond her appreciation of the region, she is able to tap aesthetically from it and exploit thematic and stylistic elements commonly absent from white plays of the same period. In the end, and in spite of her initial and precise attention to African American www.abc-clio.com

life, Hansberry’s drama is not restricted to this motif. True, Africa is artistically and culturally symbolic. But while nurturing the sociopolitical well-being of blacks, Hansberry’s plays also serve as a metaphor for surveying broad-based human issues. Phillip Effiong See also: Civil Rights Movement; Négritude; Pan-Africanism References Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Carter, Steven R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Cheney, Anne. Lorraine Hansberry. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Hansberry, Lorraine. Interview. “Make New Sounds.” American Theatre (November 1984): 5–8, 41. Hansberry, Lorraine. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black; A Portrait of Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Adapt. Robert Nemiroff. New York: S. French, 1971. Nemiroff, Robert. “A Critical Background.” In Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry. New York: Random House, 1972. Wilkerson, Margaret B. “The Sighted Eyes and Feeling Heart of Lorraine Hansberry.” Black American Literature Forum 17, no.1 (Spring 1983): 8–13.

HARLEM RENAISSANCE The Harlem Renaissance, also called New Negro movement, refers to the period of outstanding literary and artistic creativity among African Americans between the 1920s and the mid-1930s. It was centered in the vast black residential area of Harlem, New York City, where emerging African American writers produced works imbued with a newfound racial pride. Writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance defied both literary

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conventions set by white authors and the two earlier African American literary types—the writing of the plantation tradition and the black dialect poetry. Instead, they portrayed black American life and culture based on the philosophy of Pan-Africanism. Some writers also adopted the rhythms of the spirituals, blues, and jazz in their works to reflect distinctly black ethos. The Harlem Renaissance writers were mentored by several prominent black intellectuals. W. E. B. Du Bois—one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and editor for The Crisis— advocated black racial pride through rediscovering the cultural heritage of Africa. Particularly inspiring to younger black writers was his idea of the duality of the African American identity: “One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois, 1903, p. 9). James Weldon Johnson prefigured the Harlem Renaissance with his celebrated novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), which invoked Du Bois’ idea of “two-ness.” Johnson is best remembered for his God’s Trombones (1927), which comprises seven black sermons in free verse. Founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and leader of the “backto-Africa” movement, Marcus Garvey promoted black separatism. His philosophy was conveyed to younger black writers through his newspapers, the Negro World and the Blackman. Alain Locke edited The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), a landmark anthology of the Renaissance, for which he contributed several critical essays www.abc-clio.com

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offering new directions for black American writing. The Renaissance was also significantly supported by white donors and writers including Carl Van Vechten, author of the novel Nigger Heaven (1926). Although the Harlem Renaissance writers never formed a unified school, they generally explored in their works the estrangement of African Americans, the kinship of blacks in all continents, and the beauty of blackness. Countee Cullen attracted critical attention to the Renaissance with his compendium Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927). Cullen also published the poetry collections Color (1925) and Copper Sun (1927) and the novel One Way to Heaven (1931), all of which reflect his radical selfconsciousness. Langston Hughes published his first collection of verse, The Weary Blues, in 1926, and his novel Not Without Laughter in 1930. Among his well-known works are the poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) and “I, Too” (1932) and the critical essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Movement” (1925). An immigrant from Jamaica and follower of Garveyism, Claude McKay is noted for his collection of verse Harlem Shadows (1922) and the novel Home to Harlem (1928). These and his other works reflect his racial pride, left-wing ideology, and anticolonialism. Jean Toomer authored Cane (1923)—an experimental work blending the forms of fiction, sketches, poetry, and drama—which explores black American experiences and the ambiguous identity of diasporic blacks on American soil. Wallace Thurman was a unique figure in his critical perspective on the New Negro movement. His novels The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) and Infants of the Spring (1932) satirized the excesses of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Thurman also collaborated with William Jourden Rapp on the play Harlem (1929). Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God came out in 1937, which some critics contend marked the final year of the New Negro movement. According to other critics, the movement ended in 1940 with the publication of Langston Hughes’ autobiography The Big Sea and Claude McKay’s treatise Harlem: Negro Metropolis. Either way, with the arrival of the Great Depression in 1929, funding from white sponsors decreased and Harlem was unable to continue to sustain its status as the heart of black American creativity. The Harlem Renaissance was instrumental in the development of cultural black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement. John J. Han References Bloom, Harold, ed. Black American Prose Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. Bontemps, Arna, ed. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903. Harris, Leonard, ed. The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989. Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Kellner, Bruce, ed. Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: A. and C. Boni, 1925.

HAUSA (PEOPLE) The Hausa are the principal inhabitants of the northern regions of Nigeria, which is often referred to as Hausaland or the Hausa States. There are also significant numbers www.abc-clio.com

of Hausa in Benin, Cameroon, Ghana, Niger, and as far away as Sudan. There is no clear-cut definition for who belongs to the Hausa ethnic group. This designation may derive from a single attribute as well as a combination of attributes, namely, those people whose family can be traced to traditional Hausa bloodlines, those who speak Hausa as a primary language, individuals who are acculturated or assimilated into Hausa life and religion, or those who simply have roots in Hausaland (no matter their original ethnicity). Hausas make up the largest ethnic group in West Africa and have migrated throughout the region. Ethnicity is passed from the father to his children, which has allowed Hausa traders to marry in distant lands and spread their culture and language. Over 35 million people speak Hausa as a first or second language, and it is used extensively as a language of trade and commerce throughout parts of the Sudanic region. The Hausa are mainly Muslims. Islam has played a significant role in their societal development as well as the Hausa language, which borrows heavily from Arabic. Islam most likely came to Hausaland in the fourteenth century, but did not gain a strong foothold until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At about this time, Hausa legend describes the establishment of the original Hausa states: Daura, Garun Gabas, Gobir, Kano, Katsina, Rano, and Zazzau. Despite their common language and history the Hausa states were disunited for various political and economic reasons. The squabbling between states allowed neighboring kingdoms, such as Songhay and Bornu, to claim the Hausa as part of their empires or at least as vassal states. In the early nineteenth century, the Fulani inhabitants of Hausaland, led by Uthman

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dan Fodio, engaged in a prolonged jihad against the rulers of the Hausa states. The jihad was not directed at converting the Hausa, who were already Muslim, but rather at realigning the rulers’ Islamic practices toward a more orthodox interpretation. After Hausaland was under the control of dan Fodio, the Sokoto Caliphate was established and Hausaland was united under a local central government for the first time in its history. One result of the jihads and decades of further internal and external warfare was that many Hausa prisoners of war were enslaved and sent to various parts of Africa and the Americas. The Hausa were guilty of similar practices toward their enemies. Traces of the Hausa presence in the New World are found throughout the Americas, but their legacy is particularly well documented in Brazil. The Hausas are known to have played a role in several Brazilian slave uprisings, most notably the 1835 revolt in Bahia where African Muslims of many ethnicities banded together in a failed attempt to overthrow the slave system. Brent Singleton See also: Brazil; Dan Fodio, Uthman; Fulani; Sokoto Caliphate References Adamu, Mahdi. The Hausa Factor in West African History. Zaria, Nigeria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1978. Hiskett, Meryn. The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman Dan Fodio. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1994. Newman, Paul. The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Reis, João José. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Translated by Arthur Brakel. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

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HEAD, BESSIE (1937–1986) Bessie Head was a South African-born novelist and essayist who lived and wrote from living in exile in Botswana. Born on July 6, 1937, Head was an unwanted girl of a scandalous union between a middle-class white woman and unknown black man. Whereas people in the United States were racially divided into two groups, white and nonwhite (or colored), under the strict system of racial segregation based on appearance, social acceptance, and descent, South Africans were classified into three groups, white, black (Africans), and colored. The colored referred to mixed race and included Indians and Asians. Because of her mixed heritage and English-speaking colonial education, Head experienced not only racism but also alienation from a predominantly Afrikaans-speaking colored community. In 1964, after an unsuccessful marriage, Head moved into Serowe, Botswana, with her son and lived in exile. She suffered from chronic insomnia, nightmares, and hallucinations and struggled with poverty, injustice, and oppression throughout her life. By reflecting psychologically traumatic experiences in a racist and sexist society, Head’s novels, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), Maru (1971), and the autobiographical A Question of Power (1974), subtly embody her creatively complex vision of PanAfrican community beyond racial, class, national, and gender boundaries. In the short stories of The Collector of Treasures (1977), drawing upon her research on precolonial Africa and oral tradition in Serowe, Head richly portrays ordinary village people and the strange complexities of everyday life in relation to larger historical events, political struggle, religious conflict, traditional cultural values, and modern development. In a powerless social position as an exile colored

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woman, Head powerfully engages in a dialectical investigation of the colonial history and cultural representation to reconstruct a new cultural identity, one that provides a sense of belonging and a vision for a hopeful African future. On April 17, 1986, Head died of hepatitis and was buried in Serowe. Heejung Cha See also: South Africa, History and Politics References Eilersen, Gillian Stead. Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears: Her Life and Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996. Sample, Maxine, ed. Critical Essays on Bessie Head. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003.

HEALTH, PUBLIC Public health is the science and practice of protecting and improving the health of a community. In the early nineteenth century, life expectancy in the healthiest countries was slightly higher than forty years, while the unhealthiest countries’ life expectancy was in the low twenties. A “mortality revolution” occurred in Europe and North America, at first due to improvements in agricultural production and transportation which prevented localized famines, and then later from improvements in public sanitation, and finally from modern antibiotics. Life expectancy in these nations increased from 46 years in 1900 to 70 years in 1950. The world’s richest countries today are converging on a life expectancy between 75 and 80 years. Likewise, life expectancy in subSaharan Africa increased to 50 years in 1990, a 36 percent increase from 1950. Since 1990, however, life expectancy in subSaharan Africa has decreased to 46.5 years, primarily due to HIV/AIDS. Sub-Saharan www.abc-clio.com

Africa ranks last in the other major metric of public health—maternal mortality—where hemorrhage and sepsis are the leading causes of maternal death. Although South America on average has better public health statistical measures, there are important issues of inequality across nations and within societies, usually along racial and urban/rural divides. Historically, the epidemiology of Africa has shaped relations between Africa and the Americas. Disease vectors systemic to tropical Africa prevented North American and European colonial expansion and settlement in tropical Africa until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Conversely, the resistance of Africans to Eurasian diseases made possible their exploitation for slave labor when these diseases decimated native American populations. Transatlantic voyages and the production of sugar and its related products led to the emergence of yellow fever and malaria as diseases limiting the growth of European colonies in the tropical regions of the Americas. In the twenty-first century, U.S. government policies and international organizations have a substantial role in shaping the future of public health worldwide. Controversy exists over the cause of disparities in life expectancy between North America and Africa. Some attribute this gap to unique ecological conditions and the lack of economic development. Others focus on aspects of European colonialism and relationships of economic dependency as factors which create these poor health conditions. Epidemiologically, Africans, with the notable exception of the Khoisan near the Cape of Good Hope, shared the primary diseases of the Eurasian peoples and thus were not decimated like the Americans and aborigines of Australia upon their initial

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contact with Eurasians. The most prominent of these diseases were smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, cholera, and tuberculosis, all of which historically ravaged populations in Africa, as they did in Eurasia. At the same time, the tropical zones of Africa contained diseases not prevalent in North America and Europe; the most significant of these diseases were malaria, trypanosomiasis, and lymphatic filariasis. Tropical Africa’s mosquitoes are the most effective transmitters of malaria in the world. More than 95 percent of infective bites in tropical Africa are from three species of anthropophilic mosquitoes, whose traits enable them to thrive in a wide variety of tropical conditions. The parasite that causes malaria comes in three groupings of species. The parasites enter liver cells, multiply for five to fifteen days, and then enter the bloodstream and invade red blood cells. They rupture the red blood cells, reenter the bloodstream, and invade other red blood cells. At this stage, the first symptoms of fever, chills, and nausea appear. In malaria-endemic regions, children are inevitably infected. Those who survive past age five acquire apparent immunity, although many suffer from neurocognitive sequelae and anemia. The parasite remains in the liver, but the person suffers no severe clinical symptoms as long as reinfection comes from the same parasitical species. Areas of unstable transmission may suffer malaria epidemics with high mortality, since even adults may lose their acquired immunity. Shifts in climate, movements of populations, or human-induced environmental changes may all introduce or reintroduce a species of the parasite and a vector to an area. People in malaria-endemic regions of Africa have high rates of sickle cell and www.abc-clio.com

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thalassemia traits because these and other genetic adaptations provide some protection against malaria. The sickle cell trait is recessive, meaning that when both parents have the sickle cell trait, there is a 25 percent chance that the child will not have the trait, a 50 percent chance the child will have the trait, and a 25 percent chance that the child will have a sickle cell disorder. Sickle cell disorders often result in death in childhood or early adulthood. The World Health Organization (WHO) in 1983 estimated that 100,000 infants were born annually with sickle cell disease in Africa, 1,500 in the United States, 1,600 in the Caribbean, 140 in the United Kingdom, and 4,000 in South America. In malaria-endemic regions, children with a sickle-cell disorder rarely survive to adulthood because the disorder (as opposed to the trait) weakens resistance to malaria. The absence of sickle-cell disorders in adult Africans led some North American and European medical researchers in the early twentieth century to assume that sickle cell disorders were the result of the mixture of races in their countries, a reflection on the dominance of racial theories in science of that time. Medical improvements for people of European descent in tropical regions in the first half of the nineteenth century consisted primarily in the use of quinine for treatment and prophylaxis of malaria, reducing exposure to mosquitoes by choosing bases with higher elevation or anchoring ships farther from shore, and eliminating harmful medical practices such as bloodletting and mercury, which exacerbated malarial dehydration, and administering opium. The development of effective antimalarial drugs was given great urgency during World War II, when many Allied

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soldiers entered malaria-endemic areas. Chloroquine, Primaquine, Proguanil, (all brand names), as well as amodiaquine, and sulfadoxine/pyrimethamine were developed during this time, and they are still widely used to treat those who can access them upon the development of symptoms or as prophylaxis. The World Health Organization launched a malaria eradication program in 1955 using dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) but excluded Africa, arguing that the local health infrastructure was inadequate to support the program. This program greatly reduced the impact of malaria in other regions, but environmental concerns associated with DDT have curtailed these vector-eradication programs. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, malaria has reemerged in areas where spraying was halted. As of 2006, an estimated 1.5–2.7 million people worldwide die annually from malaria, primarily children in Africa. Another 500 million are infected. Estimated yearly economic loss due to malaria is about $12 billion, accounting for a crippling 1.3 percent annual loss in GDP growth in endemic countries. The 2000 Abuja Targets included increasing the percentage of children with access to effective treatment within 24 hours of the onset of symptoms, increasing the number of children and pregnant women using insecticide-treated nets, increasing the number of pregnant women with access to appropriate malaria chemoprophylaxis or presumptive intermittent treatment, and detecting epidemics within two weeks of onset and responding within two weeks of detection. Despite increasing parasitic resistance to many of the first-line antimalarials, the main barrier to fighting malaria in sub-Saharan Africa is systemic, www.abc-clio.com

not technical. Human resources development, financial investments, and systemwide initiatives to increase the reach, coverage, and equity of essential services to meet the Millennium Development Goals developed by the United Nations will require an estimated $40–60 billion annually. Meeting the more modest Abuja targets will require $1 billion per year. Current spending is $200 million per year. The public health community has shifted away from the search for the “magic bullet,” single-disease, approach because of its failure to develop the health infrastructure of trained assistants, local dispensaries, and usable and transferable skills. The WHO Alma Ata Conference of 1978 recommended that public health programs demonstrate equitable distribution, community involvement, a focus on prevention, appropriate technology, and a multisectoral approach. Yellow fever is caused by a virus transmitted by the mosquito Aëdes aegypti, the anthropophilic variety of which breeds in open containers of water. Symptoms of severe infection begin three to six days after infection. These include high fever, chills, headache, muscle aches, vomiting, and backache. After a brief recovery period, the infection can lead to shock, bleeding, and kidney and liver failure. Liver failure causes jaundice (yellowing of the skin and the whites of the eyes), which gives yellow fever its name. The mosquito lives up to four months, but it cannot fly more than 100 yards. Urban epidemics thus spread slowly, one street at a time. To survive, the virus needs a number of nonimmunes within its vector’s flight range. Some researchers believe that the first written record of yellow fever are Mayan texts describing cases of the disease occurring

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in the 1480s. Researchers disagree over whether the virus’s origin is African or American, but it seems that the migration of Aëdes aegypti westward across the Atlantic, presumably through the slave trade, spread this more effective vector for the virus. Yet, the first confirmed yellow fever epidemic occurred in 1648 in Guadeloupe and in Yucatan in Mexico, and the first recorded African epidemic occurred in 1778. As of 2006, Aëdes aegypti has never appeared in Asia and Australia, leading some researchers to posit that sugar production was the third piece of the puzzle in the development of yellow fever as an epidemic urban disease. Aëdes aegypti can survive and reproduce on a diet of sugar. The seventeenth-century Caribbean sugar production process provided year-around sucrose and open containers of water which enabled the population of Aëdes aegypti to thrive in the cities of the American tropics. Children under the age of fourteen in endemic regions generally survived yellow fever and thereby gained lifetime immunity, so it quickly became known as a disease of immigrants and strangers. Because of its life span, it was able to survive transatlantic voyages on sugar-laden ships and cause outbreaks throughout the Atlantic region. European army garrisons were thus perfect populations for yellow fever epidemics, best illustrated by the decimation of the French army sent to Saint Domingue to suppress Haitian independence. Of the 59,000 soldiers sent to Haiti between 1791 and 1803, only 10,000 returned to France, with yellow fever being the chief cause of casualties. Aëdes aegypti mosquitoes infected with the yellow fever virus caused outbreaks in port cities in the United States, the last one being an outbreak in New Orleans in 1905. www.abc-clio.com

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These outbreaks were often occasions to reinforce color lines or restrictions against immigrants. During the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, the city’s European American inhabitants called on the free African Americans to provide medical personnel and other needed services, claiming that Africans had a resistance to the disease. Despite African Americans’ succumbing to the disease at nearly the same rate as others, accusations that they exploited whites during the epidemic poisoned the city’s racial climate years afterwards. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, experienced yellow fever epidemics throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Medical experts were divided into two camps, those infectionists who believed the disease was contagious and those who believed the disease originated from local environmental causes. The infectionist position generated support for ending the importation of slaves. European immigrants experienced such high mortality that Brazilians believed that yellow fever was deterring Europeans from immigrating. As slave importation ceased and emancipation approached, Brazilians in the late 1800s hoped that increased European immigration would “whiten” the country. Local governments cleared away large areas of lower-income housing from downtown Rio de Janeiro in their efforts to limit yellow fever epidemics. Even though smallpox, tuberculosis, and cholera killed Afro-Brazilians in large numbers, no public health efforts were made to alleviate these diseases. The demographics of the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean and the struggle to complete the Panama Canal illustrate the impact of the combination of malaria and yellow fever in the American tropics. If European

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migrants to the Caribbean had multiplied at the same rate as their counterparts in North America, the population of the British West Indies in 1760 would have outnumbered the 1.7 million North Americans by nearly 1.3 million. Dr. William Gorgas, who led military public health efforts during the U.S. occupation of Cuba in 1898 and the construction of the Panama Canal in the first decade of the 1900s, estimated that the French lost 22,189 laborers from 1881 to 1889 before giving up on the project. It was only through extreme martial-law sanitation measures in the canal zone, based on the late nineteenth-century identification of the mosquito as a disease vector, that the United States was able to complete the canal. Yellow fever is endemic today in tropical Africa and South America. The existence of an effective vaccine has reduced its mortality. South American countries have achieved an 80–90 percent coverage rate with the vaccination, while most African nations’ rates are less than 40 percent. Trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, was recorded by the fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun, who wrote that lethargy killed Sultan Djata of the Kingdom of Mali. A mosquito of the Glossina species (commonly know as the tsetse fly) transmits trypanosome, a parasite, to human and bovines. After infection, a chancre, a painful red sore, develops. Within one to four weeks, symptoms appear such as fever, severe headache, irritability, extreme tiredness, swollen lymph glands, aching muscles and joints, weight loss, body rash, confusion, personality changes, slurred speech, seizures, and difficulty in walking and talking. Left untreated, the patient dies. www.abc-clio.com

From the 1920s, colonial governments began devoting resources to the control of trypanosomiasis. Despite inadequate funding, incorrect understanding of the disease, and the reluctance of pharmaceutical companies to support research into new drugs to combat the increasing resistance of the parasites to the older drugs, sustained surveillance and control almost eliminated the disease by 1965. In 2000, disruption of health services due to war, population movement, and ecological devastation caused a resurgence of the disease. Mortality estimates from the former Zaire equal or exceed those of the 1920s. The World Health Organization estimates that 55–60 million people are at risk of infection, yet only 4 million have access to health centers with reliable diagnostic capability. The East African trypanosomiasis epidemics of the early twentieth century provided the earliest arguments for those who emphasized human culpability in high African disease rates. Colonial restrictions on gun use and hunting and declining cultivation due to colonial government labor demands expanded habitats for the tsetse fly and other wild animals. Poorer nutrition due to the abandonment of food crops in order to grow the cash crops necessary to pay colonial taxes left populations exposed to sleeping sickness and influenza after WWI. Trypanosoma cruzi is a related parasite endemic in areas of tropical South America. When it infects a human host through the bite of Reduvidae bugs, it causes Chagas disease, also known as American trypanosomiasis. More than 10 million people are afflicted with the disease and 100 million people are at risk. Approximately 10 percent may die in the acute stage of the disease. Those whose cases progress to a chronic stage die prematurely, primarily

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due to cardiac complications. Existing drug treatments have severe side effects. Some Latin American countries have vector control programs using insecticides with pyretroids. Lymphatic filariasis, caused by the parasite Wuchereria bancrofti, is also spread by mosquitoes. The parasite damages the lymph system, causing fluid to collect and arms, breasts, legs, and male genitalia to swell. The resulting hardening and thickening of the skin is called elephantiasis. It also reduces immunity to other infections. Lymphatic filariasis annually infects 120 million people and causes 5 million lose disability adjusted life years (DALY), surpassed only by malaria and tuberculosis. The WHO has recommended applying annual single-dose mass chemotherapy with a combination of two drugs (chosen from among diethylcarbamazine, ivermectin, and albendazole) to entire endemic communities for the duration of the mean reproductive lifespan of the adult worm, believed to be four to six years. This would eliminate the parasite from the area, as these drugs eliminate the microfilaria from the blood of infected people, and hence mosquitoes would not become infected when they bit humans. Some researchers believe that a vector control program should accompany the chemotherapy and continue afterwards. Some of public health’s greatest successes in Africa have been the reduction in polio, the use of oral rehydration therapy (ORT) to prevent death from diarrhea, and the use of invermectin to treat onchocerciasis. While polio is still transmitted in subSaharan Africa, immunization is widespread. Worldwide, cases have declined by 95 percent. A recent setback took place in northern Nigeria when some Muslim religious figures www.abc-clio.com

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urged people not to have their children immunized, claiming that the immunizations were designed to sterilize the children and spread AIDS. Later, in 2004, outbreaks of polio occurred in that region and have since spread to other countries. ORT is a simple solution of sugar, salts, and water mixed in proper proportions to prevent death by diarrheal dehydration. World health experts in the late 1970s estimated that the approximately 500 million annual episodes of diarrhea in children under the age of five resulted in at least five million deaths. Physicians in the developed world used intravenous solutions that would not work in the field conditions of the developing world. Various researchers throughout the twentieth century identified components of what would eventually become ORT, but the medical establishment in Europe and North America was dismissive of oral liquid treatments and held on to an improper understanding of diarrhea and recommended a “starvation” or fasting therapy. An international group of researchers and clinicians in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), many of whom were affiliated with U.S. institutions, developed ORT and tested it in the terrible conditions of the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971. The developing world adopted the technology quickly and reduced dramatically mortality from diarrheal dehydration. Although cholera is not the only cause of diarrhea, the adoption of ORT has dramatically reduced the lethality of cholera epidemics. Onchocerciasis, or river blindness, is caused by infection with Onchocerca volvulus, a parasitic worm living in the human body. Adult female worms live for up to fifteen years. They produce millions of microscopic larvae (microfilaria), which migrate

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to subcutaneous (just beneath the skin) tissue. Upon death, they cause skin rashes, lesions, intense itching, and skin depigmentation. They also migrate to the eye and cause visual impairment and blindness. Infected blackflies (Simulium spp.) transmit immature larval forms of the worms from human to human. Onchocerciasis is found in thirty-five countries; 99 percent of infected people live in twenty-eight nations in tropical Africa. The disease results in an estimated one million DALY annually. Merck, Sharpe, and Dohme (MSD), which developed invermectin for veterinary medicine, collaborated with WHO, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Disease (TDR), and the Onchocerciasis Control Program in West Africa (OCP) to research if invermectin would be as effective against Onchocerca volvulus as it was against a parasite found in horses, Onchocerca cervicalis. When it was found to be effective, MSD decided to offer the drug for free to prevent river blindness. TDR developed a “communitybased treatment” program to administer the drug. Affected communities organized their own drug distribution and treatment: they received tablets from district health posts, delivered them to eligible patients, and reported to health authorities, meeting all costs themselves. On the other hand, public health campaigns can have unintended tragic consequences. Egypt’s campaign of parenteral (by injection) antischistosomal therapy (PAT) did not practice adequate equipment sterilization, resulting in the creation of a reservoir of chronic hepatitis C viral infection. Some of Africa’s public health challenges are “man-made.” Dependency theorists talk about brain drain and pharmaceutical patents impeding access to medicines www.abc-clio.com

as examples of serious public health problems. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN agency, Africa has already lost one-third of its human capital. As a result of the emigration of 20,000 skilled professionals every year between 1996 and 2006, there are more African scientists and engineers in the United States than there are in Africa. In particular, Africa’s health and social service professionals’ emigration threatens the very existence of the country’s health services, according to the Kenyan Medical Association. One-third of Ethiopia’s medical doctors, 80 percent of Zambia’s, and 60 percent of Ghana’s graduating doctors have left the country. One of the characteristics of international free trade agreements is stronger claims to intellectual property made by institutions and government regimes. The top 15 developed countries received 32,703 medical patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from 1997 to 2001 while the top 15 developing and transition countries received 954 patents in the same period. Patent holders seek to prevent pharmaceutical companies from manufacturing generic versions of their drugs for export, and in some cases, for domestic consumption. In 2000, the market cost in some countries for an antiretroviral regimen using patented drugs exceeded $10,000 per patient per year. Without an affordable and stable supply of treatments, there is less incentive to set up public health systems. At the same time, conglomerate international pharmaceutical companies pay no intellectual property rights when they exploit indigenous peoples’ knowledge of herbal medicine. Other man-made threats to public health include land mines and other warrelated pathologies, tobacco consumption,

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narcotic drug use, and practices which harm female reproductive health, such as female genital cutting and child marriage. Modern, developed world diseases like heart disease and diabetes are increasing in Africa’s cities as upper class Africans adopt more sedentary lifestyles. Research into mental and geriatric illnesses confirms their similarity to such illnesses in the developed world, although Africans may have different social interpretations. Other public health challenges on the horizon include “new” diseases, such Ebola and avian influenza. Another threat is environmental degradation. Aside from the loss in production, loss of forest areas may eliminate opportunities to discover beneficial therapies by eliminating the people with the herbal knowledge or by eliminating plant and animal species. Different routes to improving public health have been proposed. Some stress promoting investment in health care and strengthening female autonomy as the best ways to improve public health. Others stress population control, technological advancement, and economic growth. Even as modern medicine practices become more available, “traditional” medical practitioners continue to be widespread. Some of their practices are efficacious while others are useless or even harmful. Yet the continued lack of access to standard medical care and the traditional healers’ fulfillment of social roles make it likely that this segment of Africa’s public health system will remain active. Ayman Fadel See also: Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Prevention; Reproductive Health and Family Planning Africa, U.S. Influence on; World Health Organization

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References Anionwu, Elizabeth N., and Karl Atkin. The Politics of Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2001. Curtin, Philip D. Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Goesling, Brian, and Glenn Firebaugh. “The Trend in International Health Inequality.” Population and Development Review 30, no. 1 (2004): 131–46. Goodyear, James D. “The Sugar Connection: A New Perspective on the History of Yellow Fever.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 5–21. Malowany, Maureen. “Unfinished Agendas: Writing the History of Medicine of SubSaharan Africa.” African Affairs 99 (2000): 325–49. Michael, Edwin, Mwele N. Malecela-Lazaro, Paul E. Simonsen, et al. “Mathematical Modeling and the Control of Lymphatic Filariasis.” Lancet Infectious Diseases 4 (2004): 223–34. Ruxin, Joshua Nalibow. “Magic Bullet: The History of Oral Rehydration Therapy.” Medical History 38 (1994): 363–97. Shadlen, Kenneth C. “Patents and Pills, Power and Procedure: The North-South Politics of Public Health in the WTO.” Studies in Comparative International Development 39, no. 3 (2004): 76–108. Tebeje, Ainalem, and Clyde Sanger. “Their Loss, Our Gain: Many of Africa’s BestEducated People Have Left the Continent to Live in the West While Other Africans Suffer Back Home.” Ottawa Citizen, October 4, 2004, sec. A, p. 15.

HIP-HOP Hip-hop is the moniker for an artistic culture of rap music, graffiti art, and break dancing that has risen from obscurity in an African American community to become one of the most popular and recognizable in the world. Hip-hop’s focuses on aesthetic innovation and reinvention and connection to community have made it an attractive

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Hip-Hop pioneers The Sugarhill Gang perform live on stage in the mid-1970. (Getty Images)

form of political and artistic expression for people on nearly every continent. Hip-hop culture is generally considered to be a synthesis of four diverse elements: graffiti, b-boying, DJing, and emceeing. Hip-hop as a musical form is considered to have begun in New York City, in the deeply impoverished South Bronx of the mid-1970s. Local DJs set up sound systems outside and played records for block parties in scenes reminiscent of open-air sound systems playing in Jamaica. The DJs discovered that the instrumental “break” in a song was what really got audiences excited; they began switching and mixing records to take advantage of those “breaks.” The popularity of the new sound eventually shifted from block parties to discos www.abc-clio.com

to the avant-garde scene. DJs such as Jamaican immigrant DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa (both children of Caribbean immigrants) were innovators of the new music and soon became legends in New York. Graffiti writing or “tagging” developed as a culture alongside hip-hop. Graffiti writers slipped into forbidden territory and covered surfaces with nicknames or murals. The act of tagging was inherently and blatantly rebellious and political; writers tagged street signs, walls, overpasses, and train and subway cars with large, vivid compositions, even in the face of noisy public “anti-graffiti” campaigns and great personal risk. The tags announced their existence to a world that seemed to want to

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ignore the young, the poor, and the disenfranchised. A “b-boy” (break-boy) or “b-girl” was a dancer and an avid follower of hip-hop culture. They often traveled to parties in groups called “crews,” challenging other crews with acrobatic dances. From the b-boys and b-girls came one of the most recognizable markers of hip hop culture: break dancing. Brought to the mainstream in movies such as Beat Street (1984) and Breakin’ (1984), break dancing captivated the attention of the American public and helped introduce hip-hop culture to a world outside the African American community. Originally, the DJ was the focal point of the musical hip-hop experience. Eventually, attention turned to the “emcee.” The emcee kept the audience’s energy high by speaking over the beat, often in inventive rhymes, a technique known as “rapping.” The focus on the emcee as primary vehicle was solidified in 1979, when Sugarhill Records released “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. Instead of a live DJ, “Rapper’s Delight” was backed by a sample from the hit disco record “Good Times” by Chic. There had been little effort to record hiphop before; it was generally considered by detractors as a fad, as well as by advocates as a phenomenon that did not translate well to recording. The emphasis had been on the DJ’s inventiveness in creating sound and ability to keep a crowd moving, which had to be experienced live. When hip-hop records became popular, however, the attention shifted from the DJ’s skill to the emcee’s ability to rhyme. “Rapper’s Delight” was the first commercially successful hip-hop record. Its success proved that recorded hip-hop was a potentially profitable endeavor, and other independent labels attempted to capitalize www.abc-clio.com

on the new music. The recording of hip-hop ensured the continuance of the music, making it portable and transferable; but it also moved the attention firmly away from the DJs that originated it to personalities of the emcees, or “rappers.” The DJ moved to the background. With the use of widespread sampling in the late 1980s, the DJ has been largely supplanted in much popular hip-hop by the “producer,” the person who engineers beats not in front of a live audience, but in a studio. Although it began in New York as an underground phenomenon, hip-hop spread like wildfire. Local hip-hop scenes emerged in many cities across the United States, each developing its own unique sound and aesthetic, turning it into a diverse national phenomenon with innumerable styles and subgenres. Although it is important to note that hip-hop’s musical landscape has always been diverse, the dominant style of hip-hop has shifted over the decades. The party-style raps of the 1970s and early 1980s gave way to more socially conscious music in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The music of this era, concerned with the decimation of African American communities by poverty and drugs and informed by the ongoing struggle to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, openly criticized the plight of black Americans in the United States. The viewpoint was strongly Afrocentric. Much of it frequently referenced the troubled history of black oppression in the United States. Sometimes artists turned to African history as an important and unacknowledged part of the African American past. Artists like Afrika Bambaataa, Public Enemy, KRSONE, and Queen Latifah sought to educate listeners and inspire a sense of history and pride in African culture. They hoped that

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reminding listeners of the long-established civilizations, great accomplishments, and many struggles of African peoples would call African Americans to action, encouraging public protest and social action in American communities. That same era (1980s–1990s) witnessed the rise of “gangsta rap,” especially from locations outside of New York, most notably in California and the American South. In the mid-1990s, as hip-hop culture skyrocketed in popularity outside the black community, party-style raps again became popular. Hip-hop, whether actively “conscious” or not, has always been highly influenced by politics and sociological realities; even the 1970s block parties were a reprieve from the grinding poverty, gang warfare, and virulent institutional racism of the South Bronx. “Gangsta rap” is often vilified for its violence and misogyny, but it was a response to the violent, poverty-stricken, drug-decimated communities that arose in the wake of the crack cocaine epidemic and eradication of governmental support programs in the 1980s. Public debate over the right to free speech was reignited in the United States when Miami rap group 2 Live Crew, led by Haitian-American Luther Campbell, faced obscenity charges and were banned from performing in many venues because of graphic sexuality in their music. As hip-hop traveled across the United States, it also traveled across the oceans. Young people across the world have been attracted to its rebellious aesthetic, social commentary, and trendsetting. Hip-hop artists have emerged on every continent from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the suburbs of Paris. These artists use an African American art form to express local realities with culturally specific content, sound, and www.abc-clio.com

aesthetics in forms such as South Africa’s kwaito music or Brazil’s baile funk. At the dawn of a new millennium, hip-hop has come farther and become more popular than almost anyone could have imagined. Yet that popularity has engendered troubling concerns about the current purpose and future direction of the culture. The most popular hip-hop music is often accused of being empty of meaning, overly preoccupied with crass materialism, laden with pointless violence and misogyny. American hip-hop, once an almost exclusively local, underground phenomenon distributed by independent labels, is now largely controlled by major labels. This control allows distribution on a larger scale that ever before, but also limits the diversity of the music; major labels, concerned with the bottom line, market what is almost ensured to succeed and are less interested in experimenting with the new. The nonmusical elements of hip-hop culture have been definitively pushed aside in favor of the music. Finally, as the culture has gone global, international artists and enthusiasts who still see hip-hop as a viable and vital tool for protest and rebellion take issue with what they perceive as a dangerously and distressingly limited worldview in much popular American hip-hop. American artists are accused of being uninformed and uninterested in the plight of blacks across the Diaspora. Even “conscious” rappers come under fire for subscribing to an outdated, romanticized view of Africa and only being superficially interested in transatlantic events. Now moving into its thirties, the future of hip-hop seems to be at a crossroads. How can the culture retain its rebel stance if it is so widely accepted, and if it seems to take that acceptance for granted? Can popular art

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also be revolutionary? Has hip-hop aged beyond youthful rebellion? Kristina D. Bobo References Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. Neate, Patrick. Where You’re At: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003.

HIP-HOP, CUBAN Cuban hip-hop, like its African American counterpart, encompasses dance, music, graffiti art, and a philosophical worldview. Although a post-1990 phenomena, Cuba has over 500 rap groups and has held annual festivals that feature international stars from the United States, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and increased cultural exchanges between the United States and Cuba, hip-hop’s influence grew dramatically as the island went into an economic nosedive known as “the Special Period.” As Cuba decriminalized the holding of dollars and tourism became the main earner of foreign exchange, Cuba’s Afrodiasporic rap dialogue intensified, with U.S. organizations like Black August and conscious rappers like Roots and Common visiting the island. Cuba’s economic crisis hit its black population hard, since many did not have family abroad that could send them money, and despite tourism’s takeoff, many AfricanCubans were discriminated in job hiring. Alamar, a housing project east of Havana, is credited with being the birthplace of Cuban rap and is still one of the main locations for both the festival and concerts. Initial government reaction to the music was hostile; rap was considered “foreign” and “antisocial.” But eventually it was seen as a too large and www.abc-clio.com

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popular force to put down, so instead the government tried to co-opt and contain it. Now there is an official responsible for rap in the Ministry of Culture, which also has published the island’s first rap magazine, Movimiento. In addition, the Cuban Rap Agency was formed to promote, record, and help in the musical training of rappers. Cuba’s rappers have strongly affirmed their Afro-Cuban roots, be it musically or religiously, and are adamant in their denunciation of racism, discrimination, and social inequality. Cuban rappers have clearly debunked the myth of Cuba’s self-image as a racial democracy. Songs about prostitution, street life, poverty, domestic violence, obsession with money and class differences, and the lack of spiritual and ethical values abound, and their biting, poetic criticism is a refreshing antidote to the island’s lifeless press. Despite this predominantly socially aware viewpoint, Cuban rappers also sing about partying, sex, and having fun. Though Cuban rap uses programmed drumbeats and round bass lines, samples Public Enemy, Jay-Z, and Vico C, and throws in words in English, it also draws heavily on the island’s deep Afro-Cuban musical traditions of ritual music, rumba, son, and the guaracha. Some groups have used the batá drums, others sample old songs like “Quirino” or “Lágrimas negras,” and some use Cuban choteo (an irreverent humor where nothing is sacred), similar to signifying. All these variations make Cuban hip-hop an extremely rich and layered example of a genre that is conversant with Cuban and non-Cuban history, culture, poetry, and music. Orishas, the best-known Cuban rap group lives in Paris but performs frequently on the island. However, most groups reside on the island, still struggling to make ends

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meet, with scant technical resources and rarely appearing on radio or TV, unless they have a more “commercial sound.” Yet groups like Hermanos de Causa, Anónimo Consejo, Las Krudas, Obsesión, Los Paisanos, Papo Record, Cubanitos en la Red, 100 Percent Original, Explosión Suprema, Eleyó, Junior Clan, Grandes Ligas, Madera Limpia, and Alto Voltaje perform widely and have a significant following among black, brown, and white Cuban youth. Alan West-Durán See also: Cuban Music, African Influence in; Hip-Hop; Hip-Hop, Women in References Pacini Hernández, Deborah, and Reebee Garofalo. “Hip Hop in Havana: Rap. Race, and National Identity in Contemporay Cuba.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 11 and 12 (1999–2000): 18–47. West-Durán, Alan. “Rap’s Diasporic Dialogues: Cuba’s Redefinition of Afrocubanía.” Journal of Popular Music Studies (Spring 2004).

HIP-HOP, WOMEN IN Hip-hop culture, encompassing dance, music, graffiti art, and a philosophical worldview, has defined male and female gender roles; women innovators have transformed these roles through their art. While hip-hop culture has been inherently patriarchal since its inception, women have always made powerful contributions to the four essential elements of the genre. Women have sprayed walls with paint as graffiti writers, spun records as DJs, twisted and turned their bodies as break dancers, and, of course, moved the crowd with their own voices as emcees. In the 1970s women began to form a distinctly female voice at hip-hop’s origination in the Bronx, New www.abc-clio.com

York. In the new millennium, hip-hop women impact cultures worldwide. Young women have been cultural workers of the same caliber, level of influence, and spirit of innovation as young men. Despite this truth, women in hip-hop have not always garnered the same respect as men. Ironically, hip-hop women who have earned respect from their male and female peers have often generated work critical of the very patriarchal structures that would limit their abilities to excel. Hip-hop has drawn on the same ability to syncretize the dominant European system of control, Native American culture, and the foundational African ontology that has formed black cultures in the West. The original hip-hop artists are the children of Caribbean immigrants, African Americans that either participated in the Great Migration or descended from runaway slaves that had escaped to the north, and the New York Puerto Rican, or Nuyorican, population that began to significantly increase mid-century. These diverse populations, united in their shared oppression as people of color and the shared elements of diasporic cultures, intermingled in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. In the Bronx and throughout the four other New York City boroughs, these people of African descent gave birth to the black and Latino youth who created hip-hop, the new cultural form that would, like jazz, become the new American musical form. It is important to recognize hip-hop as a cultural retention that survived the Middle Passage and slavery. The history of oral expression among women of African descent is rooted on the continent itself, where queen mothers, female griots, and other women voiced their experiences in the public realm. Documented poems that

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were sung or chanted, often by groups of African women, explore themes of romantic love, initiation to adulthood, family life, and work. While these traditions continued in the West, slaves often veiled authentic African cultural forms to trick white slaveholders. Afro-Brazilian slaves veiled martial arts training with what appeared to white system controllers as dance, giving birth to capoeira. Similarly, the New York Police Department repressed early break-dancers because their aggressive movements seemed too gang-like in appearance. Afro-Haitians and Afro-Cuban slaves syncretized African religions with European Catholicism, assigning African orishas the names of Catholic saints and creating the New World religions Voodoo and Santeria. A hip-hop form of this legacy continues in the use of street names, or tags, among graffiti artists who must shield their identities from police authority while communicating authorship of their work to others in the hip-hop community. Women graffiti artists sometimes spray-painted images generally accepted as exclusively female, like cosmetic makeup, to identify themselves as women. Early hip-hop graffiti artists who created vast murals on New York subway trains risked imprisonment, beatings, and even death as the Metropolitan Transit Authority spent millions to eradicate the work these artists were sharing with the public for free. Simultaneously, artists who co-opted hiphop styles but worked on canvas and displayed their work at downtown New York for-profit art galleries were rewarded with commissions and favorable attention from mainstream media. Afro-American slaves sang songs of liberation and escape, though white slaveholders believed singing slaves were only www.abc-clio.com

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trying to “steal away” or “fly away” to Jesus. Emcees also use “black code” in the form of ever-changing colloquial expressions in their lyrics. Hip-hop artists communicate directly to their peers, just as their forebears communicated to fellow slaves, even when system controllers have access to their music. Indeed, gifted DJs’ layered use of sampling reconfigures recorded song, creating new content and new meaning. DJs and emcees also faced oppression when, in the absence of studio space, these artists practiced and performed in government housing, city parks, and public playgrounds. As hip-hop is in line with the perpetuation of African musical forms in the West, so too is hip-hop’s struggle to express authentic black art. Slaveholders criminalized the talking drum, that most ubiquitous element of African sound, because of its provocative use in slave rebellions. Likewise, early hip-hop artists fought for legitimacy and continue to struggle to define the terms of authentic diasporic expression. Women hip-hop artists have shared this struggle against official efforts to silence their work with men. However, these women, unlike their male counterparts, also struggled for legitimacy and freedom within the patriarchal structure of the hiphop community. In the early 1980s, women breakdancers were often relegated to female-only contests, or battles, as women breaking against men was too often derided by participants and the viewing audience. While male members of the famous Rock Steady Crew supported her movement art, female member Daisy “Baby Love” Castro rarely joined them in battles with other men. Though girls traditionally excelled at challenging double Dutch jump rope movements, many early male breakers felt their

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art demanded greater upper body strength than women were perceived to have. Although female graffiti artists risked the same official efforts at repression as men, male graffiti artists often discredited their female peers by attacking their sexual reputations—and ignoring their work. Sandra “Lady Pink” Fabara and Gloria “Lady Heart” Williams resisted both sexism and racism with overtly political work and deliberately feminine styles. Perhaps the most famous expression of female resistance in hip-hop is Lolita Shante Gooden’s 1984 classic single “Roxanne’s Revenge.” Both women and men in the hip-hop community embraced and celebrated her defiant anthem, which was a response to UTFO’s 1984 hit song “Roxanne Roxanne.” This moment in hip-hop represents the first widely disseminated public battle where a young woman held her own against a group of men. New York radio relegated hip-hop to special late-night and weekend segments until WQHT became the first station to play hip-hop on a regular basis. Angie Martinez, a top-rated radio personality at the station, used her influence to launch “Ladies Night.” This Friday evening program featured women DJs, making their work more accessible to a wider audience and celebrating the presence of women in hip-hop. As hip-hop grew into a multibillion dollar business through the 1990s, female presence in the culture extended to media and public relations, artist legal and managerial representation, stylists, hairdressers, makeup artists, designers, graphic artists, and studio executives. These behind-thescenes workers often came to the business of hip-hop with a powerful love for the music and a concerted mission to help preserve the integrity of hip-hop culture www.abc-clio.com

while empowering themselves through their careers. Like the female artists with whom they labor, these women workers struggle with sexism and misogyny in rap while simultaneously preserving their alliance with black and Latino men and the overall black and Latino community. Their diminished presence in the music industry relative to men renders this balancing act and their positions even more precarious. The most popular element of hip-hop culture is, of course, the work of the emcee, and celebrated female emcees have rhymed about the liberation of people of color and women’s empowerment. Though many female emcees have garnered critical and commercial success, few approach the sales figures and critical attention paid to men. In 1978 emcee Lady B became the first woman to record on wax. Lady B, once a top-rated radio DJ on Philadelphia’s WUSL, founded and worked as editor-in-chief of the first popular magazine devoted to hiphop and rhythm and blues, Word Up! Salt-N-Pepa’s 1986 debut album, Hot, Cool, and Vicious, reached double platinum sales status as it celebrated female sexual freedom and offered cautionary tales on dating and male-female relationships. Much like the blues singers that helped form the foundation for their art, this pioneering female duo and their female DJ, Spinderella, explored freely expressed female sexuality as an essential component of authentic liberation. In six months and with no radio play, hip-hop icon MC Lyte sold over 125,000 copies of her powerful response to male deception in male-female relationships, 1988’s “Paper Thin.” MC Lyte would continue to rhyme about a fictional character, Sam, and through her work explore themes of love, violence, and the 1980s crack epidemic.

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While Miss Melodie offered lyrics in collaboration with the male progenitor of conscious hip-hop KRS One, Queen Latifah and Monie Love joined forces with A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Jungle Brothers to form Native Tongues. This collective of male hip-hop groups and female solo artists produced work with decidedly conscious, diasporic themes. Queen Latifah and Monie Love’s 1989 duet, “Ladies First,” celebrated a female-centered notion of power. The “Ladies First” music video offered a vision of Africa liberated from colonial and neocolonial forces because of women’s critical and strategic thinking. These emcees often used the growing influence of music videos to celebrate women, root themselves in Afrocentric traditions, and sometimes to humorously mock men who attempt to “play” women. Salt-N-Pepa regularly used woman filmmaker Millicent Shelton to create their music videos. Women gained employment at private sector companies—or formed their own— in response to the need for behind-thescenes workers in hip-hop. Other women formed hip-hop foundations, lectured to college students and other youth, participated in community work that uses hiphop as a form of outreach, and created notfor-profit hip-hop organizations. California-based MC Yo-Yo formed the Intelligent Black Women’s Coalition and activist Brigette Moore helped found the Hip-Hop Women’s Progressive Movement. Sister Souljah is a hip-hop lecturer and activist who authored a best-selling cautionary tale aimed at the hip-hop generation, The Coldest Winter Ever. April Silver lectures on hip-hop nationwide and, with author and lecturer Kevin Powell, formed Hip-Hop Speaks to give voice to hip-hop www.abc-clio.com

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activism. Lawyer Yvonne Bynoe publishes Full Disclosure, a newsletter informing undereducated hip-hop artists of the intricacies involved with business negotiation at multinational record companies. Bynoe also founded Urban Think Tank Industry to combine her love of hip-hop and membership in the hip-hop community with activist work. As hip-hop helped fuel the spoken word movement of the 1990s, some women generated explicitly political work that challenges misogyny and the whitecontrolled industry that now structures, packages, and sells rap. Poet Ninety-Nine’s “For the Brothers That Ain’t Here” publicly castigated California-based Ice Cube for his celebrity endorsement of St. Ides liquor. Poet Sarah Jones’s “The Revolution” was banned from public radio play by the Federal Communications Commission, even though Jones’s poem challenged the explicit denigration of women and female sexuality that prevails in much of today’s rap music. Poet Jessica Care Moore, founder and publisher of Moore Black Press, has published a collection of diasporic hip-hop writing generated by male and female culture workers titled The Poetry of MCs. Female emcee Lauryn Hill has consciously remembered Africa in her collaborative work with overtly political male MC Nas. Even before the release of her multiplatinum debut solo project, The MisEducation of Lauryn Hill, her duet with Nas, “If I Ruled the World,” promised to realign the black collective with the Mother Continent. Indeed, Lauryn symbolically represents the power of Africa herself as she plaintively calls to her brothers. She promises to “free all my sons” because “I love ’em, love ’em, baby.” Indeed, women have worked with the same persistence and

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creative power as men, promising to free the black community, using hip-hop to reach the masses with songs of liberation that celebrate the lives of Africans in the Americas. Eisa Nefertari Ulen See also: Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, African; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, U.S.; Hip-Hop; HipHop, Cuban; Obeah; Orisha; Voodoo References Busby, Margaret. Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. Guevara, Nancy. “Women Writin’ Rappin’ Breakin’.” In Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture, edited by William Eric Perkins. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996. Jahn, Janheinz. Muntu: African Culture and the Western World. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. Morgan, Joan. “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate.” In Rap on Rap: Straight Up Talk on Hip Hop Culture, edited by Adam Sexton. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Smith, Danyel. “Ain’t a Damn Thing Changed: Why Women Rappers Don’t Sell.” In Rap on Rap: Straight Up Talk on Hip Hop Culture, edited by Adam Sexton. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

HUGHES, LANGSTON (1902–1967) Langston Hughes was an African American poet, playwright, and essayist. Though known primarily for poems, short stories, and plays that offer perceptive portrayals of black life and music in the United States between the 1920s and 1960s, Langston www.abc-clio.com

From the 1920s through the 1960s, Langston Hughes wrote poetry, fiction, and plays that sought to express black experiences, struggles, and aspirations in America. (Library of Congress)

Hughes also wrote many works that reflect his travels along Africa’s West Coast and in the Americas. Working aboard the S.S. Malone freighter in 1923, Hughes visited Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Belgian Congo, Angola, and Guinea, observing the palm groves and mango trees and listening to the tom-toms and the songs of African boatmen. These happy images of fertility and singing natives appear in poems, such as “African Fog,” “Call of Ethiopia,” and “Danse Africaine,” but they contrast sharply with the themes that Hughes’s Africa poems address. For instance, Hughes protests the wholesale exploitation of African resources and labor in the poem “Johannesburg Mines,” and he draws parallels in numerous other poems between the racism endured by blacks in America and the European imperialism under which Africans suffered. Further, with his coppertoned complexion and relatively straight

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hair, Hughes quickly discovers that the Africans ostracized those of mixed blood, and in “African Morning,” the short story that Hughes claims as one of his best, he exposes the uniquely lonesome position of the mulatto in Africa. However, in spite of his mixed heritage, Hughes was invited back to Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 and honored as a historic artistic figure at the World Festival of Negro Arts. Though Africa appears more frequently in his work, Hughes also demonstrates more than a passing interest in those regions of the Americas to which he traveled. Particularly in the West Indies where many descendents of former slaves reside, Hughes encountered many important writers and artists, and a cross-pollination between these figures and Hughes occurred. When Hughes visited Cuba in 1930, for example, he obtained material for such poems as “Soledad” and “Caribbean Sunset,” but he also came into contact with Nicolás Guillén, an Afro-Cuban poet who so much admired Hughes’s use of jazz and blues characteristics in poems that he wrote Motivos de Son (1930). Reflecting the island’s mixed heritage, son is a style of music developed in Cuba, which combines the Spanish canción and Spanish guitar with African rhythms and percussion instruments. Thus, like jazz and the blues, son represents a popular blend of Western and African musical traditions and so provides a useful vehicle through which to comment upon race relations. Guillén’s first major work, Motivos de Son adopts many of Hughes’s other techniques and themes as well, such as the utilization of the language of poor blacks and the castigation of imperialist ideologies. One year after his visit to Cuba, Hughes spent time in Haiti, where he encountered the author Jacques Roumain and developed www.abc-clio.com

the leftist philosophies that infiltrate his subsequent works. From his experiences in Haiti, Hughes produced the children’s book Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti (1932), the historical drama Troubled Island (1936), and the translation of Roumain’s novel entitled Gouverneurs de la rosée (1945). And in 1947, while on vacation in Jamaica, Hughes met several prominent writers, including Roger Mais and Vic Reid, and was so impressed by their work that he included their poems in an anthology called The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949. In “Broadcast to the West Indies,” Hughes himself summarizes the commonalities between blacks in the United States and blacks in the Caribbean: “I, Harlem, say:/HELLO, WEST INDIES!/You are dark like me,/ Colored with many bloods like me,/. . . . It’s a long ways/ From where you live to where I/ live—/ But there’s a direct line/ From your heart to mine.” Dana Nichols See also: African Literature; Folklore, African; Harlem Renaissance; Jazz and the Blues References Berry, Faith. Before & Beyond Harlem: Biography of Langston Hughes. New York: Random House, 1995. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. Reissue ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Hughes, Langston. Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Edited by Arnold Rampersad. New York: Knopf, 1995. Miller, R. Baxter. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS AND PREVENTION Since being identified in the early 1980s, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and its consequence, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), has become one

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of the major epidemics in both Africa and the Americas. Prevention efforts in Africa and in the United States have some important parallels, but also many important differences, as a consequence of culture, politics, and economics. Crucially, in the relations between the United States and Africa around HIV and AIDS, U.S. policies and practices regarding sexual/reproductive health have had widespread effects on the messages, programs, services, and educational efforts toward the prevention of HIV in Africa. Although just 10 percent of the world’s population resides in sub-Saharan Africa, 64 percent of all HIV-positive people worldwide live there, as do 76 percent of all HIV-positive women worldwide. More than 20 percent of all adults in Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Namibia, and South Africa are HIV positive. More than 2 million people are HIV positive or have AIDS in Latin America and the Caribbean combined. In this area of the world, the highest prevalence rate among adults is in Haiti (5.6 percent). The adult prevalence rate in the Caribbean (over 440,000 people) is second only to subSaharan Africa (more than 25 million people). In North America the prevalence rate is 0.6 percent. The epidemic takes different forms in different areas and regions, and disparately affects people even in regions with comparatively much higher or lower overall rates of prevalence. Countries in Africa are not uniformly affected, and there is a significant difference in infection rates among African nations, as is the case in other areas throughout the world as well. Prevalence rates are significantly lower in western and eastern Africa, although some countries such as Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and www.abc-clio.com

Cameroon have experienced recent surges in prevalence. There is also significant variation in when initial cases of HIV/AIDS were first recognized in African nations, ranging from early in the recognition of the virus such as in Uganda and South Africa to much later in countries such as Namibia. Thus some countries have had some amount of lead time to plan and initiate coordinated education prevention responses, while others are still in the throes of the first waves of generational infection, with the bulk of those infected and affected yet to come in successive cohorts. In these countries, a prevention education response depends not just on the planning and design of the initiative itself, but on desperately needed and rapidly depleting human resources—people in their economic and educational prime—to plan and implement a response. Globally, less than one in five individuals is able to access prevention services, and those disparately affected by access barriers include youth and women. HIV education prevention efforts reach about 8 percent of youth in southern Africa. The role of education efforts in HIV prevention is crucial, and particularly for young people may be one of the most effective since even in the most affected areas schoolchildren have the lowest rates of infection. Components of effective education efforts in Africa provide HIV/AIDS and sexual/reproductive health information and advocacy (especially for underserved groups) as well as building institutional capacity and leadership around HIV/AIDS. Such efforts also address people’s sexual health needs while concurrently addressing the extent to which individuals may exercise free and informed choices about these needs without coercion, discrimination, or violence.

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Support and resources for many of these programs originate from abroad. For instance, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)–sponsored “Geração Biz” in Mozambique provides youth-friendly services to in- and out-of-school youth to increase their sexual/reproductive health literacy through improved access, counseling, and peer education programs that encourage HIV prevention strategies. Prevention efforts among youth and adults have been most effective when carried out in specific areas with priority populations. For instance, the prevalence rate among female sex workers fell significantly in Côte d’Ivoire as a result of local targeted long-term prevention efforts. Other localized efforts, such as programs for pregnant women under twenty in South Africa and for urban men in Zambia, have shown promising initial results. In Togo, a unique effort involves motorcycle taxi drivers who are trained to become “behavior change agents,” and in South Africa young soccer players share HIV prevention information with other teams in schools and the community. Namibia provides one example of the opportunities and the challenges of effective prevention education efforts. The first HIV/AIDS case in Namibia was recorded in 1986. A high-profile national social marketing media campaign aimed at educating Namibians about HIV/AIDS began several years ago. It is coordinated by the Ministry of Health and Social Services, in collaboration with many corporate and community partners. The campaign includes public service announcements on radio and television, full-page ads in periodicals and newspapers, bumper stickers, and billboards placed throughout the country. Attractive full-color posters featuring the president of www.abc-clio.com

Namibia urging citizens to learn about the virus were also a component of the 2003 campaign, which were displayed prominently in public gathering places including post offices and other high-traffic locations. Although the official language of Namibia was declared to be English at the time of independence in 1990, campaign materials are produced in many languages and dialects so as to have the greatest impact in this nation of diverse peoples. In some ways this campaign mirrors efforts in the United States, yet in other ways it is quite different. The national nature of the campaign, with unified messages, copious funding to provide for attractive materials ubiquitously placed throughout all forms of media, and with such broad scope, is a significant departure from approaches in the United States which consist of various private organizations, local and state health departments, federal agencies, and other entities all engaging in various degrees of these but without one coordinated message. National media campaigns are also underway in other countries, including the Lovelife initiative in South Africa which incorporates HIV education messages into newspapers, television, sport, and radio media. A new era in large-scale HIV education media campaigns occurred in 2005, when leaders in broadcasting from throughout Africa met to discuss past media HIV/AIDS education efforts and to develop a more unified and coordinated strategy for the future. At this meeting, the new pan-African African Broadcast Media Partnership Against HIV/AIDS was created. This new collaborative approach aims to make HIV/AIDS central to programming and business plans of broadcasters across Africa. Organized under an initiative of the

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UN Secretary General, co-conveners represented both African and U.S. sponsors— including the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the Southern African Broadcasting Association, and the Nelson Mandela Foundation. In Namibia, in addition to the national social marketing campaign, the Namibian Planned Parenthood Association recruits and trains youth to be HIV/AIDS peer educators. These youth are equipped with both concrete information about HIV and the presentation skills to make their efforts most effective. The association also began using interactive peer theater in 2002, in which youth create and produce their own skits about HIV/AIDS for use in educating other young people. The peer corps includes youth from many regions of the country, who (after training and with continuing opportunities for professional development) carry messages of HIV awareness and prevention to their home communities. Since they are most in touch with cultural norms and values as well as the local language of their home communities, they function as effective ambassadors of education and information about access to testing and treatment as well as a host of other issues of sexual and reproductive health. Bicycles donated by several international organizations carry volunteers to provide HIV outreach into more distant areas and those inaccessible to public transportation. The peer component of HIV prevention efforts is currently very strong and rather similar to efforts in the United States in the early 1990s. Peer educators, usually youth, are recruited and trained, and then do outreach in a number of formats. Namibian youth report that they applied to the peer program to build their resumes www.abc-clio.com

and make them more marketable in the workplace, to provide them with activities to fill their time (especially for out-ofschool youth or young people older than 18 but without further higher education or employment opportunities), and to enjoy increased social status among their peers and elders as one who is bettering themselves with professional development opportunities and as a leader in the community. Peers also report enjoying the opportunity to meet other like-minded youth through the program, and greatly enjoy being an innovative part of the solution to the AIDS crisis in their country. The Namibian peer education approach is not just youth-focused but youth-driven; the peer leaders participate in informational and leadership building activities focused on helping them develop their skills to decide in what direction the actual program should go, which approaches are working, and what new ideas might be of interest in the communities. The U.S. approaches use many messages, approaches, and priorities that are adult-produced and driven; the Namibian approach gives ultimate control over the agenda to the youth themselves. Other countries have also initiated peer education programs, including South Africa and Cameroon. Differences in prevalence rates, as well as cultural norms and values, dictate in what ways these strategies are structured. In communities where there are strict taboos against discussing sexual issues, peer education and peer theater may use more hyperbolic or abstract story lines or messages; in regions where relatively fewer adults are infected and ailing, some programs recruit and train adults (rather than youth) to do adult-to-adult peer educating. Countries with lower overall prevalence

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rates may elect this approach, believing the information will “trickle down” to youth, in contrast to approaches that utilize youth and infer the information will trickle up to elders. Strategies to provide outreach efforts to the many ethnic and cultural groups in Namibia also include examining ways to provide information in the most appropriate cultural context for each community. Prevention efforts that take into account cultural norms and values include a study of several cultures in which existing approaches commonly used in Namibia and many other African countries (including the “ABC” approach—abstinence, be faithful, use condoms) are not as relevant or useful to non-Christian, nonmonogamous societies. Some research has been done into ways sexuality is constructed in these groups, toward the goal of crafting more culturally competent and accessible HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns in these regions. Other approaches mirror those of African nations that have had success in slowing the rate of infection. For instance, providing messages of both abstinence and condom availability in tandem has been key in reducing Uganda’s rate of infection. In Namibia, condoms are widely available, and advertising and public service billboards sponsored by corporations and businesses about this availability are visible throughout the country. HIV prevention materials and condoms have even been observed at national park visitor centers, placed strategically next to the visitor signin books. World AIDS Day is marked throughout the country in observances that take place in each region (the country has been divided into regions specifically for HIV prevention efforts). www.abc-clio.com

Another feature of the African landscape of HIV prevention is an absence of prevention messages and efforts aimed at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Nearly all information (except in South Africa, a notable exception) is aimed specifically at a heterosexual audience because in much of southern Africa (and the continent overall) homosexuality is not just discouraged but illegal and sometimes punishable by imprisonment, deportation, or execution. This lack of information puts LGBT people at distinct and disparate risk, as an overlay onto their already persecuted identities. Discrimination against those who are HIV infected or those thought to have AIDS is widespread and complicates prevention efforts. As of 2006, no public figure or celebrity in Namibia has come out as being HIV positive. Although public health messages abound, the HIV prevalence rate nationwide is 22.5 percent (and upwards of 40 percent in some regions), and much of the population is very much affected if not infected. HIV/AIDS is a topic squarely in the public eye yet a taboo topic of conversation in the everyday life of most Namibian people. A Namibian National AIDS Quilt has been created, similar in concept and design to the U.S. Names Project Quilt. Friends and family members of people who have died commemorate their loved ones in quilt panels they create to honor them. One striking difference between the U.S. and Namibian projects, however, is that nearly none of the Namibian quilt panels display the given names of those memorialized. Panels “to my schoolmates,” “to my beloved husband,” and “for my daughter” are common. Panels that include the actual name of the person in whose honor the panel was

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created are virtually nonexistent. In a similar fashion, the obituary pages in the national newspaper are filled with notices of the deaths of young people every day, but almost all omit the cause of death of these young people. Conversely, some obituaries prominently note those who have died in catastrophic non-HIV related ways, such as auto accidents and hunting mishaps. The stigma surrounding people who have AIDS, and their families, is profound. Overall, a comparison of African and U.S. HIV prevention indicates several important issues. In general, prevention efforts must be not merely translated into other languages, but into other cultures. Offers of assistance (in the form of financial aid or educational materials) from the United States—specifically those with conservative agendas or from faith-based organizations—must be assessed for their relevance to cultures and populations that do not share the same worldview. In some instances those approaches might be not only irrelevant but dangerous. As an example, in Namibia many women who are married experience pressure to have sex with their husbands without condoms, while single women feel more power to negotiate condom use with partners. For this reason, some approaches espoused by the United States, such as encouraging marriage and discouraging condom distribution and negotiation skills, not only fall short but could cause potential harm to women. More generally, U.S. policies on sexual and reproductive health can have widespread effects on the messages, and the very existence, of such prevention efforts in Africa. The United States’s Mexico City Policy restrictions (more widely known as the “Global Gag Rule”) denies funding to any family planning program abroad that www.abc-clio.com

uses its own money to provide abortions, abortion counseling, or advocacy. The George W. Bush administration later extended the gag rule to HIV/AIDS programs throughout the world unless they are abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) provides population assistance to developing countries around the world, including those in Africa most affected by HIV/ AIDS; all U.S. funding for UNFPA was cut in 2002. Additional U.S. policy requires HIV/ AIDS organizations to pledge opposition to sex trafficking and prostitution or be disqualified from receiving funding. This policy was immediately implemented for international programs as well, and now also affects private American groups providing HIV/ AIDS services abroad. In addition, the policy requires fund recipients to discuss condom failure rates and considers applicants for funding that have religious or moral objections to particular HIV/AIDS prevention methods or treatment programs—such as condoms and needle exchanges. Some countries view this requirement as a challenge to their sovereignty and therefore refuse to agree. Others find the language of the pledge problematic—it is unclear whether programs that serve those involved may actually be disqualified from funding— although these programs may represent the best hope for women and children to escape sex trafficking. Ongoing controversy and legislation about sex education in the United States have implications for decisions about funding such programs abroad. For instance, a request for funding proposals released in January 2006 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for CommunityBased Abstinence Education programs

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described more stringent and curriculumspecific criteria for U.S. programs that would qualify for such funds than ever before. The RFP criteria excluded funding to all programs that included information about contraceptives, left concerns about the medical accuracy of information unaddressed, and re-traumatized survivors of rape and sexual abuse by stating that abstinence is a choice over which young people have complete control. The revised criteria also specifically excluded provision of any information of relevance to gay and lesbian people or their families, and included a definition of marriage directly from the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act; the criteria also recommended that abstinent youth avoid sexually active people because they are shameful and unable to become happy—despite research to the contrary. Given the past trend of many U.S. policies being extended to U.S. organizations doing work abroad, and then directly to foreign programs, this development may greatly impact how and what HIV education efforts may remain eligible for continued funding in Africa in the near future. These largely ideologically based restrictions undermine critical prevention efforts. After President George W. Bush reinstated the Global Gag Rule, the impact of the policy change was felt not just on reproductive health but on HIV/AIDS prevention efforts too. Under the policy, no U.S. aid can be provided to foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that use funding from any other source to perform abortions in cases other than rape, incest, or threat to life of the woman, provide referral or counseling about abortion, or lobby for legalized or more accessible abortion in their own country. Those not complying lose funding from the U.S. Agency for www.abc-clio.com

International Development. For example, the Lesotho Planned Parenthood Association refused to agree to these restrictions and no longer receives any USAID supplies, including condoms—and Lesotho is one of the areas of Africa most affected by HIV. The policy has significant effects on HIV/AIDS prevention efforts, especially those coordinated through reproductive health providers. In Kenya, the effect of the “Global Gag Rule” forced a clinic to close in the province where HIV prevalence is highest overall in the country. This effectively ceased HIV testing and counseling for more than 300,000 people who have no other access to health care. At the same time, these cuts also caused the clinic to reduce by half the number of trained outreach workers who bring HIV prevention education efforts to local communities and priority populations such as youth and rural people. Also in Kenya, a creative program that coordinated service delivery of both HIV prevention education and reproductive, maternal, and child health services was forced to end—seriously threatening this integrated and innovative approach as well as the lives of the thousands of women it reached. In a similar situation in Ghana, a clinic closure due to loss of USAID funding left almost 700,000 people without access to HIV prevention education, counseling, and testing. In Ethiopia and Zambia (where the average life expectancy in now 34 years old), loss of funds to providers has severely reduced those countries’ capacity to continue HIV education outreach through trained community workers to outlying areas and at-risk populations. Cameroon was forced to close a youth center that provided programs on HIV prevention education and parenting.

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In 2005 the U.S. international HIV prevention abstinence budget was increased to $295 million. In 2003 the $15 billion AIDS law required at least a third of prevention monies to be granted to abstinenceonly-until-marriage programs. In 2005, that level was increased so that two-thirds of the funding was required to go directly toward abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. This approach does nothing to address the needs of the millions of married women at risk for HIV—up to four-fifths of HIV-positive women in sub-Saharan Africa have been infected by their husbands, who are their sole sexual partners. Twelve of the fifteen focus countries which received USAID grants for abstinence efforts from the 2004 “HIV/AIDS Prevention through Abstinence and Health Choices for Youth” program were African nations—Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. Of the eleven organizations that won the five-year grants, nine were faith-based in nature. These grants provided a total of $100 million in abstinencecentered grants under the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and were directed to the fifteen countries worldwide which are home to more than 50 percent of people with HIV infection worldwide. In Uganda, the dangerous effects of this approach are already being felt. A shift in U.S. dollars to an abstinence approach resulted in a shortage of condoms, with those available having tripled in cost. Also in Uganda, U.S. influence has changed the focus of Uganda’s previously highly successful strategy to one centered solely on abstinence. Inaccurate information about condom effectiveness has been added into the school curriculum, while at the same time www.abc-clio.com

information about the risk of HIV in marriage and the effectiveness of condoms has been removed. This altered focus closely parallels changes being made in some curricula in the United States as well. Since Uganda is viewed as a model program by the current U.S. administration, Uganda’s approach to HIV prevention could have devastating effects in Uganda and also other countries receiving U.S. funding. Other challenges to prevention efforts include financial and political forces within Africa. Access to treatment remains difficult at best, and even in places where nationwide treatment has been implemented, such as Botswana, results have thus far been mixed. At times there is a significant lag between when financial resources are promised from countries such as the United States and when they actually become available on the ground. In other instances, policies may serve to delay or prevent monies from being distributed at all. Under the Global Gag Rule, U.S. funding to nongovernmental organizations providing HIV prevention efforts has been cut in instances when those NGOs have also discussed family planning and other sexual/ reproductive health services; in several cases, these cuts have affected NGOs whose primary purpose is to provide additional lifesaving services. In one such instance, some African affiliates of the Red Cross were completely shut down in this manner, although they were the primary organization addressing infant mortality, primary health care and immunization programs, hunger, and other critical health issues. Access to medication to prevent mother-to-child transmission has just become available since 2004 in some African countries. Some of these countries are addressing the protocols for who will qualify

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for treatment; others are negotiating methods to transport needed medications into more remote areas. Issues of training for healthcare workers, enrolling eligible people into treatment, and addressing infrastructure challenges have also impacted the success of these medication rollouts. In many areas access to any medication is simply not available. The prevention component of testing and counseling can also be confounded by numerous factors. Discrimination against people who have AIDS, myths about transmission and prevention, gender differences in education, power, and influence, and differences in approaches between traditional healers and Western medical practice can all hinder testing and other prevention efforts. With the additional layer of lack of access to medication, there is little perceived benefit to being tested and knowing one’s status. The socioeconomic impact of HIV and AIDS are varied and widespread. Millions of children are orphans due to AIDS, and many children struggle to raise younger siblings—the next generation— without benefit of parents, grandparents, or extended family and community. Life expectancy is below 40 years of age in many areas; thus, the sector of workers which fuels nations and economies—teachers, doctors, nurses, business and industry leaders, civil service workers—is being steadily wiped out. In some areas, open employment positions are being “double-filled”: two employees are hired for one job, with the employer knowing that at least one of the candidates will have died before the training period has ended. With the next generation struggling with basic survival needs and without benefit of elders, hopes for educational and economic advances www.abc-clio.com

becomes dim. In many cases, these impacts of HIV/AIDS not only strain current systems, but reverse previous positive trends in the health, education, and economic sectors. In turn, this trend creates a dynamic of stunting economic growth in Africa at the very time economic resources are most needed to address HIV. The workforce in some African countries will be up to 35 percent smaller in 2020 because of HIV/AIDS. The life expectancy has declined in thirtyeight countries as a result of HIV/AIDS, and in some countries an estimated 50 percent of all health care workers die of AIDS. The disparate effect on the young, and on girls and women, is significant also. Women and girls, already at disadvantage in many areas, balance cultural expectations against perceived opportunities. The age of marriage for girls overall is younger than for men, and with the added economic pressure of having no family support system or extended community due to HIV impacts on the family, marriage may appear the best option for some. The “sugar daddy” phenomenon also lends itself to girls caught between coexisting difficult choices. Engaging in sex for money for food or for school uniforms in order to continue one’s education is commonplace in some areas. More broadly, many African programs that provide HIV/AIDS education prevention also provide other critical health and social service delivery to people in these areas. The U.S. impact on the dissemination of sexual and reproductive health information can also affect access to other vital services such as prenatal and perinatal services, basic health care, and schooling and feeding programs that may all be housed within one service delivery system or umbrella organization.

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High rates of unemployment, unequal distribution of wealth, and sometimes warfare, migration, and famine often further complicate an already dire situation across the continent. Concurrent increases in other infections as a result of HIV infection, such as tuberculosis, further strain health, family, and economic systems. The emotional toll of such complications on individuals and communities can be even higher, as in situations such as an HIVpositive patient who refused his TB medication because “when he takes it he feel hungry, and has nothing to eat.” Lis Maurer and Maureen Kelly See also: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Movements, Africa and African Diasporic; Health, Public; Reproductive Health and Family Planning in Africa, U.S. Influence on References ABT Associates. The Impending Catastrophe: A Resource Book on the Emerging HIV/AIDS Epidemic in South Africa. South Africa: Colorpress, 2000. Benotsch, Eric G., Stevenson, L. Yvonne, Sitzler, Cheryl A. et al. “HIV Prevention in Africa: Programs and Populations Served by Non-governmental Organizations.” Journal of Community Health 29, no. 4 (Aug. 2004): 319–336. Bond, George. AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Haoses, L., and M. Katjire. Workplace Stress and Fear among Nurses and Midwives in the Age of HIV/AIDS in Some of the State Health Care Institutions in Windhoek, Namibia. Windhoek, Namibia: UNAM, 2001. Kalipeni, Ezekiel. HIV and AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Kirungi, Fred. “Uganda Beating Back AIDS.” African Renewal (August 2005): 27–28. Maurer, L., and Maureen Kelly. “Lessons Learned and Global Partnerships: Stories of Sexual and Reproductive Health from Namibia.” American Journal of Sexuality Education 1 (2005): 39–50.

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Shaeffer, Sheldon. The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Education: A Review of Literature and Experience. Paris: UNESCO, 1994. Talavera, Philippe. Challenging the Namibian Perception of Sexuality: A Case Study of the Ovahimba and Ovaherero Culture-Sexual Models in Kunene North in an HIV/AIDS Context. Windhoek, Namibia: Gamsberg Macmillan, 2003. Valerio, Alexandria. Education and HIV/AIDS : A Sourcebook of HIV/AIDS Prevention Programs World. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2004.

HUMAN RIGHTS Human rights are core human values such as the dignity of human beings, their essential equality, the right to live in a community, mutual respect, and individual liberty. The development of human rights was influenced heavily by the history of transatlantic slavery and abolitionism. These rights are, to varying extents, embraced in the major philosophical and religious traditions. It is only since the post World War II era, however, that they have begun to receive legal recognition. Contemporary international organizations with a significant transatlantic presence, such as the United Nations, have been important vehicles for the articulation of human rights. Intellectuals in the United States and Western Europe originally pioneered the development of human rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Human rights were a domestic concern and a matter for domestic law. It was not until World War I and, more significantly, World War II that human rights became an international issue. Human rights are now not only a concern of major Western governments but also of developing nations in Asia, Africa, and South America as well as for intellectuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

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The last half of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic internationalization of human rights, but there continues to be a significant gap between principles of human rights and the corresponding practices of states. The enduring issue in the late twentieth century, therefore, was the extent to which nations had been, and continued to be, willing to curtail their national sovereignty in order to promote an international regime for the protection of human rights.

The Development of Human Rights Early transatlantic human rights movements were primarily concerned with the abolition of slavery. These early movements, with some exceptions, tended to be national rather than international. In 1806, Thomas Jefferson argued in front of Congress that citizens of the United States should not participate in “those violations of human rights which have so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa.” In Britain, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade mobilized public opinion to such an extent that the British Parliament was forced to debate and to consider the common rights of humanity. In 1807, the U.S. Congress passed an act that outlawed the foreign slave trade. A similar act was passed in Britain, which made it illegal to trade in or purchase humans for the purpose of slavery. International efforts to end the slave trade were led by English reformers and focused on the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The congress proclaimed that the international slave trade was repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality and provided that the slave trade should be abolished as soon as practicable. This www.abc-clio.com

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proclamation represented the first time that nations had acknowledged their collective duty to protect and defend humanity. Revolutions in communication and transportation meant that by the late nineteenth century the world was more connected than ever before, and the period saw a corresponding increase in the recognition of the existence of international human rights. Individual states were increasingly willing to protest human rights violations. Austria, France, Britain, and the United States, for example, made official protests to the Romanian and Russian governments in respect to the discrimination and persecution of their Jewish populations. The period also saw the establishment of an increasing number of NGOs. In 1901, for example, the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme articulated a vision to promote basic human rights on behalf of all humanity. Early human rights activists were primarily concerned with the problem of racial discrimination. In 1900, the first Pan-African Congress met in London. At that congress, the black activist W. E. B. Du Bois argued: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (Lauren, 1998, p. 77). Activists also turned their attention to halting the process of imperialism, and to protecting the rights of women, particularly in the areas of marriage, education, property, working conditions, birth control, and suffrage. The International Woman Suffrage Alliance was founded in 1902; by the end of 1920, it had affiliated societies in thirty countries throughout the world, with its headquarters in London.

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The outbreak of World War I accelerated the evolution of international human rights. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, nations pledged to endeavor to secure fair and humane conditions of labor, the just treatment of native inhabitants of territories, enforcement of agreements relating to the traffic of women and children, and to take steps for the international prevention and control of disease. The Treaty of Versailles was notable, however, for its exclusion of a racial equality provision, which led to widespread international demonstrations, particularly in Africa and Asia. The period after World War I saw the continued development of international human rights. NGOs and individual human rights activists increasingly saw themselves as part of an international human rights movement. International organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, the International Council of Women, and the International Alliance of Women sought to advance the rights of women around the world. The Great Depression of the 1930s led to a renewed discussion of human rights, particularly those rights relating to class, social, and economic rights. The International Labor Organization was responsible for a number of conventions dealing with trade unions, forced labor, working hours, insurance, and antidiscrimination. By the eve of World War II, this growing culture of rights was still primarily confined to Western states. One exception was the growing movement to promote racial equality and self-determination, which was primarily driven by activists in Africa and Asia and directed against Western colonial powers. www.abc-clio.com

Development of the United Nations World War II was an important turning point in the evolution of international human rights in three main respects. Firstly, while the protection of human rights was becoming an increasingly important international issue, it was still regarded as a domestic issue. War exposed the danger of allowing nations to justify their actions by reference to their exclusive domestic jurisdiction. Secondly, the war hastened the process of internationalization and confirmed the international presence of the United States. Finally, the war spurred the major powers of the day to agree on fundamental principles on human rights and to make public and global pledges to protect these rights. In 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced a joint statement of war aims in their “Atlantic Charter.” The charter proclaimed important principles, such as self-determination, labor standards, economic advancement, and social security, and, most importantly, contained an assurance that people should live in freedom from fear and want. The allied nations agreed to abide by the principles outlined in the Atlantic Charter and pledged to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as overseas. Despite growing concern for the protection of human rights, the reality was that racism, colonialism, and persecution persisted on both sides of the Atlantic. Individuals and NGOs continued to lobby for the protection of human rights. The issues of primary concern were decolonization, the fate of indigenous peoples, the treatment of people of different races, classes, and castes, and the rights of women and children.

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At the conclusion of the war, the key human rights issue for national governments was to provide an adequate safeguard for human rights without impinging too much on national sovereignty. Initial drafts of a United Nations Charter failed to include any meaningful human rights provisions. The British were concerned, for example, that a general statement assuring the protection of fundamental freedoms might provide a starting point from which control of its empire might be endangered. The early drafts created feelings of shock and anger, particularly in Africa, South America, and Asia, where self-determination was seen as fundamental to peace. The UN Charter was signed two months after the United Nations Conference on International Organization was held in San Francisco in October, 1945. The preamble to the charter sets down one of the United Nations’ objectives: To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.

Article 1(3) provided that one of the purposes of the UN was: To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

The UN Charter also dealt more specifically with a broad selection of economic and social rights, as well as ensuring the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of people and their just treatment and protection against abuses. The charter was an important step in the evolution of international human www.abc-clio.com

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rights. Its weakness was that it did not define the important human rights terms with any degree of specificity. It also failed to provide for adequate enforcement of these rights and included an “escape clause” in Article 2(7) which provided that “nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” This clause undermined the charter’s provisions on human rights. The development of an international mechanism for the protection and enforcement of human rights had “smashed against the rock of national sovereignty” (Lauren, 1998, p. 198). The period after the signing of the charter saw a number of individuals and NGOs criticize abuses of human rights both in their home countries and abroad. Apartheid in South Africa, immigration policies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and the treatment of blacks in the United States all received national and international attention. The charter was also used as a tool to challenge human rights abuses. For example, in 1945 the High Court of Ontario in Re. Drummond Wren relied upon the human rights provisions of the charter as part of the public policy of Canada in refusing to enforce covenants based on racial origin.

Human Rights in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century In 1946, the United Nations created the Commission on Human Rights. The commission’s first goal was to seriously consider the underlying philosophy of human rights and to create a document that embodied universal norms. The members of the commission were forced to transcend their individual political, cultural, religious, and philosophical ideals to put forward “universal rights”

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that should be guaranteed to all people of the world. This document was submitted for consideration by the General Assembly and was adopted on December 10, 1948. The Universal Declaration was not designed to be a narrow legal document, but it was revolutionary in the sense that it was the first international document to proscribe normative standards for human rights and quickly came to assume moral, political, and even legal force. It became clear, however, that many states that were willing to adopt nonbinding declarations of principle were not similarly willing to accept binding conventions that might limit their national sovereignty. Nations, such as Britain, were reluctant to accede to anything that might jeopardize their colonial interests. Similarly, the Soviet Union and the United States, the superpowers of the Cold War, shared the common fear that UN measures might restrict their national sovereignty. The Cold War affected the continued development of human rights. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States found it convenient to use human rights rhetoric as a weapon against the Soviet Union, but with the rise of McCarthyism in the United States and increasing criticism of its domestic human rights record, the United States began to view the development of international human rights as a threat to its national security. In 1953, President Eisenhower proclaimed that the United States would not be a party to any human rights treaty approved by the United Nations. It was not until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the Vietnam War that human rights were once again on the U.S. public agenda. The second half of the twentieth century also saw an increased presence in the www.abc-clio.com

United Nations of newly decolonized nations. There were only four African members of the United Nations during the 1950s. The destruction of the colonial empires in Africa altered the nature and composition of the United Nations. In particular, issues of racial equality and selfdetermination became important issues on the UN agenda. Indeed, the new African and Asian states were particularly important because their votes were instrumental in breaking the Cold War deadlock and precipitated a new array of international legal mechanisms. In the two decades after the adoption of the Universal Declaration, the Human Rights Commission was concerned with drafting treaties to develop the basic categories of rights that were outlined in the Universal Declaration. In 1966, the United Nations adopted two treaties: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR); and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). These covenants, along with the Universal Declaration, comprise what is colloquially referred to as the International Bill of Rights.

Civil and Political Rights Since the second half of the twentieth century, human rights have been categorized as belonging to one of three generations: the first generation consists of civil and political rights that can be derived from “natural rights” philosophy; the second generation consists of economic, social, and cultural rights; and the third generation includes collective rights. The ICCPR was designed to protect first-generation individual rights and broadly provides for the right of self-determination; the enjoyment by minorities of their own

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cultures; protection of the individual’s physical integrity; procedural fairness when an individual is deprived of his or her liberty; equal protection norms; freedoms of belief, speech, and association; and the right to political participation.

Economic and Social Rights The ICESCR protects second generation rights, such as the rights to work; just and favorable conditions of work; rest and leisure; trade unions; social security; strike; protection of the family; and an adequate standard of living. The official UN position is that the ICCPR and ICESCR are indivisible and equally important. This position masks the disagreement that exists over the two treaties, which was fueled by the Cold War. At one extreme, a number of states, most notably the former Soviet Union and China, took the view that economic and social rights were superior to civil and political rights. At the other extreme, some states, such as the United States, considered civil and political rights to be paramount. African states have overwhelmingly committed themselves to protecting economic, social, and cultural rights by widely ratifying the ICESCR, and in some cases entrenching these rights in their constitutions. The ambivalence of Western states, however, is one of the challenges facing the development of economic and social rights. The United States, for example, is yet to ratify the ICESCR. In practice, “no group of states has consistently followed up its rhetorical support at the international level with practical and sustained programmes of implementation” (Steiner and Alston, 2000, p. 250). In addition to the “core” treaties described above, the international human www.abc-clio.com

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rights legal architecture includes a number of other treaties which include conventions dealing with the rights of women, slavery, torture, racial discrimination, children, migrant workers, genocide, and apartheid. In addition to these binding treaties, there is a developing body of nonbinding UN human rights standards. Various regional arrangements supplement the international treaties, such as the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the American Convention on Human Rights. The development of human rights is at different stages on either side of the Atlantic. The African system is perhaps the least developed of the regional human rights regimes. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, developed from the UN charter, has few powers and, for the most part, has been hesitant to exercise any power that it does have. In contrast, Europe is perhaps the most developed region in terms of human rights. The United Kingdom, for example, has acceded to the major international human rights treaties, accepts rulings of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice, and enforces European human rights law in its domestic courts. The United States, on the other hand, continues to exhibit reluctance to be bound by international human rights law. Even when it has ratified treaties, it has done so with significant and important reservations. It is easy, however, to overstate the failings of the United States. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has consistently advocated the prosecution of human rights violations and has been instrumental in setting up international criminal courts for Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, Cambodia, and Sierra Leone.

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Human rights law has also been criticized for having too much of a Western focus. During the Cold War, Western and communist states clashed over the universalism of human rights. More recently, some Islamic and East Asian states have argued that the international human rights movement has not adequately considered the cultural traditions of these states. Cultural distinctiveness is also a key feature of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights which refers to “taking into consideration the virtues of historical tradition and the values of African civilization.” The issue of cultural relativism is an important challenge facing the international human rights movement through the twenty-first century. Despite the tremendous advance in human rights in the past half-century, human rights violations continue to be a problem. The 1990s saw human rights problems such as ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate bombing of civilians, government brutality, and systematic violence against women in many countries. The challenge for the twenty-first century is to translate the emerging consciousness of human rights into a global reality. The goals of the human rights movement are far from being realized and there continues to be a significant gap between principles of human rights and the corresponding practices of states. Simon Chapple References Alston, Philip. “The UN’s Human Rights Record: From San Francisco to Vienna and Beyond.” Human Rights Quarterly 16, no. 2 (May 1994): 375–390. Cassel, Douglass. “Introduction and Postscript: Partial Progress on UN Reform.” Northwestern University Journal of International Human Rights 4 (1): 1–5.

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Coicaud, Jean-Marc, Michael W. Doyle, and Anne-Marie Gardner, eds. The Globalization of Human Rights. Hong Kong: The United Nations University Press, 2003. Fields, A. Belden. Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Lauren, Paul Gordon. The Evolution of International Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Steiner, Henry J., and Philip Alston. International Human Rights in Context. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Weston, Burns H., and Stephen P. Marks, eds. The Future of International Human Rights. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 1999.

HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE Humanitarian assistance is aid given to people in emergency situations caused either by natural disasters or human-made situations (such as famine and conflict) in order to prevent loss of life and livelihood. This assistance can take a number of forms, including food, medical supplies, temporary shelters, drinking water, and cash. It can come from donations by both private sources and governments. Humanitarian assistance is delivered by different kinds of organizations. Much of it is delivered by governmental organizations such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as private voluntary organizations (also called nongovernmental organizations or NGOs) such as CARE and Oxfam. Multilateral organizations such as the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) also play a very important role. Finally, some African governments have humanitarian or disaster response offices to mobilize local resources and coordinate the efforts of their international partners.

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Despite the existence of many humanitarian organizations, it often takes a large public outcry in the West to initiate major humanitarian campaigns; this was as much the case for the 1984–1985 famine in Ethiopia as it is for Darfur, Sudan, twenty years later. While humanitarian assistance has traditionally been given on the basis of neutrality and impartiality, this aspect of the humanitarian ethic has been called into question since the early 1990s, particularly following the inadequate international response to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

A History of Humanitarian Assistance in Africa Prior to achieving independence, most African colonies were dependent on colonial administrations and their own resources for relief from famine and other disasters. There was nothing to compel colonial administrations to develop systematic policies for responding to what are now considered humanitarian emergencies. Famines and other disasters certainly occurred, some of them caused or worsened by colonial policies or practices, but the colonial powers saw relief measures as an administrative obligation at best, and often did little to ease hardship. Meanwhile, in Europe and the United States, several organizations emerged to help Europeans survive the ravages of World War II, including the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE) in America and the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (later Oxfam) in the United Kingdom. In addition, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was formed in 1943 for the same purpose, though its operations were taken over by the International Refugee Organization, which then became the www.abc-clio.com

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Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1952. While these organizations initially focused on rebuilding war-torn Europe, they eventually turned their attention to Asia and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily to fill gaps that newly independent governments were unable to fill. Following independence, few African governments gave priority to antifamine measures because the promise of economic development seemed to make them unnecessary. However, a number of humanitarian crises arose that made several governments, as well as the international community, reassess the need for more systematic disaster prevention and preparedness. One of these disasters was the famine in Biafra, a state which had tried to secede from Nigeria. The Biafran famine became widely known in 1968 following reports by journalists that included photographs of starving children. As there was no United Nations presence there, the relief effort was run by NGOs. Joint Church Aid ran a major airlift, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also participated until it agreed to pull out following a conflict with the Nigerian government. The relief efforts continued for eighteen months, until the war ended with Nigeria retaining Biafra. The Biafra crisis was the training ground of an entire generation of humanitarian aid workers, and saw the creation of new private humanitarian organizations, such as the Irish NGO Concern. It also prompted the French physician Bernard Kouchner to found Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders). Moreover, the crisis was an ethical watershed for contemporary humanitarianism. At the time of the crisis, the NGOs accepted the Biafran assertion that they would be

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massacred by Nigerian federal troops if they did not receive international assistance. However, years later, analysts began to acknowledge that the humanitarian intervention had actually prolonged the war and therefore the suffering of the Biafrans. The Biafra experience has been painfully recalled each time the international community has had to decide whether to provide humanitarian assistance in situations of civil war. Another major disaster was the 1974 famine in Ethiopia and the West African Sahel. This famine resulted in the proliferation of disaster relief organizations within both Africa and the international community. Despite the creation of the United Nations Disaster Relief Office (UNDRO) in 1971, the World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization all established their own emergency response offices in 1974–1975. The Office of Sahelian Relief Operations was established, and many European governments as well as the United States created special disaster relief agencies, either within or in addition to their development agencies. African countries established relief agencies as well, such as Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (now the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission). The number of humanitarian organizations and actors thus multiplied considerably during the 1970s.

Recent Changes in Humanitarian Assistance There have been a number of global changes that have affected humanitarian assistance to Africa since the 1980s. These include the increasing privatization of foreign aid beginning in the 1980s, as well as the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, the role www.abc-clio.com

of humanitarian intervention in the 1993 collapse of Somalia and the 1994 Rwandan genocide has called into question the notion of humanitarian neutrality. Through the 1970s and 1980s, NGOs played an ever greater role in humanitarian interventions in Africa. During the Cold War, these organizations provided assistance in countries or parts of countries that were “on the other side.” A good example of this was the work of the church-based NGO consortium known as the Emergency Relief Desk, which provided relief aid to provinces in northern Ethiopia that were engaged in civil conflict with the central government and that suffered greatly in the 1984–1985 famine. The NGOs were able to bypass the Ethiopian government by working from across the border in Sudan. In fact, NGOs were increasingly used to channel assistance from the West around African governments that were seen as corrupt or inefficient, in effect “privatizing” what used to be official government assistance. NGOs are not subject to professional regulation and have very little accountability, beyond convincing their donors that they are doing what they claim to do in order to continue receiving support. Therefore, the turn to NGOs to avoid corruption and inefficiency may just replace one set of problems with another. To address this problem, humanitarian agencies and groups have begun developing sets of standards to improve humanitarian practice and accountability. For example, the Sphere Project based in Geneva, Switzerland, has developed the Humanitarian Charter outlining disaster victims’ rights. With the end of the Cold War, internal conflict in Africa increasingly became cause for humanitarian assistance. African nations were no longer the pawns of the two

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superpowers, and national sovereignty began to be eroded, particularly during times of internal strife or conflict. Therefore, humanitarian action came to be seen (among the international community, at least) as driven by a universal obligation to help people who are suffering, rather than interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. More crises came to be characterized as “complex political emergencies,” or crises in which politics were the primary cause of suffering. There was also greater concern for civilian suffering in conflict situations, and the obligation to alleviate it through such measures as Operation Lifeline Sudan, which brought humanitarian assistance to victims of civil war in southern Sudan through the 1990s. This shift placed humanitarian workers in conflict situations, and also increased the humanitarian role of national and UN military forces. For example, the military forces that intervened in Rwanda in 1994 attempted to protect humanitarian workers, assist humanitarian agencies in their work, and deliver relief supplies directly to conflict victims. However, these changes in the role of humanitarian assistance have caused many people to question the neutrality and impartiality of humanitarian organizations. Two major humanitarian crises in particular necessitated a critical examination of late twentieth-century humanitarianism: the collapse of Somalia in 1993, and the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In the former, humanitarian agencies called for the military occupation of Somalia to facilitate humanitarian response to a major famine there. This situation happened to coincide with U.S. government interests and with the UN Secretariat’s desire to increase its mandate. The result was the dramatic www.abc-clio.com

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collapse of the Somali state, which has taken over a decade to rebuild. In Rwanda, humanitarian neutrality prompted agencies to call for a ceasefire by the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), which was fighting the genocidal government. This ceasefire would have, in effect, prolonged the genocide, as the victory of the RPF is what ended it. The two catastrophes of Somalia and Rwanda led to greater recognition of the political role that humanitarian agencies play during crises, whether they intend to or not. Even so, there remains a lack of a policy or ethics framework for humanitarian agencies who insert themselves in political and military situations.

Critiques of Humanitarian Assistance Numerous critiques of humanitarian assistance have emerged over the years. They have focused on both motives and methods of humanitarian efforts. For example, there has tended to be an emphasis on food in humanitarian responses in Africa at the expense of other major concerns, such as provision of clean water and health supplies. This emphasis on food is all the more troubling as most deaths during famines are caused by disease rather than hunger. The prominence of food aid has some historic roots in the U.S. food aid program. This program was formally institutionalized by the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954, also known as Public Law (PL) 480, which effectively separated food aid from other types of foreign aid. It also established three forms of food aid: that to be sold in recipient countries; that earmarked for famine and other emergencies, and that to be provided to U.S. private voluntary organizations for distribution in the United States and overseas.

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This structure exists today. From the beginning, the link between the food aid program and the need to dispose of U.S. agricultural surplus was obvious, as was the desire to develop commercial markets for U.S. commodities, and led to some criticism of the program. However, the American public (particularly farmers and agricultural interest groups) preferred giving or selling food aid to offering financial assistance. There is concern that giving away “free food” creates a situation of dependency, where African food producers become dependent on food aid rather than their own production. Other types of humanitarian interventions have been designed to try to solve this problem, as well as address the effects of food aid on local agricultural markets in Africa where food producers find themselves unable to compete with free food from America or Europe. Some agencies, such as the WFP, buy more food aid locally to support African markets. Food-for-work programs, in which recipients engage in public works projects in order to receive their rations, have been another solution. Yet another type of program that is increasing in popularity is cash-for-work, whose advocates recognize the importance of boosting local markets during times of crisis, particularly when the problem is not lack of food on the market but people’s lack of income to buy the food. Finally, there is a question of what motivates humanitarian agencies, particularly as humanitarianism has become more of a business driven by market forces with an increasing number of organizations competing for available resources. These market forces cause some humanitarian emergencies to receive inordinate amounts of aid, while others go virtually unnoticed. Moreover, the new “war www.abc-clio.com

on terror” launched by the United States has made U.S. national security interests a major part of the humanitarian landscape, particularly as the crises in Iraq and Afghanistan draw huge amounts of resources away from emergency responses elsewhere. To critics, these factors signal the demise of the traditional humanitarian ethic of helping people altruistically and impartially. Jericho Burg

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References Action Against Hunger. The Geopolitics of Hunger 2000–2001: Hunger and Power. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2001. Campbell, Wallace J. The History of CARE: A Personal Account. New York: Praeger, 1990. Clapham, Christopher. Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. De Waal, Alex. Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Duffield, Mark, and John Prendergast. Without Troops and Tanks: Humanitarian Intervention in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1994. Lancaster, Carol. Aid to Africa: So Much to Do, So Little Done. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Minear, Larry. The Humanitarian Enterprise: Dilemmas and Discoveries. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2002. Shaw, D. John. The UN World Food Programme and the Development of Food Aid. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Smillie, Ian, and Larry Minear. The Charity of Nations: Humanitarian Action in a Calculating World. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2004. European Community Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO). http://europa.eu .int/comm/echo/index_en.htm. Humanitarian Policy Group, Overseas Development Institute, London. http://www.odi.org.uk/hpg/. Humanitarianism and War Project, Tufts University. http://hwproject.tufts.edu/.

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HURSTON, ZORA NEALE 593 The Sphere Project: Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response. http://www.sphereproject.org/. United States Agency for International Development. http://www.usaid.gov.

HURSTON, ZORA NEALE (1891–1960) Zora Neale Hurston was an African American novelist, dramatist, and anthropologist whose best-known work draws heavily on the vernacular folk culture of her home state, Florida. But she also traveled widely in the Caribbean, and she brought a comparative diasporic perspective to her reflections on cultural forms, such as Voodoo and biblical allegory, while the ethical and

political issues raised by emancipation (from slavery and colonialism) are never far from the surface. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, but she grew up in the black town of Eatonville, Florida. She attended school there and in Jacksonville, then joined a traveling theater company, before continuing her education at Morgan Academy (Baltimore, MD) and Howard University (Washington, DC), where she was encouraged as a writer by Alain Locke. Hurston moved to New York City in 1925, where she published a number of stories and plays inspired by the Eatonville of her childhood and became a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, impressing her associates with her gift as a storyteller

Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston, famous for her 1938 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Library of Congress)

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and mimic. At the same time, she studied anthropology at Barnard College, obtaining a BA, and, with the encouragement of Franz Boas, undertook several folklorecollecting trips in Florida, the Gulf Coast, and the Bahamas between 1927 and 1931. These trips were largely financed by the philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, who imposed conditions on Hurston’s research. It was only in 1931 after her contract came to an end that Hurston was free to publish her findings. Over the next few years her writing diversified to embrace a variety of literary forms—scholarly essays, sketches, musical revues, and her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)—as she sought to devise new ways of presenting the material she remembered and collected. These experiments with different literary forms culminated in Mules and Men (1935). The book presents her research findings in the form of a first-person narrative that foregrounds the relationship between the author and her informants, and it includes an account of her initiation as a “hoodoo” practitioner in New Orleans. This book was followed by Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a novel set in Florida. Written in the third person, the narrative voice adopts the idiom and perspective of Janie Crawford, telling her story as she returns home after the death of her third husband. Both works were praised for their vivid rendering of the vernacular, but some found their apparently exclusive emphasis on rural humor and self-reliance detracted from the harsher realities of the segregated South. Famously, the young Richard Wright accused its author of having her characters ‘“swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live, between www.abc-clio.com

laughter and tears” (Gates and Appiah, 1993, p. 17). Hurston, in turn, lampooned his didacticism, anger, and poor grasp of dialect. A Rosenwald Fellowship to pursue a doctorate was suddenly cut back in 1935, but a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year funded a research trip to the Caribbean which provided material for Hurston’s next book, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938). In the eyes of some reviewers, it was a mix of jaunty reportage, scientific pretensions, and offhand political analysis. Her third novel, Moses Man of the Mountain (1939), carnivalistically rewrites the story of Exodus, bringing to it her knowledge of hoodoo practices, classical myth, and Egyptology. By making Moses an Egyptian, which, in the terms of the African American allegory she reworks makes him a white man, is a controversial move that has generally been overlooked. Hurston’s wartime autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), was a commercial success, partly because of its refusal to dwell on racial discrimination (although passages cut from the published version are more openly critical of U.S. society). She returned to Florida for the setting of her fourth novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), a sensitive study of the marriage of a poor white couple, Arvay and Jim Meserve. It did not sell well, however. A projected fifth novel, a fictionalized study of the life and times of Herod the Great, was never completed, and only parts of the manuscript have survived. Hurston’s political journalism of the 1950s betrays conservative Republican sympathies, including an opposition to desegregation, which alienated her from previous readers. During this period she found

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it increasingly difficult to earn a living by writing, and took jobs as a secretary, teacher, and maid. Her health deteriorated and she died in Fort Pierce, Florida, in 1960. After more than thirty years of neglect, Hurston’s work was rediscovered in the 1970s. With her ear for the vernacular culture of the black South, and her strong female characters, works such as Their Eyes inspired a new generation of writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Critics of the 1980s began to pay more attention to Hurston’s technical innovations as a writer, and in the 1990s she was widely recognized as having anticipated many of the concerns of post-modern ethnography. Where previously Dust Tracks, for instance, had been condemned as unnecessarily elliptical about her personal life, it is now more usually considered to address head-on some of the contradictions and pitfalls of autobiography. And far from ignoring the harsh realities of Jim Crow, her “Southern” writings are these days more often admired for the way they both record and enact cultural strategies of resistance. The conviction that Hurston’s best work is rooted in the romanticized black community she is deemed to have grown up in is less powerful than it once was. Some critics have endeavored to stress her appreciation of her home state as a multicultural space, riven by racial, class, and gender conflicts, as evident in her contributions to the Florida Federal Writers’ Project. Tell My Horse and Moses are beginning to be reappraised for their innovative exploration of themes of diasporic significance, such as African “survivals,” syncretism, national liberation, and postcolonial reconstruction. Above all, perhaps, there is a growing recognition that previous attempts to recruit Hurston to prevailing orthodoxies www.abc-clio.com

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has failed to take account of her anarchic humor, radical individualism, and delight in provocation. Alasdair Pettinger See also: Folklore, African; Harlem Renaissance; Morrison, Toni; Walker, Alice; Wright, Richard; Voodoo References Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003. Gates Jr., Henry Louis, and K. A. Appiah, eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Meisenhelder, Susan Edwards. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Plant, Deborah. Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

HUTU The Hutu are the most populous ethnic group in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, including the current nations of Burundi, Rwanda, and eastern Zaire. They settled in the region about 2,000 years ago, dominating the indigenous Twa, a people related to the pygmies. The Hutu gradually cleared the forested hills and established agricultural communities. The major social unit in Hutu society was the clan, and at the height of Hutu power in the first half of the second millennium, the clans united under petty kings known as bahinza. In the sixteenth century, the Tutsi, a people culturally and linguistically related to the Hutu, migrated from Ethiopia into central Africa and soon achieved hegemony

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over the more numerous but very loosely unified Hutu. A more physically imposing people (on average about four inches taller than the Hutu, who average five feet five inches in height), the Tutsi were favored by the Belgian colonial regime. At the time of independence, the Hutu constituted about 85 percent of the population of Burundi and almost 90 percent of the population of Rwanda, and yet in both new nations the Tutsi were politically and militarily dominant. In the late 1950s, the early 1970s, and the mid-1990s, the tensions between the Hutu and the Tutsi erupted into terrible violence, taking tens of thousands of lives in each instance. In the mid-1990s, the Hutu prosecuted an especially vicious genocide against the Tutsi and against fellow Hutu whose loyalties had fallen into question. The world community was appalled by the carnage but very slow to intervene. In particular, the United States, which had recently intervened to stop the Serbian genocide against Bosnian Muslims, was criticized for intervening in Europe but failing to do so in Africa. By the time that the Tutsi were able to reassert military control, the level of brutality and the body count approached what the Khmer Rouge had inflicted on their countrymen during their reign of terror in Cambodia. In the end, because of their excesses, the Hutu lost most of the international support for their efforts to achieve selfdetermination. War-crimes trials have been initiated against the perpetrators of the worst acts of violence during the genocide, and large numbers of Hutu have been

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forced into a harrowing existence in improvised refugee camps in neighboring Zaire and Tanzania. Martin Kich

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References Berry, John A., and Carol Pott Berry, eds. Genocide in Rwanda: A Collective Memory. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1999. Fisanick, Christina, ed. The Rwanda Genocide. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2004. Jennings, Christian. Across the Red River: Rwanda, Burundi, and the Heart of Darkness. London: V. Gollancz, 2000. Khan, Shaharyar M. The Shallow Graves of Rwanda. New York: I. B. Tauris/ St. Martins, 2000. Kuperman, Alan J. The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute P, 2001. Malkki, Liisa H. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Melvern, Linda. Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide. New York: Verso, 2004. Ndarubagiye, Leonce. Burundi: The Origins of the Hutu-Tutsi Conflict. Nairobi, Kenya: L. Ndarubagiye, 1996. Prunier, Gerard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Twagilimana, Aimable. The Debris of Ham: Ethnicity, Regionalism, and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003. Twagilimana, Aimable. Hutu and Tutsi. New York: Rosen, 1998. Weinstein, Warren, and Robert Schrire. Political Conflict and Ethnic Strategies: A Case Study of Burundi. Syracuse, NY: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1976.

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I IGBO Igbo, which earlier colonial and diasporic discourse inaccurately writes as “Ibo,” “Iboh,” “Ebo,” “Eboe,” and “Eboh,” defines an ethnic people of Nigeria, a person of Igbo descent, as well as the language of the people. The word is both singular and plural, with a collective variant, “Ndigbo,” which refers to the global nation as a whole. The Igbo are a nation of forty-five million people whose traditional homeland is located in southeastern Nigeria, on the West African Bight of Biafra off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. One creation myth asserts the heavenly descent of the Igbo progenitor, Eri, at the present Nri site. Modern historians, however, trace centuries of migratory patterns between Igbo ozo (sacred courts) and Igbo abamaba (secret cults) that, in one instance, began with the Hebraic dispersal from Israel, through Egypt and Sudan across northern Nigeria to Nri. The oldest kingdom in Nigeria, Nri is “the heart of Igbo nationality.” The eze-nri (priest-king) is a spiritual head and potentate. Igbo distinctions in ritual, leadership, commerce, scholarship, scientific advancement, and adventure are traceable to the unifying forces of the priestly northern Igbo Nri hegemony and the fraternal southern Igbo ekpe and okonko.

In the colonial era, the Igbo were the biggest exporters of palm oil in the world. In the modern era, an abundance of oil in southern Igbo land has made Nigeria the fifth biggest exporter of petroleum in the world. Ninth-century Igbo-Ukwu bronze casting and the Nsibidi script laid the foundations for the high culture of bronze technology and the writing alphabet in West Africa. American-trained Igbo Nnamdi Azikiwe (also known as Zik Azikiwe) led the expulsion of British colonialism in Nigeria and became the country’s first president and coined an African nationalism specific to Nigeria that was known as “Zikism.” The Zikist global African decolonization project and the trans-African journalism of Zik’s African Morning Post and West African Pilot aided the Pan-Africanist vision of Kwame N’krumah and Nelson Mandela. Nigeria’s genocide against the Igbo and General Ojukwu’s Biafran War (1966–1970) are landmarks of the Igbo’s continuing struggle for universal black emancipation. The postcolonial signification of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) exemplifies Igbo cultural interventionism in contemporary black experience. Igbo emergence as a “global tribe” began with the Middle Passage. As a densely

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598 IKE,VINCENT CHUKWUEMEKA Coleman, Joseph S. “The Narrative of Archibald Monteith, a Jamaican Slave.” Callaloo 13 (1990): 115–130. Coleman, Joseph S. Nigeria: Background to Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Dike, Kenneth and Ekejiuba, Felicia. The Aro of South-Eastern Nigeria, 1650–1980. Ibadan, Nigeria: University Press, 1990. Echeruo, Michael J. C. Igbo-English Dictionary: A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Igbo Language. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Stories. Edited by and introduction by Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin, 1996. Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of the Igbo People. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. Iwuanyanwu, Obi (Obiwu). “Salute to a Master Wordsmith: Tribute to Michael J. C. Echeruo.” This Day Arts & Review 8, no. 2552 (March 18, 2002): 51. Kotkin, Joel. Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy. New York: Random House, 1992. Lugard, Lord. Foreword to Leith-Ross, Sylvia. African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria. 1939. Reprint, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. New York: Picador, 2000. Onwuejeogwu, M. Angulu. An Igbo Civilization: Nri Kingdom and Hegemony. London: Ethnographica, 1981. Onyeso, Obidiegwu. “1005th Igu-Aro Ndi-Igbo: 2004 AD,” February 21, 2004. http:// essays.igbonet.com/EzeNriNriEnwelanaIIO bidiegwuOnyeso/1005thIguAroNdIgbo/. Powell, Timothy B. “Ebos Landing.” The New Georgia Encyclopedia. Athens: Georgia Humanities Council, 2004. Shaw, Thurston. Igbo-Ukwu: An Account of Archeological Discoveries in Eastern Nigeria. Vol. 1. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

populated ethnic group with the highest birthrate in Africa, Igbo were the worst hit by the transatlantic slave trade. Igbo slave revolts were historic in Belize, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and much of the West Indies. In the United States, Igbo slaves generated legendary controversies with the 1732 poisoning death of President James Madison’s grandfather, Ambrose Madison, at his Montpelier slave plantation in Virginia, and the 1803 drowning of ten of them at Igbo Landing on St. Simons Island, Georgia, after their revolt on a slave ship drowned three white overseers. The legends of such Igbo slaves and descendants of Igbo slaves as Edward Blyden, Olaudah Equiano, Frantz Fanon, James Horton, Ja Ja of Opobo, Toussaint Loverture, Archibald “Aneaso” Monteath, and Booker T. Washington demonstrate the story of the black Diaspora as the story of the rise of global Igbo civilization. Ianyanwu Obiwu See also: Achebe, Chinua; Biafra; Blyden, Edward Wilmot; Equiano, Olaudah; Fanon, Frantz; Louverture, Toussaint Bréda; Nigeria; Oil; Palm Oil; Washington, Booker T. References Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. 1958. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Afigbo, Adiele E. The Igbo and Their Neighbors: Inter-Group Relations in Southeastern Nigeria to 1953. Ibadan, Nigeria: University Press, 1987. Azikiwe, Nnamdi. My Odyssey: An Autobiography. Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum, 1970. Basden, George Thomas. Foreword to Niger Ibos, A Description of the Primitive Life, Customs and Animistic Beliefs, &c., of the Ibo People. London: Seeley, Service, 1938. Berlin, Jaqueline. “Researcher Has New Version of Legend.” The Brunswick News, August 18, 2003. http://www.igbo.biz/igbo/index .html (accessed November 1, 2007). Chambers, Douglass B. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

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IKE,VINCENT CHUKWUEMEKA (1931–) Born in 1931 in Ndikelionwu, in Awka, Anambra State, eastern Nigeria, Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike is a prominent novelist

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and administrator who has contributed significantly to the progress of Nigerian and West African education. He is representative of a whole generation of Nigerians who trained at elite secondary schools, the University of Ibadan, and abroad, and then pursued prestigious careers. Ike attended the Government College, Umuahia, before studying at the University of Ibadan, graduating in 1955. Two years at Stanford University in the United States brought him into close contact with the American education sector. On his return to Nigeria, he became assistant registrar of the University of Ibadan in 1957, and then registrar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) in 1963. UNN, founded in 1960 with the help of Michigan State University, was the first indigenous university and the first U.S. land-grant type university in Africa. The Nsukka course structure, entirely American, was very different from the British colonial higher education system, and a number of black Americans were on the staff. For Nigerians at home, this was the first real contact with African Americans and Black Nationalism. After the civil war in 1970, UNN reopened and Ike led its restoration. He next served as registrar of the West African Examinations Council before becoming pro-chancellor of the University of Benin in 1980. In 1983–1985, he was visiting professor of English and writer-in-residence at the University of Jos. Ike’s interest in education and his desire to encourage local publishing led him to found the Nigerian Book Foundation in 1991. He is best known for his novels, especially Toads for Supper (1965), The Naked Gods (1970), The Potter’s Wheel (1974), Sunset at Dawn (1976), Expo 77 and The Chicken Chasers (1980), and The Bottled Leopard and The Search (1991). The novels www.abc-clio.com

are inspired by Ike’s personal experience of the social and political development of Nigeria; they combine a satire of public institutions and an appreciation of traditional values and oral literature. Several have been on school programs for decades and some have been translated into foreign languages. Ike’s only U.S.-set novel, To My Husband from Iowa (1996), is the fictional account of the writer’s experience at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, a residency program founded in 1967 that brings together established writers from all over the world. The Nigerian female protagonist narrates her experience, ranging from casual observations to a reflection on the American way of life, to show how developing countries can emulate Western values while keeping their own traditions. Writing in English, Ike has attracted a vast readership abroad, but he also translated one of his novels, The Potter’s Wheel, into Igbo. Ike is an Honorary Fellow in Writing, University of Iowa: an Honorary Fellow, City and Guild of London Institute; and UNN made him a Doctor of Letters. In 2001, he got an award from the National Council for Arts and Culture (NCAC) in Abuja for his leading role in the cultural sector. Francoise Parent Ugochukwu See also: Nigeria Reference Ugbabe, Kanchana, ed. Chukwuemeka Ike, A Critical Reader. Lagos, Nigeria: Malthouse, 2001.

IMBUGA, FRANCIS D. (1947–) Francis D. Imbuga, a Kenyan dramatist, poet, novelist, and actor, has been a leading postcolonial writer throughout the late

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twentieth century and early twenty-first century. Imbuga’s works, which deal with contemporary Kenyan politics and social problems, have gained world renown for their salient criticisms of postcolonial African elites as well as traditional African values. His work explores the combinations between traditional African lifestyles and Western values that were imported during colonialism. He has studied, written, and influenced writers in Africa and America immensely. Imbuga was born on February 2, 1947, in Wenyange Village in the western part of Kenya. His experiences as a youth with Kenyan culture and life helped to form his disdain for city elites who were seemingly out of touch with traditional Kenyan culture and values. Imbuga gained distinction as a writer and actor early on in his life. As a high school student in 1969, he was a finalist in the Kenya National School’s Drama Festival. From this platform of success Imbuga became a writer and actor for the Voice of Kenya television series from 1970 to 1973. As he wrote and acted on television, Imbuga gained his BA in education (1973) and later his MA in drama (1975) at the University of Nairobi. Imbuga’s professional experience as a writer helped him gain a lectureship at the University of Nairobi in 1976 and later at Kenyatta University. In 1988 Imbuga moved to the United States to pursue his PhD in literature at the University of Iowa, which he completed in 1991. Imbuga’s important plays include The Burning of Rags (1989), Aminata (1988), Man of Kafira (1984), The Successor (1979), Betrayal in the City (1976), The Married Bachelor (1973), and The Forth Trial (1972). His plays with the most interest to African and North American scholars and readers are www.abc-clio.com

Aminata and Betrayal in the City. Betrayal in the City is Imbuga’s most famous and most controversial play. The play takes place in Kafira, a fictional postcolonial country situated in Africa, and it highlights the corruption of elites in the city who are not responsible to the citizens of the country. Originally the play was used in public schools across Kenya, but it was later banned because it was too subversive and education officials worried that it might inculcate a hatred of the Kenyan political elites. Aminata is Imbuga’s attempt to call attention to the oftenrepressed role of women in African society. The play features a woman lawyer who is eminent in her field but is not allowed to inherit her father’s lands because she is a woman. Imbuga is one of many prominent Kenyan writers who have made a profound impact upon postcolonial literature. His examination of the intersection of Kenyan and Western cultures has helped to reconceive what it means to be “Kenyan.” There are numerous scholarly books and articles written about Imbuga in Africa and America. Imbuga’s importance continues to grow as African studies grow at North America universities. Brett Bennett

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See also: African Literature; Kenya References Imbuga, Francis D. The Forth Trial. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1972. Imbuga, Francis D. The Married Bachelor. Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House, 1973. Imbuga, Francis D. Betrayal in the City. Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House, 1976. Imbuga, Francis D. The Successor. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1979. Imbuga, Francis D. Man of Kafira. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1984. Imbuga, Francis D. Aminata. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1988. Imbuga, Francis D. The Burning of Rags. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1989.

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IMMIGRATION, UNITED STATES Free people of African descent have been migrating to lands now part of or associated with the United States for five centuries—directly from Africa, from the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the Americas, and in lesser numbers from elsewhere in the world. The numbers who have migrated, their reasons for migrating, and how they have migrated have varied widely. Prospective immigrants have decided to migrate, not to migrate, and how to migrate based upon such things as their prior knowledge of the United States; its indigenous or colonial predecessors; political, economic, and other conditions where they were living before; their understandings of the experiences of relatives, friends, or others who previously migrated; the encouragement or discouragement of relatives, friends, or others; their own prior exposure to U.S. citizens and residents; restrictions on immigration and naturalization; the availability and cost of transportation; the available means of transportation; their economic situations; and myriad other individual and family factors. Immigration of people of African descent to the United States has been increasing. More blacks have migrated to the United States since 1945 than were ever brought into the United States and its predecessor colonies as slaves.

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and the crews of Columbus’s ships are known to have included free blacks when he and they explored the island then called Boriquen (now Puerto Rico) in 1493. Vincent Yanez Pinzon’s crew likewise included blacks when their ship was blown off course by a Caribbean storm and landed on Boriquen in 1500. They had been attempting to return to their base on Hispanola (Haiti) after becoming the first people of the Eastern Hemisphere to discover the mouth of the Maranon (Amazon) and South America’s northern coast. When Juan Ponce de Leon led voyages from Hispanola to explore and then colonize Boriquen (which he renamed) in 1508 and 1509, those accompanying him included Juan Garrido, an aristocratic black who had migrated to Lisbon from his West African birthplace. Garrido went with Ponce on another voyage in 1513, during which they and the others in their party made the first reported European discovery of Florida, and again in 1521 when Ponce made a fatal—for him—attempt to colonize Florida. In those years, the only restriction on migration to Puerto Rico and Florida was a practical one: whether the indigenous residents were able to fight off prospective colonists. The native residents of Puerto Rico were not, and an all-male Spanish colony, including Garrido, was established there in 1509. The native residents of Florida were able to fight, so Ponce and his Florida colonizing party retreated to Havana, where Ponce died in July 1521 of an arrow wound. Garrido was more seaman and soldier than colonist. After retreating from Florida with the wounded Ponce, he quickly joined Hernando Cortes in Mexico in time to participate in the siege and conquest of Tenochtitlan in August 1521, if his

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subsequent application for a Spanish pension is believed. Others of African origin who soon reached areas now part of the United States included a black West African ship captain, more recently from Portugal, whose Spanish-flagged ship and crew explored the area of present-day New York harbor in 1526, and a black Moor of North African origin who unexpectedly landed with his surviving crewmates on the Texas coast in 1528, after their ship was blown off course by a storm over the Gulf of Mexico. In the colonial period, more free people of African origin immigrated once permanent colonization of the lands now constituting the continental United States began. Some came as already free people. Others came of their own choice as indentured servants, becoming free after completing agreed-upon periods of service. Some were slaves who received their freedom upon arriving. The ethnic origins of the soldiers and settlers who established Spain’s colonies in Florida in the 1560s, New Mexico in the 1590s, Texas in the 1710s, and California in the 1760s and 1770s are unclear. What is known, however, is that Florida’s settlers came from areas of Spain with meaningful percentages of mulattos and blacks, and that a Spanish viceroy warned a leader of the Florida colonization effort to be careful of the “half-breeds” and “mulattos” in his midst. Also known is that colonial New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California were largely populated by a combination of mixed bloods, blacks, and indigenous converts to Catholicism—with mulattos identifying themselves as mixed bloods. Few colonists identified themselves as espanols. The policies of Spain toward further immigration to its colonies varied. Within www.abc-clio.com

two weeks of stepping ashore to take possession of Florida and found St. Augustine, Spain’s adelantado, or governor and military leader, led an attack on the residents of a nearby French Huguenot settlement established the year before, slaughtering as many as 300 of the “evil Lutherans.” On the other hand, Spain later offered freedom to any escaped slaves migrating to Florida from England’s colonies to the north, if they were willing to become Catholics. Spain’s North American colonies to the west were isolated, and so lightly populated (except for New Mexico where there were approximately 25,000 settlers by 1780), that immigration to them as such was not a significant issue. Spain’s major concern was with preserving its monopoly on trade with its colonies. To that end, it attempted to keep non-Spanish traders away from them. At times, at the request of the church fathers who were usually a part (if not the leaders) of its colonization efforts, it also made efforts, typically unsuccessful in the end, at religious-based exclusions of non-Catholics. Spanish New Orleans, ceded to Spain by France in 1763, had a free black population of only 99 in 1769. One free black who passed through New Orleans in the 1760s was Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable. He then went north, established his home and a trading post on the western shore of Lake Michigan, and is now viewed as the founder of Chicago. In comparison, there were no legal restrictions on migration into England’s North American colonies until 1763. Immigration was generally encouraged by colonial legislatures and governors and the English and British crowns, sometimes with economic inducements. Occasional efforts by colonial legislatures to limit immigration in times of economic or

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cultural stress, primarily directed against Scotch-Irish, Germans, and Catholics, were vetoed by royal governors. Restrictions on immigration to the colonies enacted by the British Parliament in 1763 responded to concerns over the defensibility of new settlements on the colonies’ western frontier. Parliament eventually banned all immigration to the colonies, as strains between Britain and the colonies mounted, but not until 1774. Small communities of free blacks, including immigrants, gradually developed in the English and British colonies’ eastern seaports during the colonial period. By 1790, the free black population of the new United States was 59,511, with 27,054 free blacks in the North (from Pennsylvania north), 30,258 in the Chesapeake and Upper South (Maryland and Delaware to North Carolina), and 2,199 in the Lower South (South Carolina and Georgia). The largest numbers were 12,866 in Virginia, 8,043 in Maryland, and 6,537 in Pennsylvania. Those numbers included manumitted slaves as well as blacks who were free when they migrated.

1776–1870 The United States removed all restrictions on the immigration of free people to places within its territorial jurisdiction upon becoming an independent nation. However, the numbers of free blacks migrating to the United States before the Civil War was relatively small, except for two surges in the 1790s and 1808–1810. Pre–Civil War U.S. Congresses chose not to regulate the immigration of free people, notwithstanding anti-immigration sentiments vigorously asserted by some political groups and economic interests from time to time. www.abc-clio.com

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The only pre–Civil War restrictions on U.S. immigration, enacted in the first decade of the 1800s, did not affect free blacks. They merely prohibited the importing of slaves. Importing of slaves into some states became illegal under U.S. federal law effective April 1, 1804, specifically, into those states which had already prohibited the importing of slaves on their own. Some states had enacted such prohibitions even before independence was declared. Effective January 1, 1808, ship owners and others transporting people into the rest of the United States were similarly limited to bringing in only free people. However, the very first U.S. Congress, in its act of March 26, 1790, did prevent free black immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens by limiting naturalization of new immigrants to “free white people.” Later on, some states attempted their own form of regulating immigration, but in response to an influx of impoverished Irish fleeing the potato famine, not blacks. Those efforts were challenged in the courts and failed. In The Passenger Cases (1849), a 5–4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court held that Massachusetts and New York laws placing a per person tax on foreign passengers arriving in those states by ship improperly usurped the congressional power over foreign commerce. The Supreme Court majority’s opinion observed that if such a tax were allowed without federal permission, states could prohibit ships from bringing foreign passengers into the United States altogether—a result it thought inconceivable. Proslavery Chief Justice Taney wrote the dissent. Despite the “free white” restriction on U.S. citizenship, the number of free black immigrants coming into the United States increased in the 1790s. The increase was

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largely because of slave uprisings in the then-French colony of Saint Dominique (Haiti). The refugees migrating to the United States from Saint Dominique included white slave owners and free gens de couleur (men of color) and their slaves. They largely settled in Atlantic seaport towns, including Norfolk, Charleston, and Philadelphia. Approximately 500 of the Saint Dominique refugees in Philadelphia were gens de couleur. But although blacks were hardly a new phenomenon there, and Philadelphia already had an elite African American community, the new gens de couleur received little sympathy or assistance. Free black émigré men became impoverished, and free black émigré women notably became paid companions of male Americans and male refugees from France’s own revolution—including the malleable French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand during his 1794–1796 U.S. exile—as well as male white immigrants from Saint Dominique. The later years of the next decade saw a second surge of immigrants from Saint Dominique, this time largely into the Gulf ports of Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans. These francophone refugees had first gone to Cuba in the 1790s and early 1800s, only to been expelled in 1808 after war broke out between France and Spain when they refused to swear their allegiance to Spain’s temporarily deposed Ferdinand VII. Napoleon had replaced Ferdinand VII on the Spanish throne with his brother Josef Bonaparte. Some 3,102 Saint Dominique gens de couleur arrived in New Orleans from Cuba in 1809 alone. As a result, the 1810 U.S. census showed 29 percent of New Orleans’s population as being free persons of color. www.abc-clio.com

The gens de couleur and other Saint Dominique refugees played major parts in defeating the British in the Battle of New Orleans. The Second Battalion of Free Men of Color was almost entirely made up of free black Saint Dominique refugees. Overall, over 600 of the approximately 3,000 U.S. soldiers who opposed the British were free blacks. The white refugees who played important roles in New Orleans’s defense after being driven from Saint Dominique included the Lafittes and other privateers who provided gunners and soldiers. Other white refugees made up a significant percentage of the Battalion of Orleans. Just before the Civil War started, a migration of African-Portuguese Cape Verde islanders to the United States began. The U.S. Navy’s African Squadron had been based in the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa’s coast, from 1843 until 1859. New England whaling ships frequented them too, and whaling captains soon began to recruit the islanders as seamen. Some of the recruited seamen then decided to migrate to the United States, with the first arriving in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1860.

1870–1921 The U.S. Congress became more active on questions of immigration and naturalization after the Civil War, enacting qualitative restrictions and some racial restrictions (but not of African-origin blacks), for the first time. During those same years, the number of immigrants to the United States, both white and black, significantly increased. Congress began by passing the Nationality Act of 1870, which added “persons of African nativity and African descent” to those eligible for U.S. citizenship. U.S. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a

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radical Republican, introduced bills proposing to simply delete the words “free white” from U.S. naturalization law in 1868, 1869, and 1870. Sumner’s bills failed, but a compromise amendment proposed in 1870 by radical Republican Senator Willard Warner of Alabama, an Ohio-born former Union Army general, was enacted. Five years later, in 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, the first federal restriction on immigration since importing slaves was prohibited in 1804 and 1808. The Page Act outlawed both the importing of women for purposes of prostitution and the immigration of persons convicted abroad for nonpolitical felonies. That same year, federal supremacy over immigration matters was reconfirmed by the Supreme Court, this time unanimously, in Henderson v. Mayor of New York. New York’s legislature had responded to the Court’s decision in The Passenger Cases by amending its state law to require either the posting of a per person bond on all foreigners arriving as ship passengers, or payment of the same per person tax on arriving foreign passengers already disallowed in The Passenger Cases. The Court’s decision in Henderson struck down the amended law as still impinging on Congress’s power over foreign commerce, along with a similar Louisiana law. Later in 1875, in Chy Lung v. Freeman, the Supreme Court struck down a California law requiring bonds for some but not all arriving foreign passengers—allegedly lewd and debauched women—as another state usurpation of Congress’s foreign commerce power. Congress enacted another federal immigration law in 1882. This time it barred from immigration “lunatics,” “idiots,” and “any person unable to take care of himself www.abc-clio.com

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or herself without becoming a public charge.” It also placed a new federal per person tax on arriving foreign ship passengers. In The Head Money Cases of 1884, the Supreme Court upheld that tax as a proper exercise of constitutional power to regulate foreign commerce, because it had been enacted by the body with that power—the federal Congress. The 1882 law was amended over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto in 1917. One amendment added a new exclusion from eligibility for immigration of those over sixteen who could not read English or another language. The 1917 amendments also incorporated a number of other exclusions which had previously been added to U.S. immigration law by other statutes enacted after 1882. They had included epileptics, alcoholics, sufferers from tuberculosis or other “loathsome diseases,” polygamists, anarchists, and those advocating violent overthrow of the U.S. government as among those ineligible for immigration. The 1917 immigration law was the first to recognize refugees as entitled to special consideration. It waived the new literacy requirement for those able to show that they were “seeking admission to the United States to avoid religious persecution.” A number of laws passed between 1882 and 1917 included racial restrictions on immigration too. But the racial restrictions had little effect on the immigration of blacks because they applied only to immigrants from China, some other areas of Asia, and some Pacific islands. The reported foreign-born black population of the United States increased from approximately 10,000 in 1870 to 54,737 in 1900. It is estimated that about 200,000 blacks migrated to the United States between 1865 and 1930, most before 1921.

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Approximately 35,000 of the new black immigrants came from the Cape Verde Islands, the largest number between 1900 and the 1920s. Most were men who worked in maritime-related trades and fishing and as unskilled factory laborers and crop pickers in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. There they created their own social institutions after finding themselves unwanted in local Portuguese and Madeiran society. Most other black immigrants between 1865 and 1930 came from the Caribbean. Many of the first were Cubans, who came to cities on the Gulf and East Coast in the decades before the Spanish-American War of 1898, where their activities included agitating for Cuban independence and the abolition of Cuban slavery. Darker-skinned Cubans tended to settle in and around Florida. Some black Dominicans came to the United States too, primarily to New York City. Other Caribbean blacks came after 1900, either directly or after working in the Canal Zone or Central America. Many financed their migrations with their earnings as laborers on the Panama Canal. The largest numbers came from the British colonies of Jamaica and Barbados, where there was little industry or available land. Other islanders had the same concern. One-fifth of the population of the Bahamas migrated to Florida between 1900 and 1920.

1921–Present U.S. immigration law radically changed in 1921 when Congress passed the so-called Quota Act. In place of open immigration with limited exclusions, Congress created numerical caps on immigration. Altered www.abc-clio.com

versions of those caps remain in place today. The Quota Act further recognized, for the first time, the importance of family unification, which remains a fundamental principle of U.S. immigration law. The caps created by the Quota Act of 1921 temporarily limited, with certain exceptions, the number of people from outside of the Western Hemisphere “who may be admitted . . . to the United States in any fiscal year . . . to 3 percentum of the number of foreign-born persons of [their] nationality resident in the United States as determined by the United States census of 1910.” There was no cap, however, placed on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. Others excepted from the Quota Act included the minor children of U.S. citizens, who were likewise allowed to migrate to the United States in unlimited numbers. The Immigration Act of 1924 kept the temporary caps and made them permanent, but reduced the percentage of each nationality’s annual immigration quota to 2 percent, changed the determining census date to 1890 (when there were fewer resident immigrants), and, most importantly for black migration, cut back the Western Hemisphere exemption by limiting it to persons born in independent nations, Canada, Newfoundland, or the Canal Zone. From then on, until Europe’s colonies in the Caribbean and Central and South America became independent, natives of those colonies could only migrate to the United States under the quotas for their parent countries. Other parts of the 1924 law set preferences for the distribution of each nationality’s quota and required prospective immigrants to obtain quota visas at U.S.

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consulates abroad before coming to the United States. Prospective immigrants could no longer simply arrive in the United States and present themselves to immigration authorities. Recognizing the principle of family unification, the 1924 law made some family members of U.S. citizens exempt from the quota system altogether, and thus still able to enter in unlimited numbers. As for other family members, the 1924 law made 50 percent of each nationality’s visa quota first available to the foreign husbands of U.S. citizens and the foreign parents of adult U.S. citizens. Within that 50 percent, foreign husbands and parents skilled in agriculture, and their wives and non-adult children, were given preference. The other 50 percent of each nationality’s quota, and unused portions of the husbands’ and parents’ 50 percent, was first made available to certain family members of legal immigrants already in the United States, their minor children, and their wives. Under the 1924 law, the total number of Eastern Hemisphere–born and colonial Western Hemisphere–born people who could obtain quota visas was 164,667 per year. The annual quota for African-born nationals, reflecting the comparatively small numbers of African-born U.S. residents in 1890, was 1,200 per year. The overall total of quota visas was reduced to 150,000 in 1929, with each foreign nation’s quota being adjusted to reflect the number of inhabitants of the continental United States attributable to that nation by “birth or ancestry” as of 1920. U.S. immigrants from the Americas, their descendants, and “slave immigrants” were excluded when those computations were made. www.abc-clio.com

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Since 1929, the history of U.S. immigration policy has been one of adjusting caps and quotas and adding to the classes of prospective immigrants who can enter the United States outside of caps or quotas. Displaced persons acts enacted in 1948 and 1950 enabled more than 400,000 immigrants to come to the United States after World War II. Then in 1953, at President Dwight Eisenhower’s urging, Congress enacted the United States’ first Refugee Relief Act, which allowed 214,000 refugees and escapees from communist countries to immigrate. Following that precedent, subsequent refugee, escapee, and asylum acts have allowed political and religious immigration outside of regular caps or quotas from every continent except Australia—including refugees from the Congo, Ethiopia, Egypt, Kenya, Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, Cuba, and Haiti. Similar acts have modified the requirements for refugees seeking citizenship. The Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act of 1998, for example, allowed some escapees from Haiti to apply for permanent U.S. residence and eventual U.S. citizenship without first obtaining a visa at a U.S. consulate. In 1952, U.S. naturalization law significantly changed when the McCarran-Walter Act (Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952) removed the remaining racial restrictions on U.S. citizenship. The McCarranWalter Act also simplified the implementation of the family reunification principle by simply allowing all spouses of U.S. citizens—irrespective of gender or race— and all minor children of U.S. citizens to immigrate without regard for caps and quotas. Preferences for quota visas were revised in light of the elimination of any need for a

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preference for spouses and children. Highly skilled immigrants with urgently needed skills, and their families, were given first preference instead. One part of the 1952 law had particular temporary significance for black immigration from the Caribbean. Although the annual worldwide cap on quota immigrants was slightly increased above 150,000, quotas for European colonies were capped at 100 immigrants per colony per year. The result was decreased migration into the United States from Jamaica and Barbados and increased immigration into England, until Jamaica became independent in 1962 and Barbados became independent in 1966. Congress scrapped the national immigration caps on annual immigration in 1965, replacing them with hemispheric caps: 120,000 quota visas were made available for immigration from the Western Hemisphere, and 170,000 for immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere. The new caps did not apply to spouses, minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens. Some 17,400 preference visas were set aside for refugees from communist countries and the Middle East. The hemispheric caps were, in turn, replaced by a single global immigration cap of 290,000 in 1976. The Immigration Act of 1990, still in effect, revamped the overall system of quotas and of preferences within quotas. It created a flexible overall cap of 675,000 immigrants per year from everywhere beginning in 1995, to be allocated among three new classes of family-sponsored immigrants (480,000 per year), employment-based immigrants (140,000 per year), and diversity immigrants (55,000 per year). The exemption of spouses, minor children, and www.abc-clio.com

parents of U.S. citizens from caps and quotas remained. The available figures show that migration to the United States from Africa has been markedly increasing. After lulls during the Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War years, 39,300 Africans migrated to the United States in the 1960s, 91,500 in the 1970s, 192,300 in the 1980s, 338,100 in the 1990s, 44,731 in 2000, and 53,948 in 2001. Some 70 to 75 percent of the new African immigrants are estimated to have been black, with that percentage increasing. The sub-Saharan African population of the United States was estimated at more that 537,534 in 2000, 80 percent of it being foreign born. African immigrants have settled all across the United States, with notable concentrations in New York City and California. Prior to the 1970s, educated Africans had primarily migrated to Europe. That changed as Europe tightened its restrictions on immigration and restrictions on migration from Africa to the United States were reduced. The 1990 U.S. census showed African immigrants, without regard to race, as having the highest levels of education of foreign-born U.S. residents. Notwithstanding their diplomas and degrees, many African immigrants have taken nonprofessional jobs in the United States, especially upon their arrival. The largest numbers of sub-Saharan African immigrants have come from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, and since the 1990s, Somalia, reflecting the political, racial, ethnic, and religious turmoil of those countries. Africa has produced more refugees than any other continent since the early 1990s. Approximately 3,800 young male refugees, called the Lost Boys of Sudan,

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came to towns across the United States as refugees in 2000 and 2001. The Lost Boys had been driven from their homes and families by warfare in southern Sudan as young children and had wandered by themselves for months before reaching the safety of Kenyan refugee camps. Their lives after reaching the United States have been the subjects of newspaper articles, an essay on the Red Cross’s Web page, films, and at least one book. The available figures on migration from the Caribbean to the United States are similar. They show 519,500 Caribbean migrants coming to the United States in the 1960s, 759,800 in the 1970s, 892,700 in the 1980s, and around 1,200,000 in the 1990s. In the 1960s and 1970s, the largest number of Caribbean immigrants was from Cuba: 258,600 in the 1960s and 276,800 in the 1970s. The largest numbers in the 1980s were from the Dominican Republic (251,800), Jamaica (213,800), Cuba (159,200), and Haiti (140,200). The number of migrating Haitians rose during the 1990s to approximate the number of migrating Jamaicans. Studies of immigrant Dominicans have shown that their reasons for migrating to the United States are largely economic, although the number of Dominican migrants has briefly spiked after political turmoil. Dominicans in the United States have largely congregated in the New York City area. The numbers of immigrants coming from Jamaica and Haiti have roughly correlated with political and economic events in those countries. Jamaican immigrants have settled all along the East Coast of the United States, with some concentration in the New York area. Haitian immigrants www.abc-clio.com

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have typically stayed in and around Florida, but with a good number also coming to New York. The reasons for Cuban migration have been more complex. The migrations of Cubans in the 1960s certainly began with refugees from Fidel Castro’s rule, but many later immigrants seem to have come for mixed family, political, and economic reasons. Most Cuban immigrants have likewise stayed in and around Florida, especially in the Miami area where they have considerable political and economic power. A fair number are in the New York area too. Steven B. Jacobson References Bixler, Mark. The Lost Boys of Sudan: An American Story of the Refugee Experience. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Cordero-Guzman, Hector R., Robert C. Smith, and Ramon Grosfoguel, eds. Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001. Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. 2nd ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Diaz-Briquets, Sergio, and Sidney Weintraub, eds. Determinants of Emigration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. Dinnerstein, Leonard, and David M. Reimers. Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration. 4th ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Fitzpatrick, Joseph P. Puerto Rican Americans: The Meaning of Migration to the Mainland. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987. Foner, Nancy. In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Halter, Marilyn. Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1965. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Kasinitz, Philip. Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

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610 IMPERIAL GERMANY, BLACK ENTERTAINERS IN Laguerre, Michel S. American Odyssey: Haitians in New York City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Levine, Barry, ed. The Caribbean Exodus. New York: Praeger, 1987. Palmer, Ransford W. Pilgrims from the Sun: West Indian Migration to America. New York: Twayne, 1995. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

IMPERIAL GERMANY, BLACK ENTERTAINERS IN The presence of black entertainers in imperial Germany led to the transformation of art forms (composition and performance, music and vaudeville) through their contribution of black cultural forms. Not all blacks in Germany arrived from America. Germany had colonies in East, West, and Southwest Africa. Some individuals came from those lands to be trained as missionaries, others pursued a profession, others came to complete their education, while still others were exhibited as circus Africans until this was formally forbidden. Thus, blacks in Germany were not an uncommon sight. Of course, the average Germans’ perception of their colonies, and of the natives from the colonies, was guided by racist clichés. Discrimination was effective enough to bar blacks from most professions, except, like their brothers in the United States, music and vaudeville. Areas of folk and traditional music which did not find their way onto recordings have all but disappeared from history: those melodic lines which have been used in orchestral works, published in books, noted by instrumentalists, and described by folklorists lack the intensity of recordings. This effect is particularly dramatic when www.abc-clio.com

considering the innumerable dancers, singers, instrumentalists, comedians, and actors of African descent active in Europe prior to World War I. Negro spirituals, published in England from the 1870s, have the words, the melodic line, and piano accompaniment, but nothing of the qualities that live performance (captured on recordings) reveals. And since most of the early authors of scholarly books and discographies on blues and jazz were Europeans, whose only contact with the music was through recordings, the prehistory of jazz and blues has also tended to disappear from history. Even less well documented are aspects of the cross-cultural fertilization: German musicians playing for audiences— including black audiences—in the United States in the nineteenth century. Prior to the emergence of the Tin Pan Alley music business, musical life in the United States had for some 200 years been dominated by Europe. Apart from folklore there was little else but European—and for that matter much German—musical repertoire. In fact, Germany was the center of music, musical instruments, and music publishing from the last decades of the nineteenth century. Its tutors, instrumentalists, and publications were well known outside Germany. Ambitious musical people traveled to Germany for lessons and study, including African Americans such as Will Marion Cook, who was a pupil of famous violinist Joseph Joachim in Berlin in 1887–1889. The first American orchestra, black or white, to tour Europe left the United States as early as 1837. All the members of this brass band, led by Frank Johnson, were Afro-Americans. And, of course, this black band played an exclusively European repertoire. American novelty dance tunes, many

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of which had some African American background, did not appear in print until the last decade of the nineteenth century when they were made popular by the tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley. They had competition from Germany, as German musicians played to entertain American audiences. Vast parts of Germany were extremely poor. Apart from the option of military service, many became itinerant musicians, earning their living in England and the United States, as well as North Africa and the Far East. Stretches of Germany became known as the “musicians’ belt” (Musikantenland ). Musicians from the very remote rural hinterland were exposed to Africans and African music. During their travels in the United States, they by no means catered exclusively to white audiences, as evidenced by surviving photographs. As professional musicians these German artists had to be able to play the entire repertoire by sight, and that repertoire had to include ragtime, cakewalks, two-steps, and any other fashionable American dance tune of Afro-American influence. And there is proof of this, as some of the local museums keep the original collections of notated music (Stimmbücher). In the Black Forest and other poor neighborhoods, German musicians spent the winter manufacturing mechanical musical instruments for export. People who had not even heard of St. Louis or Sedalia produced authentic cakewalk and ragtime music for piano rolls and metal disc Symphonions. Although some textbooks say that the “March King” John Philip Sousa introduced the cakewalk in Europe, the claim is not supported by factual evidence. On the contrary, Sousa had an apparent aversion to African American influences in music. Long before Sousa came to Europe, www.abc-clio.com

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Afro-Americans had come with their banjos. Afro-American song and dance entertainers performed buck, sand, and tap dances, as well as cakewalks, for entirely white audiences. The institutionalization of discrimination following the abolition of slavery in the United States illuminates the socioeconomic motives for Afro-Americans to visit Europe, as does the establishment of the Ku Klux Klan only two years after the end of slavery. Discrimination reached such levels that this period is remembered as the “Terrible Nineties.” Lynchings were announced in newspapers, as if people were being invited to attend a picnic or some other form of entertainment. At the same time, there was a strange parallel development occurring in the music world: while poor German musicians migrated to the United States, poor Afro-American musicians and song and dance artists migrated to Germany. In one year alone, 1896, more than one hundred Afro-American individuals can be identified in the major magazine devoted to German traveling musicians and entertainers, underscoring their national presence and influence on German culture. And this number could be only a small percentage of the actual number touring. Some blacks arrived as members of large troupes, such as William Foote’s African Character Concert Company, which set foot on German soil at Hamburg in 1891. When the troupe broke up, many of the members remained in Europe and can be traced all over Europe, from Madrid to Nischny Nowgorod. In Europe, too, people of African descent were often disregarded and despised as a racial minority—but nowhere as seriously as in the United States. Many racially mixed acts traveled as “black and white”

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performers. Quite a few African Americans married German women and appeared on stage as racially mixed duets. This integration would have been virtually impossible in the United States. As late as the mid1930s, John Hammond (a white man) created a sensation when he organized his first Carnegie Hall concert featuring black and white performers on the same stage. Dixy Davis and husband Richard Davis, like innumerable others, presented their performances thirty to forty years before the Carnegie Hall event. Some performances by black visitors to Germany were captured on film. There is a Pathé film showing unidentified black and white performers doing the cakewalk on stage. Other Afro-American performers recorded cylinders and disc records during their stay in Europe. Besides Pete Hampton and Arabella Fields, other pre–World War I recording artists include the Four Black Diamonds, the Darktown Entertainers, mandolinist Seth Weeks, the Four Black Troubadours (also known as the Colored Meisters), and the London-based banjoplaying Afro-Canadian Bohee Brothers, James and George. Hampton and his fellow artists stand in for the hundreds who unfortunately left no trace on film or disc. Perhaps the most important of these is the husband and wife team of Charles Johnson and Dora Dean. The couple is said to have introduced the cakewalk at New York’s old Madison Square Garden in 1895. They are also said to have been the first dance team, black or white, to wear evening clothes on the stage (1901, at Hammerstein’s Roof Garden). Despite their success in the United States, they made Europe their permanent home and only returned to the United States when World War I broke out in 1914, www.abc-clio.com

forcing them to disband their Ragtime Sextette (which also included the dance team of Rufus Greenlee and Thaddeus Drayton, pianist Louis “Kid” Coles, and drummer Peggie Holland). Long before Josephine Baker reached European shores the impeccably dressed and beautiful Dora Dean was a society event in Europe and the Germans looked forward to her annual appearances at the prestigious Berlin Wintergarten. In the field of music and vaudeville, Europeans, including the Germans, truly admired their visitors, and contemporary reviews make it clear that audiences perceived that what they were being offered was not only professional but distinctive. Rainer E. Lotz

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References Abbott, Lynn, and Doug Seroff. Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music 1889–1895. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Dixon, Robert M. W., John Godrich, and Howard Rye. Blues & Gospel Records 1890–1943. 4th ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Green, Jeffrey. Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain 1901–1914. London: Frank Cass, 1998. Hoffmann, Bernd. Die Rezeption AfroAmerikanischer Musik in deutschsprachigen Musik- und Rundfunkzeitschriften 1900–1945. Cologne, Germany: Typescript, 1989. Lotz, Rainer E. Black People. Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany. Bonn, Germany: Birgit Lotz, 1997. Lotz, Rainer E. The Pre-History/Heisse Tanzmusik in Deutschland—Ein Fotoalbum. Band 1: Die Vorgeschichte. Vol. 1 of Hot Dance Bands in Germany: A Photo Album. Menden, Germany: Jazzfreund Publikation, 1986. Lotz, Rainer E. The Sound Documents. Vol. 1 of German Ragtime & Prehistory of Jazz. Chigwell, Essex, UK: Storyville, 1985. Lotz, Rainer E., and Ian Pegg, eds. Under The Imperial Carpet: Essays in Black History 1780–1950. Sussex, UK: Rabbit Press, Crawley, 1986.

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INDUSTRIALIZATION 613 Reed-Anderson, Paulette. Eine Geschichte von mehr als 100 Jahren: Die Anfänge der Afrikanischen Diaspora in Berlin. Berlin: Die Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats, n.d. Walker, Edward S., and Walker, Steven. English Ragtime: A Discography. 2nd ed. Stamford, UK: Self published, 2003.

INDUSTRIALIZATION Industrialization first appeared in Great Britain in the 1780s and gradually made its way across the North Atlantic to parts of Western Europe and the United States, bypassing much of Africa and the Americas, until emerging on a limited scale by the late nineteenth century. In the northern Atlantic, the process of industrialization generated incremental yet large-scale changes. These included the expansion of towns and cities, the construction of factories, the liberalization of credit, and the extension of transportation and communication networks. This “industrial revolution,” as historian Arnold Toynbee termed it, was one of the most important changes in human history. It took place over several decades and did not affect all of Europe and the rest of the world at the same time. Indeed, in 1850, in many parts of Europe, the number of agricultural workers still outpaced those in manufacturing although this gap narrowed significantly by 1914 when industrialization expanded even more. In explaining the conditions under which the Industrial Revolution took place in Great Britain, scholars generally point to several key domestic phenomena: the advent of new inventions and technologies, the availability of capital and credit, population growth, and the expansion of agricultural production. Looking at industrialization on an international scale, however, it probably would never have occurred in www.abc-clio.com

its nineteenth-century context without the commercial linkages forged by merchants, planters, and colonial regimes within Africa and the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Furthermore, African and American societies impacted and were impacted by industrialization in several key areas: the establishment of cross-Atlantic markets, or the so-called “triangular trade” in certain commodities (including molasses, rum, sugar, and cotton); the expansion of large-landed estates in Latin America and eventually Africa; and the limited transfer of industrialization to those regions in the early twentieth century. Export commodities produced by African laborers in Spanish America, Portuguese Brazil, British America, French and Dutch America, and the United States stimulated Atlantic commercial exchanges and industrialization in the long term. By the early sixteenth century, European imperial powers, such as Spain, Great Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands, established colonial outposts in the Americas in order to extract raw materials from the region. The reciprocal demand for resources and the lack of sufficient numbers of Amerindian laborers led Western European powers to turn to African slave laborers on a larger scale by the seventeenth century. Europeans tapped into a slave trade that had already existed on the west coast and interior of Africa; yet, one of the most devastating long-term consequences of the Atlantic slave trade was that European and American demands for slaves drastically depopulated several areas of the continent. Between 1500 and 1850, millions of African laborers endured the grueling long voyages to the agricultural and mining sectors of the Americas where they were put to work in the production of gold, silver,

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diamonds, sugar, rice, tobacco, indigo, henequen, and cotton. Trading certain commodities was more profitable than others at several different times during the colonial era. Gold and silver, for instance, were important commodities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but dwindling returns led to the eventual decline of these mining sectors. Profits for sugar production fluctuated throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries depending on demand and competition. Cotton consumption grew exponentially from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries when it was shipped to English factories, but the opening of cotton plantations in Egypt, for example, hurt this trade in the American South. Despite the proliferation in the trade of commodities and slaves by the late eighteenth century, there is still no consensus as to what extent African slaves and the Atlantic slave trade impacted industrialization. Karl Marx was one of the first intellectuals to establish a link between the profits earned by merchants from the use of slave labor with the accumulation of capital investment in Britain’s industrial sector; subsequently, others, such as Lowell Ragatz and Eric Williams, in the early twentieth century applied this idea specifically to the British Caribbean as a case study. In his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Eric Williams, a Trinidadian-born and Oxfordeducated scholar, argued that profits earned by merchants and traders from African slavery helped to promote British industrialization and economic development. According to this view, African slaves themselves and the raw materials that they provided for the Atlantic markets were sold by merchants for a profit, which were, in turn, www.abc-clio.com

reinvested into other commercial and industrial endeavors, such as machinery and factories. Moreover, not only did the raw materials that African slaves produced spark cross-Atlantic trade, but the English (and later New England) cotton mills would not have had a market to sell their manufactured products nor a cheap source of cotton to use as raw materials had it not been for the demand in the Americas. Critics of the “Williams thesis” have argued that profits from the slave trade were not a key source of capital accumulation in Great Britain. Profits from the Atlantic slave trade fluctuated and were not that high (at least not for European traders). In addition, the revenues that the slave trade and slaves generated were not large enough to constitute a major factor in British capital formation. These critics concede that some Atlantic merchants secured handsome returns from their participation in the slave trade and put these dividends into factories, but they also argue that the sum of these investments were inconsequential at best in financing the industrial revolution. Finally, another fault that critics find with Williams’s argument occurs when comparing the industrialization experience of Great Britain with those of Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. These countries never industrialized to the extent that Great Britain had and thus, as the rebuttal goes, slavery and the slave trade were not important variables in the industrialization process. Despite the objections raised, however, the Williams thesis remains incredibly resilient and has greatly influenced subsequent generations of scholars until today. What most scholars agree on is that the production of agricultural commodities, the transportation of raw materials, manufactured goods, and African slaves greatly

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lubricated interoceanic commercial transactions on a scale never before seen. This “triangular trade,” as many historians call it, caused changes within state institutions, affected regional and city growth, and helped to nourish new industries whose dependence on export markets for sustained growth was evident even before the close of the eighteenth century. These factors boosted the development of shipping and financial institutions, raised incomes, stimulated new demands, and created a vastly expanded market for British goods and services, which resulted in the search for new methods of production. Transatlantic slavery and all of the maritime and commercial transactions associated with it, including the issuance of shipping licenses, brokerage and port fees, taxes, and other associated transportation costs, led to the further expansion of the Atlantic system. Revolutions in maritime navigation and shipbuilding also cut down on transportation time and cost. Within this context, one could argue that a nascent form of industrialization appeared in Great Britain in the eighteenth century associated with interoceanic trade. The rise of ports, shipbuilding and docking companies, insurance firms, and refineries are all evidence of this. Moreover, in the age of mercantilism, European empires created bureaucracies to tax and regulate these commercial exchanges. State involvement was also enhanced by the fact that European governments invested heavily in constructing naval fleets, fortresses, and paying soldiers and officers in order to protect their extractive enterprises in Africa and the Americas. Indeed, Atlantic port cities, like Boston, New York, Bristol, and Liverpool, flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as they were geared toward trade with Africa and the Americas. www.abc-clio.com

Within these rising urban centers, the middle classes sought to expand their wealth and social status. This led to the increased volume of commercial transactions, such as billing, insurance, and the development of banking and other financial and credit schemes and institutions, that were vital to industrialization. In fact, banking institutions in the northern Atlantic shifted from tight to liberal lending policies beginning in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. The decline of slavery in Africa and the Americas also took place within the context of industrialization. As its wealthier population built more factories and employed more domestic laborers, Great Britain passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. This decision was all the more important because the British Empire had the most powerful navy in the world and could thus enforce its decree to a great extent. Indeed, the slave trade and chattel slavery continued into the 1880s, but thanks in large measure to British enforcement, the volume of slave transactions declined precipitously. In 1833, Great Britain also became one of the first industrialized countries to abolish slavery, and African-descended slaves in the Caribbean directly benefited from this action. Still, scholars, including Eric Williams among others, have often wondered why British attitudes toward slavery and the slave trade changed so abruptly in the early nineteenth century. On the eve of Great Britain’s decision to abolish slavery, sugar plantations continued to be quite profitable. Explanations abound ranging from the rise of homegrown evangelical and abolition movements, the decline in sugar revenues, and industrialization itself. However, it is clear that the decisions to abolish

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the slave trade and slavery itself were all politically and ideologically connected, rooted in industrialization. By the late eighteenth century, slaveholders and Atlantic merchants lost support and power within the British government as it competed with a growing number of industrialists committed to the laissez-faire principles of Adam Smith. These new, middle-class proponents of abolition became increasingly hostile to colonial monopolies and viewed slavery as part of an outdated mercantilist system that, they argued, should be dismantled. At the same time, however, abolitionism also gave Great Britain’s industrialized ruling classes an opportunity to claim moral leadership even as it exploited domestic workers in their factories. These industrialists sympathized and lent their support on a variety of levels to evangelical movements that based their opposition to slavery on religious and humanitarian principles. By the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, the abolitionist movement had become a potent national force, and slaveholder and planter interests in Great Britain were becoming politically subordinate. By the middle to latter part of the nineteenth century, huge changes also took place in Africa and the Americas not only because they continued to be the centers for extraction of natural resources for European powers but also because they constituted the primary markets for European, especially British, manufactured products. Colonies in the Americas, for example, stimulated demand for textiles, ceramics, furniture, and other items. It is equally important to stress that Europeans attempted to saturate African markets with their manufactured goods. At the same time, there is ample evidence that the rise of European factories undermined African www.abc-clio.com

and American industries that might have competed with them. Textile producers in Latin America, for example, were put out of business when English factories flooded the Atlantic markets with wool and cotton products. As a result, the British Caribbean, northern South America, Mexico, and the American South specialized primarily in the production and sale of agricultural commodities, such as cotton, sugar, and coffee, for European markets. Even as these agrarian-based societies imported industrial technology during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, this was done to improve crop yields rather than create competition with European factories. When railroads and railroad lines were built in Cuba in the 1850s, for example, it emerged as one of the largest sugarcane suppliers in the world. Yet, the benefits that steam engines and railroads could bring to the Americas could not save the sugar economy as it continued a slow decline into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, the importation of industrial technology and know-how by the end of the nineteenth century did not change the fundamental relationship between the northern Atlantic industrial centers and the societies of Africa and the Americas. By 1870, industrialization in Europe and the United States benefited greatly from numerous scientific and technological innovations. These shaped the supply and demand of goods and services on a global scale throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The harnessing of electricity, the use of the internal combustion engine, and the invention of chemicals and synthetic dyes spawned industries in their own right and widened the gap between developing and developed countries

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even more. Moreover, the number of industrialized nations expanded to include Belgium and Germany, and these countries increasingly demanded more foodstuffs for their populations and raw materials for their factories. They also sought the exploitation of new minerals, such as copper, zinc, and nitrate, for use in the technological, industrial, and military complexes of the Western world. Thus, industrialization had profound consequences for Africa and the Americas. Key agricultural and mining sectors of these new national economies either remained or eventually were turned over to foreign industrial interests. This occurred even as more and more nation-states declared their independence from European colonial powers, such as Portugal and Spain, after 1820. This is often labeled by some scholars as the birth of neocolonialism, whereby Latin American governments remained politically independent but economically dependent on industrialized countries for markets and technology. Indeed, the wealthiest, more industrialized countries of the West, such as Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, dominated the agricultural and mining sectors of Latin American states. In Central America, U.S.-owned plantations grew bananas and other tropical fruits for the expanding global market. In addition, Brazilian landowners cultivated sugar, coffee, and citrus. In Mexico until the 1930s, the United States and Great Britain owned a large number of mines and oil fields. Foreigners also took over Peru’s guano industry and Chile’s nitrate and copper enterprises. In fact, Peruvian guano was utilized primarily as a fertilizer and was responsible for initiating an agricultural revolution in Europe in the nineteenth century. www.abc-clio.com

In Africa, the slave trade had already precipitated the economic backwardness of the continent, but aggressive European colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aggravated this problem. At the height of the slave trade in the mid-1700s, European merchants established mutually beneficial commercial relations with African middlemen and African producers. By the 1850s, however, the decline of the slave trade left Africa, also dependent on the slave trade as a source of revenue, in an inferior position relative to European industrialized countries. Reduced demand for commodities from Africa because of the onset of an economic depression in Europe in 1867 left African commercial interests in turmoil. European and African merchants competed for diminishing shares of the market, but Europeans had the advantage of military and technological power in acquiring access to new markets. With the ups and downs of the business cycle, industrial powers searched for new resources and markets. On an unprecedented scale and with rapid speed, European powers made forays into the interior of the African continent where they began seizing large tracts of land in what scholars often call the Scramble for Africa. By the end of the nineteenth century, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Belgium established colonial regimes in various parts of Africa. In the tropical and more temperate zones of Africa, Europeans established large-sized rubber, palm oil, and peanut plantations. By the 1890s, Africa was beginning to be drawn further into the Atlantic network with the expansion of mining activities in South Africa and the Belgian Congo. This expansion continued until the 1960s when the African nation-states began to declare their independence in increasing

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numbers, yet African nations were still underdeveloped and failed to industrialize to any great extent. Jesse Hingson See also: Agriculture; Company of Merchants Trading to Africa; International Development; Oil; World Trade Organization References Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. London: Verso, 1998. Carrington, Selwyn H. H. The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775–1810. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Drescher, Seymour. Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Eltis, David. Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Higman, B.W. Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2002. Inikori, Joseph E. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002. Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981. Solow, Barbara, and Stanley Engerman. British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wallerstein, Immanuel. Capitalist World Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Walvin, James. Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora. London: Cassell, 2000. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. 1944. Reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

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INSURGENCY AND COUNTERINSURGENCY Insurgency is the armed opposition to a government, often with the purpose of overthrowing the government or gaining independence from it. In Africa and the Americas, insurgent movements have arisen in Angola, Mozambique, Algeria, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Namibia, Nigeria, Eritrea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, and El Salvador, among others. They have been driven by a number of causes. In Peru, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia, Marxist movements sought to take control of the government. In Angola, Mozambique, and Nicaragua, anticommunist groups sought to overthrow Marxist governments. In Algeria, Sudan, Namibia, Nigeria, and Eritrea, anticolonial or separatist movements sought to achieve independence. Religion or ethnicity has identified rebel movements in Burundi, Rwanda, Liberia, Uganda, Algeria, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In recent wars in Sierra Leone and Colombia, the goals of organizations are less clear than the political, religious, ethnic, or separatist movements preceding them. In each of these cases, government-led counterinsurgencies, representing opposing political, religious, and ethnic positions, fought against the insurgents. Insurgencies, unlike coups, are longterm actions, often lasting many years. Wars in Colombia, Guatemala, Angola, and Sudan, for example, lasted more than two decades. This length is due, in part, to the strategy most insurgent movements choose to use in their struggle: guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla war is a strategy of the weak. It is designed to allow a poorly

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manned and equipped faction to survive long enough to gain recruits, equipment, and experience. However, due to their weakness, insurgents (also called rebels or guerrillas), cannot readily defeat government forces; on the other hand, government forces (i.e., counterinsurgents) cannot readily defeat guerrillas. The guerrillas’ ability to hide or melt into the population makes them hard to find; their ability to win popular support makes their movement difficult to eradicate. Thus, the average guerrilla war has far more longevity than a conventional war. Insurgents almost always begin their military opposition to a government lacking much of the power of the ruling body. The government occupies a territory and has access to its resources, possesses a trained and equipped (at least to a degree) military, and has a population that funds it through the normal workings of taxation and the economy. Moreover, the government possesses at least some level of international legitimacy. The opposition, on the other hand, often lacks a territory, and its armed forces are considerably smaller than those of the government and typically more poorly trained and equipped. At the very beginning of the conflict, the opposition often lacks any significant funding source and has little, if any, foreign recognition. Capable rebel leaders recognize their weakness and understand that meeting government forces on the battlefield will result in certain defeat. Instead, guerrillas engage in hit and run attacks, striking the enemy when it is weak and then fleeing. To do this successfully, guerrillas must have a base that is largely secure from attack. Other countries may provide such havens, as Uganda did for the Rwandan Patriotic Front in the early 1990s. In other cases, www.abc-clio.com

rebels flee to areas characterized by terrain inaccessible by the government’s military as Fidel Castro did during his rebellion against the Batista government in Cuba. For this reason, most insurgencies have been rural. If the guerrillas go fully underground, they may survive indefinitely; however, they pose little danger to the government and have little hope of success. Guerrillas must function among the population. It is the main source of the guerrillas’ strength, providing intelligence, weapons, food, hiding places, and personnel. Without the support of the population, the guerrillas have no chance to win the war. Similarly, if the government lacks that same support, it too will lose the conflict. Thus, counterinsurgents and insurgents are fighting to win over the same thing: the people. Violence against the population has been used by both governments and guerrillas to force the people’s acquiescence and assistance. The Chilean government under Augusto Pinochet arrested, killed, and “disappeared” thousands of Chilean citizens it believed sympathetic to the leftist rebels in the country. The Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, fighting a war against the government in the 1990s, severed the limbs of men, women, and children to prevent them and dissuade others from aiding government troops. The guerrillas have an additional incentive to use violence against the population. By demonstrating their ability to act seemingly unchecked, the guerrillas can diminish the government’s legitimacy—the perception that it has the right to rule. Ideology is a second tool used by guerrilla groups to try to win the support of the population. Mao Zedong and Che Guevara both argued that, to succeed, guerrilla

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groups must have a political goal with which the people can sympathize. Whereas Mao and Che focused on political ideology—specifically forms of MarxismLeninism—other leaders and groups have utilized religion, such as the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, and ethnicity, the Interahamwe in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to define their organizations’ causes and try to rally the population. Religious and ethnic ideologies have a key drawback: it is difficult, if not impossible, to convert those not part of the group before the war. Anyone, on the other hand, can change their political beliefs, making it easier for the guerrillas to lure former supporters of the government away. These ideologies, whether political, religious, or ethnic are often a reflection of and an answer to the perceived lack of provision by the government. They are responses to groups’ feelings of being discriminated against or ignored by the state’s government. To combat the rebellion, governments’ counterinsurgent operations must focus on responding to these feelings of discrimination and neglect. The immediate requirement for counterinsurgent forces is providing security to the population. Governments must hunt down and capture, kill, or isolate guerrillas so that they do not pose a military threat, particularly to the population. Governments must be careful to avoid too much military force. Indiscriminate attacks alienate those whose families have been killed and property damaged, encouraging them to shift their allegiance to the rebels. Successful counterinsurgency tactics focus on small units, carefully trained, that are drawn from and live among the population. These troops have the potential of gaining the www.abc-clio.com

population’s trust and therefore increase the likelihood the people will provide intelligence on guerrilla whereabouts and intentions to the government. Military force is necessary, but not sufficient, for a successful counterinsurgency. To combat insurgents, the government must “win the hearts and minds of ” the same population the guerrillas are seeking to win over. The government must prove itself the legitimate ruler of the state. In addition to providing security, the government can provide goods and services, improve infrastructure, build schools and hospitals, and provide necessary food and medicines to improve the view that the government cares for its population. The government must take steps to respond to the reasons underlying the conflict, including corruption; economic, political, and social injustice; and ethnic and religious discrimination. Only by responding to the underlying sociopolitical issues can the counterinsurgency succeed. Only by reacting to these issues can the government win over the population that may otherwise support the guerrillas. The insurgencies that occurred to free nations from colonial rule took place over nearly two hundred years in the Americas and Africa. The American Revolution was the first, in the late eighteenth century. The Americans combined conventional attacks—facing British armed forces on the battlefields and oceans—with guerrilla attacks, including the ambushes and sniper attacks on British forces as they left Concord for Boston in 1775; the British suffered nearly 20 percent casualties in that retreat. Thirty years later, in the early 1800s, several of the colonies of South America fought under Simon Bolívar for independence from Spain.

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It was only in the mid-twentieth century that the African states gained independence from their colonial rulers; some, like Algeria, undertook guerrilla warfare to accomplish this goal. From 1954 to 1962, the FLN (National Liberation Front and its armed wing, the ALN [National Liberation Army]) waged an insurgency against French rule. By 1957, the guerrillas were striking Algerians and French, civilian as well as military, in the Battle of Algiers. The French responded violently, arresting, killing, and torturing thousands of suspected terrorists and their supporters. Such response failed to end the insurgency. Instead, it galvanized the population to oppose French rule. The French counterinsurgency, at this time, was unsuccessful. It relied heavily on garrisons—opening the countryside to the guerrillas—and on terror to force compliance from the people. By the time French military tactics improved and the military began to pacify the countryside as well as stop incoming weapons and personnel from Tunisia and Morocco, the French government was tired of the fight. The FLN, which had been seriously depleted in the fighting with the French, also agreed to negotiations; the two sides agreed to a four-year plan to allow the Algerian people to decide their own fate. In 1963, Algerians would vote overwhelmingly for independence and be granted it. Even after the decolonization of Africa, insurgencies on that continent did not stop. Within a number of African countries there were independence movements as one ethnic or tribal group sought independence from the state. In Nigeria, 1967–1970, the Biafran War saw a rebellion by the Ibo people put down by the Nigerian government. In Sudan, from 1955 to 1972 and again from 1983 to 2005, the southern Sudanese www.abc-clio.com

fought a long insurgency attempting to secede from the Arab, Islamic government in Khartoum. The more recent war ended in a stalemate, with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the inclusion of southern Sudanese in the government. Like many insurgencies, this one ended with the agreement of the factions to share power, rather than with the victory of any one group. While each of these insurgencies failed to achieve independence, two other conflicts were successful. In Namibia, SWAPO (South West African People’s Organization) fought against South African forces beginning in 1966, using both guerrilla and terrorist tactics. In 1990, Namibia was declared independent. The Eritreans fought a more than three-decade war against the ruling Ethiopian government, gaining independence in 1993. Most of the insurgencies during the Cold War, in both Africa and the Americas, were over political ideology rather than border lines or national autonomy. That is not to say that ethnic identity had no place in the wars between Marxists, Maoists, or socialists and their opponents; indeed, numerous guerrilla groups were disproportionately drawn from ethnic minorities in states, including the Tupac Amaru in Peru. However, these were wars in which factions identified themselves by political leanings and who fought to decide the political ideology that would rule the state. In Guatemala, following a U.S.-sponsored coup in 1954, left-wing rebels would fight against successive anticommunist governments until peace accords were signed in 1996. In Colombia, too, wars were fought between various anticommunist governments and leftist rebels. The most recent war, beginning in 1984, featured two main

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rebel groups, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and ELN (National Liberation Army), that continued to combat the government into the post-Cold War period. In Africa, similar wars were fought between communists and noncommunists in Angola and Mozambique. Communist groups were not monolithic. They varied in ideological underpinnings and in their sources of support. In Angola, the Chinese-supported FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) fought against the Soviet-sponsored government headed by the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), which had won. The Maoist Sendero Luminoso and Marxist Tupac Amaru waged wars with the Peruvian government, espousing competing beliefs and using different tactics. Tupac Amaru, in particular, relied heavily on terrorist actions rather than classic insurgency activities. In both cases, the 1992 crackdown by the Peruvian government weakened the groups’ ability to wage war dramatically. A characteristic common to many of these conflicts was outside interference. Most of these conflicts, particularly those revolving around political ideology, saw U.S., Soviet, Chinese, or Cuban influence. These insurgencies became proxy wars in the Cold War as the United States and the communist countries sought to counter one another. Through most of the Cold War, the United States and its allies supported the counterinsurgents, seeking to contain the expansion of communism, while the Soviets, Chinese, and Cubans supported rebel groups. This traditional stance would change in the 1980s as President Ronald Reagan’s policy of rollback led the Americans to support rebel movements combating Marxist governments in www.abc-clio.com

Nicaragua and Angola. Also in Africa, the South African government assisted rebel groups in Angola and Mozambique. Following the Cuban revolution in 1959, the Communist government under Fidel Castro funded groups throughout Latin America. A key ally in the war against the Batista government, Che Guevara, would set up training camps in Cuba for revolutionaries and go to Congo in 1965, where he sought to train a rebel army. He then traveled to Bolivia to try to create an insurgent movement; he would be captured and killed in 1967. The clearest example of external influence was the 1975–1992 Angolan civil war. The Soviets provided assistance and Cuban ground forces (up to 18,000 by October 1975) to the MPLA, who would soon win control of the government. It was opposed by UNITA, supported by the United States, and FNLA, aided by China. South Africa sent more than 5,000 troops to combat the MPLA, which was also being supported by Namibian rebels. The end of the Cold War resulted in two major shifts in insurgencies in Africa and the Americas. First, external assistance shifted from partisan aid to peacekeeping. Soviet, Cuban, and American aid to warring factions mostly ended by the early 1990s. This end was particularly noticeable in Africa. American aid continued in Latin America, particularly to the Colombian government in its battle against FARC and ELN. The collapse of apartheid in South Africa and the removal of the white government there also lessened the role of South Africa in the wars of southern Africa. A second shift was the decline in politically based insurgencies. Instead, insurgents organized themselves along ethnic and religious lines. While groups—such as factions in Burundi and Rwanda—had

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long been explicitly aligned along tribal and ethnic lines, there was a decline in the number of groups claiming pure political motives. Islamist movements increased their activities throughout northern Africa, most notably in Algeria where, in 1992, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won elections. The military conducted a coup shortly thereafter, leading to a seven-year war with Islamic rebels, including the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and a breakaway group, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). This war led to the deaths of more than 70,000 people. While the war largely ended in 1999, terrorist attacks by these two groups continue. Other religious groups include the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, which seeks to restructure society based on the Ten Commandments. Ethnic insurgent organizations have included the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in Rwanda, a primarily Tutsi group which came to power following the 1994 genocide conducted by the Hutu government. Regardless of ideology, groups are increasingly turning to self-financing, often through the production and sale of illicit items. The RUF (Revolutionary United Front) in Sierra Leone and UNITA in Angola relied heavily on diamond sales. Actions by FARC and ELN in Colombia are increasingly divorced from their communist ideology as they have increasingly engaged in the narcotics trade, becoming two of the wealthiest guerrilla organizations in the world. The increasing self-sufficiency of some insurgent operations and the shift from politically based to religious- and ethnicbased organizations has effects for both the insurgencies and the ability of governments to counter them. The self-financing by www.abc-clio.com

organizations increases their likelihood of survival. Unlike groups dependent on outside support and sanctuary, these groups are not reliant on other governments, diasporas, or sympathizers in other countries. However, only groups located in areas conducive to the growth, mining, or drilling of valuable items are able to finance their own wars. The ethnic and religious component of organizations also increases their chance of survival as their members are less likely to be converted to the government’s—or to other groups’—way of thinking. Ethnicity is not easily shifted. Thus, counterinsurgents are less able to defeat the insurgencies. On the other hand, the identification by ethnicity or religion inherently limits the ability of the guerilla group from expanding its base of support. It limits the likelihood the group will win the hearts and minds of the population outside the early base of supporters. The insurgency is less likely to overthrow a government in a multiethnic or multireligious state. These new wars are likely to continue indefinitely, with insurgents and counterinsurgents both stalemated. Andrea M. Lopez See also: Terrorism; Truth and Reconciliation Commissions References Asprey, Robert B. War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History. Vol. 1. Lincoln, NE: Backinprint.com, 2002. Clodfelter, Micheal. Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1618–1991. Vol. II. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1992. Manwaring, Max G. Internal Wars: Rethinking Problem and Response. Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute. September 2001. Mao Tse-tung. On Guerrilla Warfare. Translated by Samuel B. Griffith, II. Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1992.

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624 INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT McCormick, Gordon H. “Che Guevara.” World Policy Journal 14 (Winter 1997–1998): 63–79.

INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT President Harry S. Truman announced on January 20, 1949, the U.S. commitment to help poor countries develop their economies. Amid the tensions of the Cold War, the United States wanted to use foreign aid to woo the unaligned nations of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. American policymakers also foresaw that, if robust, the economies in these regions would be able to afford U.S. exports. In May 1950, Congress passed the Act for International Development, empowering the president to authorize programs that aimed to help poor nations strengthen their economies, and that September, Truman created the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA) to oversee the nascent development programs. The TCA focused its early efforts on improving agriculture, health, and education. Among the first efforts were those of Florida extension agent Frank Pinder in Liberia and New England teacher Albion Patterson in Paraguay. Both men had been in the field before Congress passed the Act for International Development and so were able quickly to make good the promise of economic development. Pinder helped Liberians grow rice, and Patterson taught Paraguayan farmers to use the steel plow, a cultivator, and a method for plowing under velvet beans to increase the fertility of soils. Contemporary with these efforts was a program in Chile to purify water, build sewers, and stockpile vaccines against typhoid and smallpox. Plan Chilean sought to teach www.abc-clio.com

farmers to use machinery and conserve soil. In the mid-1950s, the University of Chicago began to help the Catholic University of Chile develop a curriculum in economics with the aim of graduating men and women knowledgeable about and sympathetic toward capitalism, and the two universities began to exchange students and scholars. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sharpened TCA’s focus on improving trade between the United States and the third world by loaning money to underdeveloped nations. American policymakers initially favored the World Bank as the originator of these loans, but the magnitude of the proposed economic aid and the World Bank’s insistence on short-term loans spurred the United States to devise alternatives to it. In 1957, Congress created the Development Loan Fund to provide long-term loans to developing nations and, in 1959, the Inter-American Development Bank to loan money to Latin America. In 1961, Congress, at the urging of President John F. Kennedy, created the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which along with the InterAmerican Development Bank and the World Bank loaned the countries of Latin America $22 billion between 1961 and 1970. In concert with these loans, governments throughout Latin America contributed capital of their own and raised tariffs to protect nascent industries. These actions boosted gross domestic product (GDP) on average in Latin America 6.5 percent in 1969, though growth in agriculture was only 2.5 percent. Between 1962 and 1972, USAID and the World Bank loaned Nigeria $900 million in the belief that Nigeria was the African nation most able to benefit from aid and with the aim of increasing the production of food 45 percent

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and of manufactured goods fourfold. GDP rose on average 5 percent through 1965, but political turmoil thereafter undid this achievement. More successful was aid to increase food production in Latin America and North Africa. The use of fertilizers, irrigation, herbicides, insecticides, and highyielding cultivars increased crop yields faster than the increase in population in these regions, though in sub-Saharan Africa yield gains lagged behind population increase before 1980. Not content with this state of affairs, the U.S. Congress redoubled efforts in Africa, allocating $500 million to the new Development Fund for Africa in 1988 and increasing the amount to $800 million in 1991. After 1987, the United States and Great Britain targeted aid to building and repairing roads in Tanzania. In the 1990s, USAID steered farmers in Uganda toward the production of flowers, fruit, and vegetables for export. The poverty rate in Uganda decreased from 57 percent in 1992 to 35 percent in 2000. By the mid-1990s, Uganda, Togo, and Lesotho, all recipients of U.S. aid, had boosted GDP 10 percent per year. Other countries in Africa and Latin America benefited from foreign aid. Between 1962 and 2000, the United States loaned or granted $1.1 billion to Tunisia, where per person income rose from $655 in 1965 to $2,100 in 2000. Per person income tripled in Brazil, the recipient between 1962 and 2000 of $2.3 billion in U.S. aid, from $1,190 in 1965 to $3,580 in 2000, and in Argentina, the recipient of $203 million, from $2,555 in 1962 to $7,460 in 2000. But several other countries have faltered. Niger, the recipient between 1962 and 2000 of $584 million in U.S. aid, saw per person income decline from www.abc-clio.com

$569 in 1965 to $180 in 2000. Per person income fell from $239 in 1965 to $210 in 2000 in Burkina Faso, the recipient between 1962 and 2000 of $455 million in U.S. aid; from $442 in 1965 to $280 in 2000 in the Central African Republic, the recipient of $80 million in U.S. aid; from $251 to $200 in Chad, the recipient of $308 million in U.S. aid; from $662 to $600 in Côte d’Ivoire, the recipient of $216 million in U.S. aid; from $126 to $100 in Ethiopia, the recipient of $1.9 billion in U.S. aid; from $372 to $250 in Madagascar, the recipient of $463 million in U.S. aid; and from $581 to $370 in Mauritania, the recipient of $211 million in U.S. aid. Christopher Cumo References Bulmer-Thomas, Victor. The Economic History of Latin America since Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Butterfield, Samuel Hale. U.S. Development Aid—An Historic First: Achievements and Failures in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Cardenas, Enrique, Jose Antonio Ocampo, and Rosemary Thorp, eds. An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Latin America. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2000. Hanna, Nagy, and Robert Picciotto, eds. Making Development Work: Development Learning in a World of Poverty and Wealth. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002.

INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND In July 1944, representatives from fortyfour countries meeting in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, founded the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to promote free trade. In pursuit of this aim, the IMF sets currency exchange rates among nations and

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offers their central banks short-term loans. In 1952, the IMF adopted the principle of conditionality in claiming the right to require economic reforms of a country as a condition of its receiving a loan. The IMF first made a conditioned loan to Peru in 1954. The IMF in 1958 required as a condition of a loan that Argentina reduce the power of its trade unions in hopes of slowing the increase in wages and thereby dampening inflation. In 1959, the IMF obliged Chile, as it had Argentina, to slow the growth in wages. Between 1954 and 1970, Latin American countries received 164 loans from the IMF. During the 1970s, however, the number of loans to Latin America declined as the region found itself awash in capital. The oil crisis of that decade slowed the growth of the U.S. economy, discouraging investment in it. Capital, fleeing from the United States, found a home in Latin America, allowing its nations to forgo IMF loans. That is, loans from the private sector replaced loans from the IMF. In 1978, the IMF obliged Sudan as a condition of receiving a loan to devalue its currency to make its exports cheaper on the world market and thereby to earn foreign exchange. In pursuit of this goal, the IMF steered Sudanese agriculture toward groundnuts and cotton, traditional exports. To curb inflation, the IMF required Sudan to restrain the growth in wages and to weaken price controls in the belief that the free market would set prices lower than would government. Devaluation of the currency, however, increased the price of imports, forcing Sudan to borrow money and thereby driving up the deficit to more than $10 billion by 1982. The spike in the price of imports elevated already high petroleum prices. The result was inflation at www.abc-clio.com

25.7 percent by 1982. Industry floundered amid high inflation, skewing Sudan toward the production of cash crops, as had been the case during colonialism. In 1983, Nigeria negotiated with the IMF for a $2.4 billion loan but balked at the proposed reforms. In 1986, however, petroleum, Nigeria’s principal export, dipped below $10 barrel, prompting private banks to withhold loans from the country for fear it would default. With few other sources of capital, Nigeria accepted an IMF loan. Nigeria’s president credited IMF reforms with turning a $79.4 million trade deficit in 1986 to a $60.1 million surplus in 1987. Between 1990 and 1992, the production of cotton increased five times and of cocoa 50 percent. The director general of the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research, however, charged that the increase in cash crops came at the expense of food for sustenance. Moreover, farmers received less than half the price of their crops with the rest covering transport to market. Like the Sudan, Nigeria saw its economy tilt back toward the export of cash crops and petroleum as had been the case during colonialism. In 1985, the IMF rescheduled the repayment of $1 billion due between 1986 and 1991 in Zambia. Even so Zambia paid 26 percent of export earnings to service its debt. Judging that the IMF had imposed too draconian a series of reforms, Zambia in 1986 ended them, causing the IMF to suspend loans to Zambia and raising the possibility that the country might default on its debt. The next year the Organization of African Unity proposed the creation of an African debt club to lobby the IMF to reschedule the repayment of debt throughout Africa. Zambia neared the precipice of default. Mexico plunged over the edge, suspending debt repayment in 1982, followed over the

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next two years by nearly every other debtor in Latin America and Africa. The IMF intervened, extending loans to fifteen countries in Latin America in 1983, whereas it had doled out loans to only five countries in the region in 1981. Excepting a dip in the number of loans in the mid-1980s, the IMF remained active in Latin America, offering loans to fourteen countries in the region in 1995 and to thirteen in 1996. Yet debt rose between 1980 and 1995 from $11.2 billion to $21.8 billion in Chile, from $27 billion to $35.2 billion in Venezuela, from $27.2 billion to $90 billion in Argentina, from $50.7 billion to $161.1 billion in Mexico, and from $64 billion to $164.9 billion in Brazil. Debt in Sudan stood at $24 billion in 2003; in Argentina at $147 billion in 2004; and in Nigeria at $33 billion in 2005. Brazilian debt totaled 51.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2005. Rather than restoring prosperity, IMF loans have coincided with high debt. Christopher Cumo References Anunobi, Fredoline O. The Implications of Conditionality: The International Monetary Fund and Africa. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992. “International Monetary Fund.” http:// www.imf.org (accessed October 25, 2005). Pastor, Manuel. The International Monetary Fund and Latin America: Economic Stabilization and Class Conflict. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987. Vera, Leonardo. Stabilization and Growth in Latin America: A Critique and Reconstruction from Post-Keynesian and Structuralist Perspectives. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2000.

IRONWORKING Ironworking and bronze casting were part of life in what are now central Nigeria and Benin, and African slaves brought the www.abc-clio.com

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hearth, de cadinho (the crucible), and the African forge to the Americas. In Brazil, they are even credited with having been tutors to their captors, working the iron directly in the crude early forges of Minas Gerais. Iron smelting and forging were sacred in Africa, and this belief was preserved by many Africans in America. An iron furnace found in the sacred forest of the Akan dates back to the ninth century. In the Mande area of Upper Guinea, iron makers were hereditary clans with considerable power. Ironworking, and blacksmithing and mining more generally, were the focus of patterns of resistance to slavery. A metal helmet made in the 1,000-year-old methods of the Nok was found in Palmares, the seventeenth-century society of fugitives and Indians in Brazil, a society that lasted nearly a hundred years. Among descendants of Ngola (Angola), iron or clay pots were carefully fashioned into powerful religious objects. In Mexico, African miners became a force in the Revolution of 1810, which abolished slavery in Mexico. In Virginia and Maryland, forges were places trusted, as in Congolese culture, as sanctuaries. A high proportion of successful fugitives in America were associated with ironworking and blacksmithing. The iron industry in the southern United States remained dependent on enslaved black labor until the middle of the nineteenth century and the destruction of the Civil War. After Emancipation, African American ironworkers worked on railroads and in the growing steel industry, making rails in Pittsburgh. Black ironworkers remained strong in the southern ironworks in Richmond and Birmingham until the middle of the twentieth century. Jean Libby See also: Technology Transfers

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628 ISLAM, AFRICAN AMERICAN References Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in Development of Brazilian Civilization. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. Starobin, Robert S. Industrial Slavery in the Old South. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Sweet, James H. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the AfricanPortuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Vlach, John Michael. “Roots and Branches: Historical Patterns in African Diasporan Artifacts.” In African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, edited by Sheila S. Walker. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

ISLAM, AFRICAN AMERICAN African American Islam demonstrates the spread of Muslim faith and peoples in the New World as a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade; it also describes transatlantic political and religious exchanges, New World inventions of Islam, and African American cultural identity. It is generally acknowledged that Africa has enjoyed a long and profound connection with the religion of Islam dating back to the eighth century. From North Africa, Islam spread through the Sahel region as a result of trade and commerce, and it put the peoples of this region into contact with the flourishing Mediterranean world. In turn, Africans were awakened to invisible forces beyond their borders and introduced to historical developments that make up the ancient history of Western civilization. A significant number of African Muslims were captured and sent to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade. In Brazil, Surinam, and Haiti, Muslims were in the vanguard of organized rebellion. Their efforts in seceding from these colonial states www.abc-clio.com

to establish independent “African” societies in the New World influenced the overall character of slavery even in the United States where traders and planters consciously suppressed all manifest signs of “alien” religion in order to better control their slaves. The earliest African Muslims in America and their resistance to the fate of slavery are known through the experiences of Yarrow Mamout, Job Ben Solomon, Abdul Rahahman, Bilali Muhammad, and Lamen Kebe—all Muslims—brought to North America aboard slave ships from Sahelian Africa in the eighteenth century. The religion of these slaves provided a fledgling ideology of opposition to subjugation under the twinned yoke of slavery and New World Christian dominion. As descendants of elite Muslim lineages of African tribes, they were often literate in Arabic and impressed their white slave masters by their leadership abilities on the plantation. In this way, some Muslim slaves earned notoriety as drivers and a few even gained manumission. Accounts of organized rebellion by Muslim slaves in U.S. territories are scarce. However, in the Caribbean world and particularly in northern Brazil, religion provided a singular ideological rallying point for revolt. Muslim conspirators played a cardinal role in the slave uprisings of Bahia, earning for Muslims throughout the Americas a special reputation for rebellion. Their renown emanated from Brazil to Surinam and throughout the Caribbean, inspiring the successful revolt of Toussaint Louverture and Jean Jacque Dessalines in Haiti as well as several uprisings in Jamaica. However, the role, if any, played by Muslims in the U.S. Civil War and postEmancipation society remains unknown.

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With the exception of a few individual testimonies, African Islamic traditions appear not to have survived the transition from slavery to freedom. In the 1880s, Edward Blyden, a scholar and churchman from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, published a treatise entitled Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887, reprinted 1967). This work was based on Blyden’s years of travel in Africa and the Levant on behalf of the Methodist-backed American Colonization Society, which had long sought to spread Christianity to Africa by repatriating freed slaves. Blyden explained that the reasons Africans often chose Islam over Christianity was because the Qur’an had protected the black man from self-depreciation in the presence of both Arab and European colonizers. When Blyden died in Sierra Leone he was accorded a Muslim funeral. To this day the question of his conversion to Islam remains a mystery. Nevertheless, he became an important symbol linking Islam to panAfrican nationalism. His thought resonated with young black leaders like the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, who was further influenced by Duse Mohammed Ali, a London-based Egyptian who published The Africa Times and Orient Review, the first periodical devoted to the Afro-Islamic Diaspora. Garvey apprenticed with Duse Mohammed in London and eventually incorporated his mentor’s convictions into the motto of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), “One God, One Aim, One Destiny,” expressing the Islamic principle of tawhid (unity or oneness). The logic of a separate destiny for Americans of African descent espoused therein was essentially a political impulse that found its most articulate expressions in religious discourse. www.abc-clio.com

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When disillusionment and despair overwhelmed the black masses streaming into northern cities during the Great Migration (1914–1919), it was this religious discourse which prevailed among the most destitute and heart-broken individuals who found little comfort in the tenor of assimilation and status consciousness of the Methodist and Baptist churches. Thus for the growing African American urban population, religious movements became sanctuaries for autonomous thought and protonationalist ideas. As these movements began to respond to human needs for protection, employment, food, money, and shelter, the material foundations for nationalism solidified. The period between 1890 and World War II was one of luxuriant growth and development for many forms of black religion in the United States. In this time span, three Islamic movements came to prominence in urban America. They were the Moorish Science Temple, the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, and the Nation of Islam. Understood as a whole, they represent a movement based on three themes: the struggle for equality, interest in Africa, and attachment to land. All those who joined were somehow influenced by the secular nationalism of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA and the issues which gathered around the rising tide of self-consciousness and the will to discover and recreate a new, urban identity. Reformers and proselytizers of this period depicted Islam as an alternative to Christian ethics as well as a way to reestablish a spiritual discourse with the world of nonwhite peoples outside the United States. During this time the elementary principles of Islamic education, lifestyle, and worship were established. Thereafter

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they would remain the foundations of African American Islam. First organized in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913 then revived in Chicago, Illinois, in 1919, Nobel Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple maintained an uncertain continuity with the vestigial religious traditions handed down from the slave generations. In his amalgamation of Islam, Christianity, Oriental mysticism, and gnosis, Noble Drew Ali drew upon the folk beliefs of slavery where Old and New Testament prophets could be fused into a singular and powerful symbol of resistance to oppression. The text of the identity cards distributed to the Moors reveals a conscious attempt at syncretism. In addition to their identity cards, members of the Moorish Science Temple suffixed Arabic titles to their names, El or Bey. They wore red fezzes and beards and practiced abstinence from “unclean” foods, cosmetics, and “theatrical, licentious entertainment.” Segregation of the sexes was instituted in the Moorish Temples, while at the same time, Noble Drew Ali preached monogamy and a stable family structure. The greeting “Peace!” or “Islam!” was adopted by the Moors, demonstrating through a simple gesture the powerful appeal and collective solidarity of the African Diaspora to which Drew assimilated his followers. As a way of attracting new converts, those who professed to carry piety in their breasts—no matter how faint and unclear their beliefs resonated—were invited to eschew the “white God of the white man.” Noble Drew Ali even authored his own “Holy Koran,” drawing on passages from the real Qur’an, the Bible, Garvey’s sayings, anecdotes of Jesus, and his own ideas. By the late 1920s, Noble Drew Ali was celebrated as a black messiah anxious www.abc-clio.com

to redeem his fellow African Americans. His unorthodox teachings employed Islam to counter the systematic dehumanization of blacks brought about by the proliferation of Jim Crow laws. His considerable following demonstrated a proclivity to oppose all Eurocentric ideologies and presaged modern Afrocentric tendencies. Beyond doubt, the Moorish Science Temple paved the way for the Nation of Islam. Almost simultaneously Islam was making inroads in other black communities thanks to a group of Punjabi missionaries. Founded in India by a self-proclaimed redeemer of Islam named Ghulam Ahmad, the Ahmadiya Movement in Islam has an important theological preoccupation with the Christian gospel and its succession of prophets and promise for the Second Coming. Its appeal to many African Americans lies in its criticism of the Bible as a forgery and its apocryphal refutation of the crucifixion of Jesus. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Ahmadis created a vigorous worldwide missionary movement. Having determined to become the harbingers of Islam in the West, they brought ideas of Islamic social justice to bear upon the reality of North American ghettos. This synthesis was fortuitous, as demonstrated by the experience of Walter Gregg, a young Texan who migrated to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1924. There, this pensive young man, interested in books, religion, and the problems of his race, met another black convert to Ahmadiya who offered him a solution: “Change your name, get your language, follow your people and you won’t be a Negro anymore.” He changed his named to Wali Akram and studied the Qur’an intensively. By 1933 he had broken with the Ahmadiya and established the First Cleveland Mosque as a

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place of Sunni orthodox worship. Eventually he would educate three generations of Midwesterners in Islam. Self-taught, he published his own Arabic grammar textbooks and in 1956 made a pilgrimage to Mecca sponsored by the Pakistani Tabligh Jamaat group. He titled his hajj diary “From the Cotton Fields of the South to the Deserts of Arabia.” Akram died in 1994 but the First Cleveland Mosque endures as the oldest functioning mosque in the United States. An era of rhetorical confrontation began during the 1930s in Detroit. Under the guidance of Master Fard Muhammad and the stewardship of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam (NOI) became the foremost non-Christian religious movement among African Americans. So great was the appeal of Elijah Muhammad that the movement influenced blacks in practically every major city in the United States. The ideology of the Nation of Islam played to the apprehensions of a dislocated black population, victims of racial segregation, economic exploitation, and Cold War repression. Black Muslims abandoned their “slave names” and replaced them with an “X,” indicative of their “lost-found” Afro-Asian ancestry according to Elijah Muhammad. Spiritual uplift came to many blacks who were down and out. Some were redeemed felons like Malcolm X, who rose from “the dead level” to the highest rank in the NOI. By his eloquent “straight talk,” Malcolm X articulated many repressed feelings of the black man which were ignored by leaders of the Christian church. It was not the black man but the Church which had fallen from grace. So, whether from the confines of a prison cell or the pews of a Baptist Church, an individual could regain his humanity, www.abc-clio.com

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simultaneously redeeming his family and enslaved ancestors, by being reborn into the worldwide Islamic ummah. Malcolm X’s defection from the Nation of Islam profoundly affected the development of orthodox Islam in America. Not only was it a decisive blow to the power of Elijah Muhammad’s organization, but it also spelled an end to the idiosyncratic interpretation of Islam which theretofore had dominated public conception of the religion among many Americans. This rejection of the unorthodox practices of the Nation of Islam, which had led to widespread misperceptions of Islamic theology, paved the way for discussions of Islamic belief and inaugurated a period of rich diversity from 1965 until the present. The decade 1965–1975 was a period of transition from “temples” to “mosques” and Islamic community centers. Leading the way were the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem and the Dar ul-Islam Movement founded at Yasin Mosque in Brooklyn. Both were inspired by African American Muslims who, like Malcolm X, had traveled to Mecca and experienced for themselves the racial plurality and international appeal of Islam. Sheik K. Ahmad Tawfiq, founder of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, had studied at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he was strongly influenced by the Egyptian Ikwan alMuslimun (Muslim Brotherhood). Acknowledging the internationalist character of “true” Islam, Tawfiq kept enough of the “nationalist” logic within his grasp to make sense to his African American audience. Yasin Mosque led by Imam Yahya Abdul Karim in Brooklyn was an outgrowth of Sheik Daoud Faisal’s Islamic Mission to America, which was located on State Street not far from the immigrant

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Arab community on Atlantic Avenue. Muslim emissaries, businessmen, and United Nations diplomats from the world over frequently prayed at the State Street mosque. For years this interaction galvanized a solid core of African Americans who mingled with the foreign visitors. Arabic scholarship, knowledge of Islamic law, and pilgrimages to the Middle East were the privileges of this association. In the decade of 1965–1975 the African Americans resolved to take their experience back into the streets, uniting with their brothers who had independently found the path to righteous Islam. The target was Bedford-Stuyvesant where they used Islamic zeal to recover a gang-infested neighborhood. Their Islam was infused with activism and their activism was informed by sharia (Islamic law). Inspired by tradition, they established a dormitory (suffa) for homeless and psychically dislocated young men. To rehabilitate convicts, they helped establish Masjid Sankore, the first orthodox prison mosque recognized by the New York State Department of Corrections. To set an even greater example, they put into motion a nationwide movement, the Dar ul-Islam. Simultaneously, there were Islamic movements underway in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. Imam Talib A. Dawud, an Antiguan jazz trumpeter and lapsed Ahmadi convert, founded the Muslim Brotherhood of America in Philadelphia. His movement influenced many bebop-era jazz musicians, including Art Blakey, Yusef Latif, John Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Randy Weston, and Pharaoh Sanders, who created an aura of popular culture for African American Islam. The Islamic Party of Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, Georgia, made inroads into the black middle class because its founder, www.abc-clio.com

Yusuf M. Hamid, attracted university students searching for new formulas after the demise of Black Power, the antiwar movement, and Marxist politics. The movement was organized according to Islamic popularpolitical principles and combined communal living with the spirit of hijrah, the migration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina to establish the first Muslim city-state in 622 BCE. The Islamic Party’s final goal, evoking this historic migration, was the establishment of an Islamic state or caliphate somewhere in North America. In an address to the Philadelphia Muslim Conference in 1970, Hamid argued eloquently for unity with the Dar ul-Islam movement, but this initiative failed after two years. While imprisoned in New York for political crimes in the early 1970s, the Black Power leader H. Rap Brown came into contact with chaplains from the Dar ul-Islam movement. He committed himself to Islam and changed his name to Jamil Al-Amin. Following his conversion to Islam and parole from a New York prison in 1976, AlAmin made a pilgrimage to Mecca and then settled in Atlanta’s West End, where he founded the Community Mosque of Atlanta. His congregation was the basis for the National Community, a coalition of thirty North American mosques that sought to revive Brooklyn’s Dar ul-Islam movement in spirit if not name. Presiding as imam and civic leader for more than two decades, Al-Amin was credited for resuscitating a dying ghetto by ridding the area of drug dealers and prostitutes, thereby making it safe for children and families. Other activists who discovered Islam while imprisoned were members of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. Their use of Islam as a tool for

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resisting the ennui of prison created a fierce reputation for their activities on behalf of the religious rights of inmates. Younger inmates following their examples are now responsible for a very large number of Muslims throughout state and federal correctional systems. Islam continues to flourish in the prison underground where even hardened members of Los Angeles and Chicago gangs find spiritual values that were absent from their lives on the street. Meanwhile the streets of urban America have become another battleground where the Islamic ideal of martyrdom has often been invoked to fight against drugs. Brooklyn imams Siraj Wahaj and Al-Amin Abdul Latif were instrumental in developing an antinarcotics strategy in 1987. Since then Muslims around the country have joined the “holy war” against crack in their neighborhoods. One effect of fundamental Islamic reasoning has been to engage a profound debate between the old politics of nationalism and the Qur’anically ordained issue of human rights. This debate comes at a time when criminal and class violence have subordinated civil rights issues to the struggle for survival. There are a number of gleaming Islamic centers across the American landscape: Los Angeles, Chicago, Toledo, Washington, Atlanta, and New York. Wherever large immigrant communities are established, there is usually an Islamic center that has been funded partially through local contributions but mainly by organizations such as the Muslim World League. Based in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim World League is dedicated to promoting the Wahabi dynasty’s claim over the holy sites at Mecca and Medina. There are many controversial aspects to the work of this organization in the United States. Instances www.abc-clio.com

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of discrimination against African Americans have been alleged. Cultural imperialism is another contentious issue. Moreover, there is deep concern about the Islamic propriety of Muslims investing in expensive mosques while ignoring the needs of their destitute brothers living in urban slums. One emphatic conviction shared by most African Americans who have made their pilgrimage to Mecca is the rapture felt by communing with the multitude of humanity who circles the holy kaaba, the cube-shaped structure predating the Islamic presence in Mecca which became a sacred sanctuary under Muhammad’s rule and around which al-Masjid al-Haram is built. This pilgrimage often becomes the central experience in their lives and produces a contagious effect at home. In this encounter, African American Muslims experience directly the heterogeneous ways of Islam. As a consequence of this immersion, other tendencies of Islam receive new legitimacy. Significantly, the experience reties the knot with African Islam, thereby attracting those seeking a more esoteric religious experience to the Sufi traditions of the Sudan and West Africa. So pilgrimages act as an impetus toward Afrocentrism among many African American Muslims. There are Muslims among blacks in almost every major American city. New York is only one of the areas that has experienced enormous growth in the number of Muslims. There are 112 mosques in the state of New York, with 71 in the five boroughs of New York City. Chicago has at least 40 mosques. In addition, Los Angeles, Washington, Atlanta, Detroit, Cleveland, and Toledo are cities where one might expect to see 10,000 Muslims celebrating the Eid al-Fitr, the celebration marking the end

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of Ramadan, communally. In total there are almost 600 mosques nationwide. The South-Central area of Los Angeles, scene of the 1992 riots in reaction to the decision in the Rodney King trial, counts dozens of small storefront mosques of various affiliations and beliefs. There was even a Shia mosque, al-Rasul, whose black imam espoused jihad until he moved to Iran in 1989. Local Muslim activists proselytized among the notorious Crips and Bloods long before the riots gave further cause to the idea of unity. The activists’ efforts were based upon the belief that gangs represent a “primitive” stage of cultural nationalism whose logical culmination lies in adherence to Islam as the “true” religion for people of African descent. Due to the persistence of this minority of partisans in the cause of Allah throughout the past decades, it is often said that every black youth grows up in proximity to some notion of Islam. For this reason, perhaps, almost 90 percent of the converts to Islam in the United States are African Americans, a trend whose meaning has not been lost to prominent Arab- or Asian-American Muslims who desire to build a political coalition with the goal of enhancing their position in American society. The alliance of the Muslim Political Action Committee with Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign was a tentative gesture in this direction. However, political differences surfaced in 1991 on the occasion of the Gulf War. Middle-class immigrants joined the followers of Warith Mohammed in patriotic support of the U.S.-led military coalition to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait. On the other hand, many African American Muslims, both Sunni orthodox and Nation of Islam, dissented together with a large www.abc-clio.com

number of pious, working-class immigrants who opposed foreign military presence in the sacred land of Islam. The war also spurred a wave of conversion among African American soldiers who were temporarily based in Saudi Arabia and exposed to intense religious proselytization by ultraconservative Wahabi clerics. In the emotionally charged atmosphere following the events of September 11, 2001, and subsequent American military retaliations in Afghanistan and Iraq, African American Muslims weathered occasional though often persistent allegations of disloyalty and subversion. However, there was no evidence of mass collaboration with terrorist cells as alleged by some media and law enforcement officials who seemed determined to resurrect criminal stereotyping and political witch hunts in the manner of hysterical anti-Communism. In pursuit of national security, the police regularly monitor Friday sermons and special events at mosques throughout the country. Some Muslims allege harassment at their jobs and discrimination in schools. While such persecution has failed to diminish their zeal, it has fostered a new sense of unity among indigenous and immigrant Muslims in America. Another likely influence on the future of Islam in America will be the religious choice made by thousands of young African Americans returning home from combat and military service in the Muslim world. Robert Dannin

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See also: Ali, Noble Drew; Farrakhan, Louis; Garvey, Marcus; Islam, African American; Malcolm X; Mohammed, Warith Deen; Nation of Islam References Austin, Allan D. African Muslims in Antebellum America. New York: Garland Publishing, 1984.

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ISLAM, AFRICAN AMERICAN Blyden, Edward Wilmot. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. 1887. Reprinted with an introduction by Christopher Fyfe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967. Dannin, Robert. Black Pilgrimage to Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Essien-Udom, E. U. Black Nationalism. New York: Dell, 1964.

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Fauset, Arthur Huff. Black Gods of the Metropolis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944. Reis, J. J. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

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J JACOBS, HARRIET ANN (1813–1897) Harriet Jacobs was an escaped female slave and the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813 to Delilah and Elijah Jacobs—both slaves of mixed racial ancestry. In her important narrative, Jacobs discloses that she did not know she was a slave until the age of six when her mother died. Her mother’s mistress took in Jacobs and taught her to read, spell, and sew. Upon her death six years later, the mistress conferred Jacobs on her three-year-old niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, whose father, Dr. James Norcom, sexually harassed Jacobs for seven years. At sixteen, when Norcom threatened Jacobs with concubinage, she began an affair with neighbor Samuel Sawyer, a young, white attorney, and became pregnant to thwart Norcom’s advances. She bore two children, Joseph and Louisa Matilda. Norcom persisted, and in 1835, Jacobs ran away and hid for seven years in a three-foot high attic crawl space above her grandmother’s home. There, she watched over her children, who lived with her grandmother, a freedwoman. In 1842, Jacobs escaped to the north where she worked as a nursemaid and then in an antislavery reading room over Frederick

Douglass’s North Star. She reunited with her children and, shortly thereafter, met Amy Post, a Quaker feminist and abolitionist, who encouraged Jacobs to publish her story. Incidents is remarkable, for, unlike male-authored slave narratives, it foregrounds the sexual violence female slaves endured at the hands of their masters, the disastrous effects of such exploitative practices upon slave mothers and their children, and the problems racial mixing posed for a system of inequity based upon skin color. Initially Incidents was considered a fiction: it was published under the pseudonym Linda Brent; edited by Lydia Child, a northern abolitionist, novelist, and political pamphleteer; and shares some generic conventions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which like Incidents, was written in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In the 1980s, scholars confirmed Jacobs’s identity and her text’s authenticity through manuscript and historical research. Jacobs devoted her life to abolition, before, during, and after the Civil War, and died in her Washington, D.C., home March 7, 1897. She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wendy Weise See also: Slave Narratives; Stowe, Harriet Beecher

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638 JAMAICA References Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004.

JAMAICA Jamaica is an island of the Caribbean, 90 miles (145 kilometers) south of Cuba and 100 miles (161 kilometers) west of Haiti. It is a former British colony with a history of enslavement of its indigenous and African peoples and of Afro-Jamaican rebellion against domination through dance, religion, and outright confrontation. The original inhabitants of Jamaica, prior to Christopher Columbus landing there on May 5, 1494, were the Arawak Indians who gave the island its name, Xaymaca. The Spanish took over Jamaica in 1496, and they remained in power until 1655, when the British gained control. The harsh treatment by the Spaniards along with exposure to foreign illnesses resulted in the Arawak’s extinction. Today, 90 percent of the island’s population is of West African descent. African natives were in Jamaica 150 years before the British arrived; after the British landed on the island, though, their culture became a dominant fixture of the island’s social mix. African natives were brought to Jamaica as slaves in 1517. In 1655, in a battle between the Spanish and the British (called the Western Design) for control of Jamaica, the slaves sided with the Spanish, who in turn gave them their freedom. After the Spanish defeat, the freed slaves, now referred www.abc-clio.com

to as Maroons (translated as “untamed” or escaped slaves), retreated to the mountains in an attempt to maintain their freedom and start their own communities. The two major groups of Maroons that resided in Jamaica were the Trelawny Town Maroons and the Winward Maroons. Because of the Maroons’ superior military and hunting prowess, the British had a difficult time controlling them. Britain eventually gained control over the Maroons, although the Maroons were responsible for numerous rebellions against Britain. Between 1673 and 1832, slaves were in constant rebellion and staged numerous uprisings against their owners. The economic success of Jamaica during this time depended on sugar plantations. The slaves were brought over from Africa to work in the sugarcane fields and harvest the coffee, the two crops which helped Jamaica to become one of the most valuable islands in the Caribbean region for 150 years. The First Maroon War in Jamaica lasted from 1728 to 1738; the focus for the British was to destroy the Maroon settlements and maintain their stronghold over the slaves. Undefeated but not victorious, the British ended up signing treaties granting the Maroons land and freedom. In return, the Maroons pledged to find, capture, and return runaway slaves as well as aid the British in the case of a military invasion. Despite the treaties, Jamaican slaves continued to revolt and in 1760, an Akan slave named Tacky, who was formerly an African chief, led a rebellion to end slavery. Modeling his rebellion and determination after the Maroons and hoping to gain his own version of their substantial freedom, he methodically began to copy their political and social strategies. Ironically, Tacky was killed by a Maroon. The Second

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Maroon War in the 1790s caused some of the Maroons to be exiled to Canada and then to Africa. The Consolidated Slave Act of 1781 declared that a slave’s work day was to be 11 hours long and that each slave would get a day off every other week. As the act began, missionaries and leaders took up residency to provide religious instruction as well as support to the slaves. One such leader was Moses Baker, a black Baptist preacher. He and George Lisle, an emancipated slave who became a preacher, saw the need for religious enlightenment for the slave population. They wanted to reach the Afro-Jamaican population by combining Christianity with their African practices of religion. In 1792, a missionary society was founded; the London Missionary Society followed in 1795 and the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1803. The missionaries’ role was to befriend the slaves, teach them the tenets of the Christian religion, and to expose the immorality of slavery. The missionaries gave the slaves more determination to rebel for their freedom by preaching the injustices of slavery. William Wilberforce was instrumental in eliciting a response from the Society for Gradual Abolition of Slavery through his writings showing the inhumanity and injustices of slavery; in 1830, emancipation was strongly recommended. In 1831, one of the most violent rebellions occurred. This uprising is referred to as the Baptist War, or the Christmas Rebellion, and was led by Sam Sharpe (it is sometimes referred to as Sam Sharpe’s Rebellion). The rebellion, which lasted four months, began peacefully but quickly escalated into widespread violent unrest. This rebellion, though, brought about a quick response. Sam Sharpe was executed by www.abc-clio.com

hanging May 23, 1832. Sharpe was declared a national hero by the rebels, who continued to revolt in the name of freedom until 1833 when emancipation was declared. However, emancipation did not truly come to fruition in 1834. August 1, 1834, is remembered as the day of freedom and is commemorated by attending a religious service called the “Divine Services.” The Abolition Act declared that all slaves’ children under the age of six or born afterwards were considered free. Despite the Abolition Act, there was a condition to the slaves’ freedom: they had to participate in an apprenticeship for six years. This apprenticeship did, however, allow the workers to argue against unjust treatment. Missionaries organized the meetings for the apprentices. The work and requirements for those working in the fields (“praedials”) was six years and differed from those in domestic positions (“non-praedials”), which were for four years. The apprenticeship program lasted until August 1, 1838, when Britain decided the program had become a hindrance. Education was awarded to the freed slaves but only in a limited manner. Oppression was a constant factor in all aspects of the slaves’ lives, including education and religious reforms which appeared in the guise of freedom. In 1840, things began to change when voting rights for Afro-Jamaicans were granted. The emphasis was still on profits and the upper class; however, some of the middle-class residents were granted political seats on the council. Despite the positive outcome, however small, in 1846, Britain passed the Sugar Duties Act, which caused the sugar industry in Jamaica to falter. Riots and demonstrations increased and with the Morant Bay Rebellion, extreme restrictions were placed upon Jamaica.

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Once again Afro-Jamaican freedom was tested when, on October 11, 1865, an incident occurred that involved a man who was sent to prison for trespassing on a plantation that was considered abandoned. This injustice caused ire in Afro-Jamaican communities. Protesters marched to Morant Bay to show their anger. This protest was led by Paul Bogle and George William Gordon. The result of this rebellion was that Jamaica became a Crown Colony under British rule. Despite the governmental change, AfroJamaicans were still considered a minority and extremely oppressed. Under the new government, Afro-Jamaicans were in dire straights. The sugar industry was on the decline and replaced with the banana industry now controlled by the United Fruit Company. Because of the governmental actions, the Afro-Jamaicans were immigrating to other areas of the country for employment. After the Morant Bay Rebellion, Jamaica settled into a time of prosperity. Afro-Jamaicans began to accumulate land and there was a rise in the middle class. Despite this prosperity, Afro-Jamaicans were still contained and oppressed by the white majority. The Morant Rebellion demonstrated to the white majority that AfroJamaicans were capable of protesting against unfair treatment and making a strong statement against the whites. From the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, Afro-Jamaicans were still not fairly recognized in government, so they turned away from it and returned to their religious heritage as a means of shaping social protest and change. Movements designed to confront the social injustices experienced by Afro-Jamaicans include Bewardism, Garveyism, Ethiopianism, and Rastafarianism. Not only did these movewww.abc-clio.com

ments choose to expose and address the horrific conditions suffered by AfroJamaicans, they also inspired the lower classes to call for social and economic reforms. The People’s Political Party founded by Garvey in 1929 was considered the first anticolonial political party. In 1935, Alexander Bustamante created the Jamaica Workers and Trademen’s Union (JWTU). Three years later, Bustamante headed the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU) and Norman Manley created the People’s National Party (PNP). All of these parties were created to aid the peasants in pushing for reforms. Another party that was formed by Bustamante in 1943 was the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). A year later an election was held and the Jamaican Labour Party won with Alexander Bustamante as the first chief minister. August 5, 1962, saw the creation of the Dominion of Jamaica. At the celebration, the motto of Jamaica (“Out of Many, One People”) was instituted. At the first session of Parliament, Princess Margaret gave Sir Alexander Bustamante the appropriate documents in recognition of the new commonwealth. Despite the celebration, Bustamante and Norman Manley both warned the people of the challenges that were facing them as an independent nation. In the 1950s, Jamaica took the newest discovery of bauxite and coupled it with the tourist industry to benefit the economy. During this time, Afro-Jamaicans benefited from the recovering economy. Yet political friction persisted and flowered in the 1960s as the leadership of Edward Seaga altered the social and political landscape of Jamaica. Seaga, who would become leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in 1974 and Prime Minister of Jamaica from 1980 to 1989, advanced an

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anticommunist and procapitalist model of governance, and he was viewed by some as emphasizing the business success of the Afro-Jamaicans as individual initiative to the detriment of viewing such successes as part of a collective advance of their social, economic, and political status. Afro-Jamaicans have had to face severe poverty, discrimination, and oppression in order to service and succeed as a culture. To preserve their heritage, they are working to revitalize art, language, stories, music, dance, and religion. One of the dance forms that still exists in Jamaica is the junconoo. Jamaica is also known as the birthplace of Bob Marley and reggae music. The definitive themes throughout AfroJamaican culture are African heritage, religion, and struggles for freedom. In the twenty-first century, Jamaica is faced with high rates of crime, corruption, and poverty. Drugs and drug trafficking play a big part in the country’s social and political problems. Jamaica is a land of extremes in terms of economic prosperity. A major resort island, tourists driving to the resorts go past people living in poverty. And the Afro-Jamaicans are still fighting to receive the benefits of their homeland. Karen E. Holleran See also: Garvey, Marcus; Morant Bay Rebellion; Rastafari References Banks, Russell. Book of Jamaica. London: Harper Perennial, 1996. Brodber, Erna. The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica, 1907–1944. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Hurwitz, Samuel J., and Edith F. Hurwitz. Jamaica: A Historical Portrait. New York: Praeger, 1971. Long, Edward, and Howard Johnson. The History of Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2003.

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Mason, Peter. In Focus Jamaica: A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture. Latin America Bureau, 2000. Monteith, Kathleen, and Glen Richards, eds. Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture. London: University of the West Indies Press, 2002. Mordecai, Martin, and Pamela Mordecai. Culture and Customs of Jamaica. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Mouser, Bruce L., and Samuel Gamble. A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793–1794. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Sheller, Mimi. Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Sherlock, Philip, and Hazel Bennett. The Story of the Jamaican People. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998. Stolzoff, Norman G. Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Williams, Eric. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean: 1492–1969. New York: Vintage, 1984.

JAMAICA,WOMEN’S ROLE IN Jamaican women have been participants and leaders in slave resistance and rebellion and have shaped intellectual, cultural, and political life in the Caribbean, Britain, and the United States. From the first arrivals in the mid-seventeenth century till the present, women of African descent have played a key role in the socioeconomic, cultural, and political development of Jamaica. Slave women, of whom there were 160,000 on the eve of Emancipation, constituted the bulk of the field labor force on the sugar plantations. As they resorted more to covert forms of resistance to improve their living and working conditions, such as feigning illness and slacking, than such overt forms

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as running away and revolt, few slave women have entered the official records. A notable exception is Nanny of the Maroons, a slave woman who became the leader of a community of runaway slaves and successfully used guerrilla warfare against the British in the 1720s and 1730s. Like their enslaved ancestors, the first generation of Afro-Jamaican women born in freedom used a variety of strategies to combat oppression. They played a visible part in the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, which followed several decades of planter practices and colonial policies that aimed to curb the legal rights of the ex-slaves. Sarah Johnson and Ann Thompson raided a police station and stores in order to obtain gunpowder and cutlasses, while Elizabeth Taylor beat a black man who had volunteered to put down the rebellion for having betrayed his mother and race. These women have not received as much attention in studies on the immediate postemancipation period, however, as Mary Seacole. Having gained experience nursing invalid soldiers in her mother’s lodginghouse, Seacole went to England in 1854 to be sent as an army nurse to the Crimea. When the War Office rejected her on the color of her skin, she made her own way to the Crimea where she set up a medical store and hostel near Balaclava. Afro-Jamaican women in the postemancipation period not only tried to improve their own lives and those of future generations of black women by taking part in protests but also by working within a wide range of organizations. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several middle-class Afro-Jamaican women not only joined but also founded social welfare organizations aimed at women and children, such as the Jamaica Save the www.abc-clio.com

Children Fund. After World War I, AfroJamaican women became members of existing trade unions and set up unions that catered specifically to women. The educator and social reformer Amy Bailey, for instance, was the first woman to join the Jamaica Union of Teachers and cofounded the Women Teachers’ Federation. While most female union members were active as rank-and-file members, a small number entered the middle leadership, chaired committees, or worked as secretaries of unions. Gladys Longbridge (Lady Bustamante), for example, served as both secretary and treasurer of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union in the late 1930s. Some Afro-Jamaican women also played an active role in (semi-) political organizations. Born in Jamaica in 1897, Amy Ashwood Garvey became a follower of Marcus Garvey at the age of 17 and helped him found the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). When Garvey left for the United States in 1916, she left for Panama but eventually joined Garvey and married him in 1919. Until their marriage broke down in 1922, she played an important role in the UNIA’s New York branch. During World War II, she returned to Jamaica where she founded the J.A.G. Smith Political Party, which did badly in the polls. In 1944, she went to the United States, where she campaigned to persuade the government to offer war work to Jamaican men and women. In the late 1940s and 1950s, she was active in the PanAfrican movement and cofounded the Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in the United Kingdom. Garvey’s second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, is also remembered as a woman who fought for the freedom and equality of black people in Africa and the Diaspora.

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Born in Kingston in 1896, she moved to the United States in 1918. She met Garvey in 1919 and married him in 1923. She occupied key roles in the UNIA, was instrumental in organizing the fifth Pan-African Congress, put pressure on the United Nations to issue an “African freedom charter,” and wrote numerous letters, essays, and speeches on black liberation. She was also involved in local politics. Shortly after their return to Jamaica in 1927, she helped Garvey set up the People’s Political Party, and in the 1940s, she worked for Norman Manley’s Peoples National Party (PNP), which was instrumental in bringing about Jamaica’s independence. Jacques Garvey was not the only Afro-Jamaican woman, however, who believed that self-government was an essential precondition for the full equality of people of African descent in Jamaica and actively fought toward this goal. During a visit to Britain in 1938, Amy Bailey spoke about self-government to the secretary of state for the colonies and also addressed the issue at a major peace conference in Glasgow. Afro-Jamaican women in the interwar years were not just concerned about class and racial oppression but also about gender oppression. Una Marson was one of several women who criticized persisting Victorian ideas about the place and roles of women and the male domination of the political processes. She voiced her opinions, amongst other Afro-Jamaican women critical of these pervasive and limiting ideas, in the magazine The Cosmopolitan, which she edited from 1928 till 1931. Marson is not only known as Jamaica’s first woman editorpublisher but also as the first major woman poet of the Caribbean. In her poems, as much as in her journalistic work, she encouraged Afro-Jamaican women to undermine www.abc-clio.com

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the Victorian ideal of womanhood and take pride in their African heritage. One of the factors that enabled AfroJamaican women to play a more prominent role in politics after World War I was the extension of the franchise in 1919 to propertied, literate women over twenty-five. It was not until 1939, however, that the first Afro-Jamaican woman stood for local election. Mary Morris Knibb, an active member of the Women’s Liberal Club, won a seat that year on the council of the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation. The granting of universal adult suffrage in 1944 enabled women also to stand for the Legislative Council. In 1944, Iris Rhudella Collins, a community worker, was the first woman elected to this political body. The advancement of Afro-Jamaican women in politics in the 1940s and 1950s was severely hindered, however, by a strong ideology of female domesticity, articulated by the colonial government, unions, and political parties. Some Afro-Jamaican women did manage to cross the barriers and enter politics. Daphne Campbell, for instance, was one of several women active in Left politics in the 1950s. She was an active member of the PNP until 1952 when Marxists were expelled from the party. She then joined the People’s Educational Organisation (PEO) and the People’s Freedom Movement, of which she became an executive member in 1955. Campbell worked especially toward the advancement of Jamaican women. She set up the Jamaica Women’s Assembly, an auxiliary of the PEO, which was concerned with the plight of working-class women. The granting of independence in 1962 was not accompanied by a significant improvement in the socioeconomic status of Jamaican women. From the late 1960s

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onward Afro-Jamaican women discussed the deplorable status of women in Jamaican society and proposed schemes to alter it. The proposals put forward by several feminist-oriented women in the PNP Women’s Auxiliary, including the well-known scholar Lucille Mathurin-Mair, led the government to set up a Women’s Bureau in 1973 which oversees the development of women in Jamaica. The activities of feminist-oriented Afro-Jamaican women also led to the creation of several nongovernmental organizations, including the Association of Women’s Organizations of Jamaica, an umbrella organization of thirty different groups that has done important work in the field of crimes against women. To improve the quality and quantity of female representation at the highest level of political decision making, the Jamaica Women’s Political Caucus (JWPC) was set up in 1992. It trains potential candidates on relevant topics, such as fundraising and presentation skills, and has achieved some successes. In the 2002 elections, for example, Afro-Jamaican women for the first time served as party leaders. The educator Hyacinth Bennett led the National Democratic Movement, while talk-show host Antoinette Haughton represented the United People’s Party. The JWPC has, however, a long way to go to increase the profile of Jamaican women in politics. As of 2004, women hold only 13 percent of the parliamentary seats, 12 percent of the seats at the ministerial level, and 22 percent at the subministerial level. Afro-Jamaican women have made more inroads in culture than in politics since independence. They have played a key role in the development of one of Jamaica’s most well-known export products: reggae. Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt, and Marcia Griffiths www.abc-clio.com

formed the I-threes, the support group of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Rita, who gained the title “Queen of Reggae” in 1982, has enjoyed a successful career in her own right, both before and after her husband’s death. She largely retired from music in the mid-1980s and has devoted her energies since to a number of causes. She looks after her husband’s legacy, fosters the career of Ziggy Marley and the Melodymakers, supports young talent, and is benefactor of a number of humanitarian causes, including the fight against drugs. Another well-known female Jamaican cultural icon is Louise Bennett-Coverly, or Miss Lou as she is better known. She has written and performed in creole in the theater and on TV and radio since the 1950s. Through her publications and international tours of lectures and performances, Miss Lou has done much to promote Jamaican culture worldwide. In 2001, her role as ambassador of Jamaican culture was formally recognized when she was appointed Member of the Order of Merit. For four centuries, then, women of African descent in Jamaica have used a variety of strategies and techniques to fight race, class, and gender oppression and have helped to develop the island and raise its profile abroad. Henrice Altnick

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See also: Garvey, Amy Jacques; Garvey, Marcus; Marley, Robert Nesta; Nanny; Rastafari References Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson, 1905–65. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998. Martin, Tony. Amy Ashwood Garvey: PanAfricanist, Feminist and Wife. Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1997. Shepherd, Verene, ed. Women in Caribbean History. London and Kingston, Jamaica: James Currey and Ian Randle Publishers, 1999.

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JAMES, CYRIL LIONEL ROBERT Simpson, Joanne. The Jamaican Woman: A Celebration. N.P.: Creative Links, 2001. Taylor, Ula Yvette. The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Vassell, Linnette. “Women of the Masses: Daphne Campbell and ‘Left’ Politics in Jamaica in the 1950s.” In Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, edited by Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1995. 318–336.

JAMES, CYRIL LIONEL ROBERT (1901–1989) Cyril Lionel Robert James was a Trinidadian scholar and intellectual and a prolific author whose works focus on Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean politics. The mark of a true intellectual often lies in his or her ability to anticipate historical change with such depth and engagement that he or she remains always of the moment, able to speak to audiences in multiple times and locations. If the African American intellectual and statesperson, W. E. B. Du Bois, was one such figure, Trinidadian scholar and intellectual C. L. R. James was another. James’s life and journeys as a colonial intellectual can be seen as emblematic of many of the great changes that have shaped both the previous empires of Europe and their colonies in the African Atlantic over the course of the twentieth century. His work continues to serve as a model of intellectual engagement with the world we live in. An early predictor, for example, of the geopolitical events and effects of globalization, James’s scholarship and theoretical analyses lay at the forefront of providing new scholars with ways to recognize the importance of the framework of the African Atlantic www.abc-clio.com

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for analyzing the geopolitical events that shaped the twentieth century, and for predicting the events and historical changes in the century to come. Between his birth in Trinidad on January 4, 1901, and his passing in May 1989 in Brixton, South London, James lived multiple lives. His trajectory began as a boy growing up in a small colonial society, trained to be a Victorian gentleman scholar. James sailed to England at the age of 31 to become a novelist. Though he had already published his first and only novel, Minty Alley in 1928, in London the young immigrant intellectual’s activities expanded to include his political involvement with Trotskyism, and his writing and organizing for Pan-African liberation between 1932 and 1938. James ended what was to be the first of many phases of his life in England as a historian, publishing in 1938 his classic account of the first black revolution in Haiti, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. In 1938, James traveled to the United States on a speaking engagement for the Trotskyite movement. There he would live as an underground revolutionary until 1956, when he became a deportee and victim of McCarthyism in the 1950s. During his time in the United States, James wrote texts that have now become classics in American intellectual history, the expansive Notes on American Civilization which he began in 1949, and his polemical Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, published in 1953, an original study of Herman Melville’s American classic Moby Dick that included an indictment of the U.S. government for its treatment of James as a political prisoner interred on Ellis Island while awaiting his deportation decision. Upon his deportation from the United States in the late 1950s,

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James’s attention would turn to PanAfrican and Pan-Caribbean politics. Back in his homeland of Trinidad in 1958, James become a political journalist and organizer until he was once again detained as a political prisoner, this time under house arrest in Trinidad in March 1965. During his years spent traveling throughout the Caribbean and speaking on issues central to Caribbean and African politics, such as federation and decolonization, James wrote his autobiographical meditation on cricket, Beyond a Boundary. This 1963 text, published a year after Trinidadian national independence, has since become a classic in postcolonial and Caribbean literature. James returned to the United States in the late 1960s, where he spent more than a decade teaching in American universities and speaking to intellectual audiences. It was in this role that he often served as an elder radical statesperson and interlocutor for the newly radicalized youth of the Black Power Movement in the United States. During these years he also anticipated the emergence of black feminism in American cultural and intellectual circles in the 1980s. Posthumously, James is seen as a leading figure in postcolonial and Caribbean studies and as a model for intellectual and scholarly work in a newly reconceived postnational, transatlantic, American study. Michelle Stephens See also: Black Power Movement; Caribbean Literature; Pan-Africanism; Postcolonial Studies References Archives of the C. L. R. James Institute in New York. Director Jim Murray. Grimshaw, Anna, ed. The C. L. R. James Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. James, C. L. R. American Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

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James, C. L. R. Modern Politics. Detroit, MI: Bewick Editions, 1973. Pease, Donald E. “C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways and the World We Live In.” Introduction to Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Hanover, VA: University Press of New England, 2001. Stephens, Michelle A. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Worcester, Kent. C. L. R. James: A Political Biography. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

JAZZ AND THE BLUES Jazz and the blues are African American musical forms that have had tremendous cultural impact on other American musical forms. Perhaps the art form that has benefited most from the melding of African and American sensibilities is music, and this mutual influence is clearest in the genres commonly referred to as jazz and the blues. Although scholars differ on exactly how to define “jazz” and “the blues” and which types of music they include within each definition, there is enough common agreement to allow fruitful discussion. The roots of both jazz and the blues lie in Africa, but the genres were developed in the Americas by African slaves and their descendants, and have returned to Africa as well as the rest of the world as popular contemporary music forms. Additionally, the influence of jazz and the blues is evident in many types of popular music, including rhythm and blues, reggae, calypso, and bossa nova.

The Blues The term “the blues”—or simply “blues”— refers both to the specific musical form also

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known as “the twelve-bar blues” due to its characteristic chord progression over twelve bars, or musical measures, and to a range of musical techniques such as this chord progression and the blues scale. The blues developed in the United States from the field chants, spirituals, and work songs of African American slaves, and displays several characteristics which may be traced back to African musical traditions. One is the call-and-response format, in which performance of a song alternates, often line by line, between a leader (the call) and a group (the response). Another is the blues scale, with its lowered third and seventh tone (and sometimes lowered fifth tone as well), and the use of melisma and “sliding” around and between notes. Some scholars trace these melodic characteristics back to the Muslim music of West Africa. This is one version of the notes of the blues scale, in the key of C: C–D–E F–G–A–B–C

Of course, blues performers do not confine themselves strictly to those notes as defined in Western classical music. Although the blues uses many different structures, the most common today is that known as the twelve-bar blues, which evolved around 1900 partially due to the influence of American popular music. The characteristic chordal structure of the twelve-bar blues in the key of C would be: C–CCC FFCC GFCC

Once again, this structure is only a basic framework, which in performance is altered according to the taste of the individual musician. Traditional twelve-bar blues lyrics have a characteristic format which may be notated as A–A´–B, meaning a first line, www.abc-clio.com

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repetition with variation of the first line, and a second line. This structure is evident in a stanza of the “St. Louis Blues” by W. C. Handy (1914; Dover, 1990): I hate to see the evenin’ sun go down Hate to see that evenin’ sun go down ’Cause my baby done gone and left this town.

Trying to devise rules to classify which songs qualify as blues is difficult and probably ultimately pointless: music is a living art, not a collection of blueprints. Many songs that are not strictly twelve-bar blues incorporate some blues elements, and many others include the term “blues” in the title without using any blues elements at all. However, it is useful to consider two blues styles that developed over the years because they represent many of the opposing tendencies in modern blues performance. One style, commonly called “country blues,” remains closer to the rural roots of the music and is often performed by a single singer backing himself on guitar. Outstanding performers in this tradition who lived in the era of recorded sound include Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly (Huddie William Ledbetter), and Mississippi John Hurt (John Smith Hurt). A more modern style of blues performance is often called “city blues” or “urban blues” because it incorporates musical elements that performers were often first exposed to in urban areas. Music in the more modern blues style is often performed by a singer plus a small band including instruments such as the electric guitar, piano, trumpet, saxophone, and traps. Some of the most influential performers in modern blues include Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield), Buddy Guy (George Guy), and Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Arthur Burnett).

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Blues musician Muddy Waters in 1964. (Library of Congress)

Jazz Jazz was developed around 1900 in the United States, largely by African Americans who combined aspects of traditional forms such as the blues with Western forms such as marches and popular songs. The term “jazz,” or “jass,” was first used in New Orleans and this city is often considered the birthplace of jazz. New Orleans offered ideal conditions for the birthplace of a new African American art form: performances by slaves at the legendary “Congo Square” familiarized both whites and free African Americans with African music and dance, and many free African Americans living in New Orleans were also educated in European musical traditions. Many of the fathers of jazz came from New Orleans, including Kid Ory (Edward Ory), King Oliver (Joe Oliver), Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong; the latter is considered www.abc-clio.com

by many to be the greatest jazz musician of all time. Their early style is sometimes called “Dixieland” and is characterized by constant, simultaneous improvisation and the use of the blues scale with its “bent” notes outside the Western system of pitches. The term Dixieland was popularized in part by a band of white musicians from New Orleans called The Original Dixieland Jass Band, which made the first jazz recordings in 1917. Jazz spread from New Orleans across the United States; New York and Chicago were particularly important centers of activity. The increasing availability of jazz on the radio and on sound recordings helped to spread its influence. The decade 1920–1930 in the United States is often termed the Jazz Age, attesting to the popularity of the music and its acceptance, for better or worse, as a metaphor for life in the United States during those years. For some, jazz symbolized the newfound freedom and optimism of American society after World War I, while for others it was the perfect symbol of contemporary societal degeneracy and decay. Big band or swing music, which included much larger instrumental ensembles, was popular in the 1920s into the 1950s. The size of bands varied: Paul Whiteman’s band sometimes included twenty or more musicians, while twelve players was a more typical size for most bands. The larger ensembles required a change in style toward music which was more composed or arranged and in which only one instrument improvised at a time. White bandleaders and musicians played a major role in big band music. Important white bandleaders included Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, and Jimmy Dorsey. Important African American big band leaders included Count Basie, Jay

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Musician Louis Armstrong, one of the twentieth century’s leading jazz innovators. (Library of Congress)

McShann, Duke Ellington, and Bennie Moten. Although the big band music, like much of American life, was largely segregated, there was also some collaboration. For instance, Benny Goodman made a point of including African American musicians in his band and performing arrangements by African American composers. The modern jazz style known as bebop developed in New York City in the 1940s, although it did not become widely known until a decade later because there were few recordings from those early years. Musicians working in this style developed a new, more complex vocabulary of melody, harmony, and rhythm; indeed, some critics believe bebop was deliberately developed as a more exclusive jazz for connoisseurs that would not have the broadly popular appeal of earlier styles. Bebop groups also returned www.abc-clio.com

to the small ensembles characteristic of early jazz, rather than the large bands of the swing era. Early leaders in bebop include Charlie Parker (Charles Christopher Parker, Jr.), Dizzy Gillespie (John Burks Gillespie), Thelonius Monk, and Max Roach. More recent jazz musicians who were influenced by bebop include John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman. In the 1960s a style known as “free jazz” was developed by a number of young musicians who deliberately distanced themselves from the conventions of traditional or “mainstream” jazz, such as predictable melodies and chord progressions. Leaders of this movement included Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, and Don Cherry. Although popular among a small circle of listeners, and influential among

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music critics, this style of music did not have wide popular appeal. Most jazz musicians performed in more traditional styles, often combining aspects of several historical styles with their own innovations. In fact, the ready availability of recordings by the 1960s meant that a typical musician could be exposed to music from many different historical periods and geographical regions, and this influenced many young performers toward an eclectic jazz style drawing on many influences. The dissemination of jazz around the world has been greatly aided by the contemporaneous development of mass media, in particular the spread of radio broadcasting and phonograph recording. This influence was seen first in European countries that had more access to the new technologies; but by the 1940s, radio broadcasting and phonograph records were reaching many regions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well. Touring American bands also helped popularize jazz, and again this influence was felt first in Europe. Will Marion Cook was a pioneer in this regard, and his most important single act may have been introducing the saxophonist and clarinetist Sidney Bechet to Europe, and Europe to Bechet. When Cook’s concert band, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, toured England in 1918, their repertoire was primarily concert (non-improvised) works. However, their programs included a few improvisational, blues-influenced works featuring Bechet, which were received with great critical acclaim. Bechet went on to have a distinguished international career as a jazz musician, touring throughout Europe, the United States, and the USSR before settling in France, where he spent the last years of his life. Other American jazz musicians toured extensively www.abc-clio.com

in Europe and some chose to live there, a choice that may have been influenced not only by the availability of work due to the popularity of jazz but also, in the case of the African American artists, by the greater social and political freedoms enjoyed there compared with in the United States where racial discrimination was legal in many parts of the country. Jazz became popular in Africa also, although a few decades later than in Europe. By the 1940s radio and phonograph technology was available in many regions of the continent, and distinctive local styles developed that combined elements of jazz with traditional music. Musicians from the Republic of South Africa were among the first to achieve worldwide recognition, including Hugh Masakela, Miriam Makeba, and Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim). Caribbean jazz influenced the music of many other African forms; for instance, the highlife style popular in Ghana and Nigeria was heavily influenced by calypso. As jazz became known in Europe and among classical musicians in America, many classical composers tried incorporating aspects of jazz into their music. For the most part, these classical works did not include the improvisatory element that lies at the heart of jazz performance, but incorporated specific jazz-influenced elements such as melodic motifs and chord progressions into classical music forms. The French composer Darius Milhaud was among the first well-known classical composer to deliberately incorporate jazz elements into a concert work with his La Creation du monde (The Creation of the World; 1923). Other early classical works that make extensive use of jazz elements include the German

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composer Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spiel auf (1925) and the American George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1923), An American in Paris (1928), and Porgy and Bess (1935). The last work was premiered in 1923 at an historic concert staged by Paul Whiteman at New York City’s Aeolian Hall entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music.” This concert is often credited with popularizing jazz, or at least Whiteman’s take on the jazz idiom, among the concert-going public. Sarah Boslaugh References Ansell, Gwen. Soweto Blues: Jazz and Politics in South Africa. New York: Continuum, 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music, edited by Allan Moore. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Carr, Ian, Digby Fairweather, and Brian Priestley. The Rough Guide to Jazz. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

JAZZ, AFRICAN Although jazz is no longer the most widely played form of contemporary music, it is still breaking new ground and combining and recombining in different forms of African popular music. There is still a core of practitioners and fans interested in highly experimental modern jazz, and a constantly changing group of musicians fusing jazz idioms with contemporary popular music genres. This fusion is visible in African popular music, where many artists combine elements of jazz, local rhythms, and modern forms of electronic dance music. The development of jazz music in South Africa illustrates the way American jazz influenced African jazz. South Africans had www.abc-clio.com

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their first formal contact with African American music on June 19, 1890, when the minstrel troupe of Orpheus Myron McAdoo’s Virginia Jubilee Singers from Hampton, Virginia, presented a series of concerts in Cape Town. Their appearance created a significant impact upon the music scene, as it introduced innovative new harmonic concepts and structures that would play a crucial role in the development of South African jazz. The formal introduction of jazz into South Africa took place shortly after World War I, when American merchant seamen brought some of the early jazz recordings to Cape Town. In the middle 1920s, Queenstown became known as “Little Jazz Town” because of the many New Orleans– style bands that were resident there. Ragtime shifted into Dixieland jazz in some areas. Many local Dixie bands were formed in South Africa, like the Dark Town Strutters and the Big Four of Johannesburg; ragtime became part of the black urban marabi music of the 1920s and 1930s. The dance style called marabi evolved in the black urban centers, where different tribes met with former slaves from the Americas. It was originally a humble form of music, but it became similar to the jazz played by swing bands in the United States when the relatively wealthy and free blacks of Sophiatown adopted it. In Ghana, Dixieland became part of the repertoire of 1920s bands such as the Jazz Kings of Accra. Much of South African music of the 1950s was born at the crossroads of American jazz, African American choral styles, and African folk music. For example, vocalist Miriam Makeba and her husband trumpeter Hugh Masekela recorded in a pop-jazz style. Furthermore, the 1950s were a great age of jazz development in South Africa. South Africans used jazz as a platform

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and became deeply involved in the struggle for democracy on a creative level by using the music as a clarion call for liberation. As a result of the bebop revolution in the United States, a new strain of jazz began to emerge, which contained a greater American influence. Tours by African American artists such as Louis Armstrong and jazz saxophonist Paul Winter became inspirations. Jazz pianist and educator John Mehegan served as a jazz mentor in South Africa. American jazz influenced highlife music, the Ghanaian and Nigerian ballroom music, which absorbed many elements of jazz, especially in ordinary orchestras of wind and string instruments. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was deeply impressed by American artists, which led him to use jazz as a stepping-stone to African music, and subsequently used African music to play jazz. In 1968, he coined a new style of music, Afro-beat, by combining James Brown’s funk music, highlife, and jazz with Nigerian beat. American jazz and the Black Power Movement influenced him during a ten-month promotional tour in the United States. His intricate music, which might arguably be called Afrojazz, blends African rhythms and jazz horn lines with sociopolitical lyrics that defend the rights of the common people. Manu Dibango, Africa’s best-known jazz saxophonist and heir to jazz and rhythm and blues, fused African rhythms and melodies with jazz in his legendary jazzy-sound album Soul Makossa (1972). This recording was followed by African Soul, a mixture of jazz, rumba, and Latino rhythm. In 1983, Dibango recorded Electric Africa, an extraordinary mixture of jazz, rap, and traditional music, with help from great jazz musicians Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrel, and Herbie Hancock. Moroccan Maleem Mahmoud Ghania collaborated www.abc-clio.com

with jazz giant Pharoah Sanders on Trance of Seven Colors (1994), while Hassan Hakmoun created fusion tracks of trancey gnawa, rock and American dance music on Trance (1993). Benin’s Gangbé Brass Band explores the rich Voodoo culture and ancient songs of their country, which are combined with jazz melodies to produce a powerful contemporary sound. Philip A. Ojo See also: Jazz and the Blues; Music (African) References Collins, Edmund John. “Jazz Feedback to Africa.” American Music 5, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 176–193. Nettl, Bruno. “The Western Impact on World Music: Africa and the American Indians.” In Contemporary Music and Music Cultures by Charles Hamm, Bruno Nettl, and Ronald Byrnside. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

JOHNSON, CHARLES R. (1948–) Charles R. Johnson is known as a journalist, illustrator, scriptwriter, playwright, essayist, fiction writer, biographer, and philosopher. Johnson’s elevation to the stage of national and international fame came with publication of his novel Middle Passage (1990). However, his road to fame as a creative writer and scholar-teacher holding the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock chair in Creative Writing at the University of Washington since 1990 came by way of a varied path. Born April 23, 1948, in Evanston, Illinois, Johnson remained rooted to his state through both his bachelor’s degree in journalism (1971) and master’s degree in philosophy (1973) at Southern Illinois University. From the time he was employed as a reporter and political cartoonist for the campus newspaper, The Southern Illinoisian, and his stint as a stringer for The

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Chicago Tribune (1968), it appeared that Johnson was heading for a long-term career in journalism. But he changed directions at the master’s level and went on to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy from State University of New York in 1998 that positioned him squarely in academia, where he still remains, even while periodically writing scripts for television and publishing two books of drawings—Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time (1972). Author of two books of literary criticism, fifteen television scripts, and sixtythree essays, Johnson is widely recognized for his early novels Faith and the Good Thing (1974) and Oxherding Tale (1984), and two short-story collections, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986) and Soulcatcher and Other Stories (2000). However, the catalyst of his career came with the 1990 publication of Middle Passage. The book’s 1830s fictional hero, Rutherford Calhoun, is a freeman who undergoes a reverse middle passage out of New Orleans on a slave ship, which lands at Senegambia to pick up a cargo of mysterious Africans. At sea Calhoun experiences a body/soul division, after which he transforms into a philosophically grounded, morally based, and spiritually rooted personage—all at the old age of twenty-three. Through metamorphosis, he becomes a philosophical composite of Everyman—the best shorn of the worst ideas among the transatlantic slave triad of Europe, Africa, and America— emerging from Johnson’s own training and sustained interest in philosophy as expressed in Being and Race (1970) and Turning the Wheel: Essays in Buddhism and Literature (2003). Although Johnson’s 1998 novel Dreamer and coauthored work King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2000) illustrate his reverence for the great leader, neither has surpassed the attention www.abc-clio.com

garnered by Middle Passage, which earned Johnson the National Book Award in 1990, two honorary doctorates, and a host of other state, national, and international awards of distinction. Virginia Whatley Smith See also: Haley, Alex References Coleman, James W. “Charles Johnson’s Response to ‘Caliban’s Dilemma.’” Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001. Jablon, Madelyn. “Mimesis of Process: The Thematization of Art—Charles Johnson, Middle Passage.” Black Metafiction: SelfConsciousness in African American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Page, Phillip. “‘As Within, So It Is Without’: The Composite Self in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage.” Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Literature. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999.

JOHNSON, JAMES WELDON (1871–1938) James Weldon Johnson was an African American poet, novelist, lyricist, historian, educator, activist, and diplomat. He was the eldest son of James Johnson, an American freeman, and Helen Louise Dillett, a native of Nassau, the Bahamas, who was educated in New York. In his autobiography Along This Way (1933), he described his mother’s forebears as Haitians displaced by the years preceding the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and a French army officer in Haiti, who relocated with them to the Bahamas. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson became familiar to America as a lyricist and poet— having written the lyrics to “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (also known as the “Negro National Anthem”) and the collection of poetic sermons God’s Trombones—and as an activist in national politics. Johnson served as

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Author and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. (National Archives)

field secretary and later executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Johnson’s 1906 appointment as American diplomat first to Venezuela and then Nicaragua was the result of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Era administration, which gave some government positions traditionally reserved for whites to a handful of African Americans. As American diplomat to these countries, Johnson gained a comparative perspective on black cultural identity and racial attitudes in the Americas. He noted in particular the different attitudes toward complexion in the diverse black populations and the difference in Venezuelan attitudes toward racial and cultural assimilation. Johnson used some of these observations about the cultural distinctiveness of black culture versus the merits of its assimilation into a national identity in his first book-length www.abc-clio.com

work, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), composed mostly during his consular appointment in Venezuela. In this work, Johnson used a narrator who could “pass” as white to explore the cultural meaning of blackness in the American North and South as well as in Europe. As diplomat to Venezuela and Nicaragua, Johnson also observed these countries’ resistance to American expansionist policies, and worked on behalf of the U.S. government to quell a revolution in Nicaragua. Johnson sought promotion to a consular position in Switzerland, which he was stoutly denied under President Woodrow Wilson’s administration in 1912. Johnson resigned from his post the same year. Taking up the position of field secretary to the NAACP in 1916, Johnson was responsible for significantly increasing the membership of the fledgling organization, especially in the South, to make the NAACP a national power. In this new position, Johnson became another type of diplomat— one who represented the concerns of black people throughout the world, from African nations to the Caribbean nation of Haiti. As a correspondent for the NAACP, Johnson investigated American outrages in Haiti under the U.S. Marines’ occupation, initiated by the American government in 1915 and lasting until 1934. The results of his investigation were published in a fourpart series called “Self-Determining Haiti” in The Nation (1920). In this and other writings of the World War I era, Johnson reminded his readers of the hypocrisy of the Woodrow Wilson administration’s slogan claiming U.S. participation in the Great War was to “make the world safe for democracy.” Although black troops fought with distinction in the war, they were

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denied the rights and privileges of full and equal citizenship in their own country. Moreover, they were the victims of what Johnson called the “Red Summer” of 1919, when postwar race riots swept through twenty-two cities and caused the deaths of hundreds of African Americans. In his investigative writing for the NAACP, Johnson revealed the mentality of the Southern populace that shaped American segregationist and expansionist practices. Johnson described the Haitian situation as one where the ignorance and the racism of the American South were inadvertently exported to Haiti. As the first black nation to gain independence from its French colonizers in 1804, Haiti was a symbol of black pride and self-determinacy to black people throughout the world. In Haiti, he reminded his readers the majority of marines stationed and leading the effort of occupation had been passed over for participation in World War I. These marines were Southern, poorly trained and poorly educated, and steeped in the conviction of race hatred—a hatred that motivated the very instances of extreme brutality that Johnson was investigating. Here and elsewhere in his diplomacy and writings on behalf of the NAACP, Johnson supported the national outlook and participation in the war, especially the effort to defend democracy. He used the very definitions of American patriotism, however, to alter the policy of excluding African Americans from the nation’s life in art, letters, and politics. In fact, Johnson often argued that African Americans were more American than whites in their artistic and cultural contributions as well as in their patriotism and love of freedom. In his political activities and in his writing, Johnson was interested in the www.abc-clio.com

broad concerns of the black Diaspora— African decolonization, Haitian selfdetermination, and so on—from a staunchly nationalistic, American perspective. Like many other African American leaders of his day, Johnson rejected the alternative vision of a cultural homeland for blacks that Marcus Garvey provided in his Universal Negro Improvement Association. Johnson saw Garvey’s program of repatriation to Liberia as a threat to the NAACP’s strategies of interracialism and integration as the means to achieving civil rights for African Americans. Noelle Morrissette See also: Garvey, Marcus; Harlem Renaissance; Literature, African American References Johnson, James Weldon. “Self-Determining Haiti.” Nation 111 (1920): 236–238, 265–267, 295–297, 345–347. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. New York: Knopf, 1927. Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson. New York: Viking, 1933. Johnson, James Weldon. The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, edited by Sondra Kathryn Wilson. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Levy, Eugene. James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1973.

JOHNSON, LINTON KWESI (1952–) Linton Kwesi Johnson was born August 24, 1952, in Chapelton, Jamaica, and has lived in London since the age of 10. He is a poet, performance poet, and dub poet. Johnson is the acknowledged godfather of dub poetry, and because of his focus on reggae music and themes, and his use of

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Jamaican creole, he also is known as the world’s first reggae poet. Dub poetry is poetry infused with musical rhythms. Johnson himself gave name to the “dub-lyricist” in the article “Jamaican Rebel Music,” which he authored for the publication Race and Class in 1976. In Johnson’s performances of dub poetry, he gives meaning to the Rastafari notion that “word sound ’ave power.” His notable poems, “Street 66,” “Five Nights of Bleeding,” and “Inglan Is a Bitch,” give realistic accounts of rough times in 1970s England. Often the narrator expresses the feeling of helplessness at having apparently no means of escape from the blues party culture that ends with the police showing up; but there is also a sense of pride that comes with living through these experiences, a righteous pride that serves as catharsis for the audience. Johnson’s poems run the gamut of human emotion. His “Reggae fi Dada,” for example, has been called the “finest creole elegy to date”; the poem addresses not only the loss of a father but is also an indictment of the violence and financial hardships of Jamaican society. While attending Goldsmith’s College, University of London, in the 1960s, Johnson joined the Black Panthers and apparently helped to organize a poetry movement within the group. By the early 1970s, he was published in Race Today and honored as a writer-in-residence; he later worked at the Keskidee Center, noted for being the first home of black theater and art. Johnson is published by Race Today publications, Bogle-L’Overture, Island Records, and on his own label, LKJ. His poetry is anthologized in numerous publications such as The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature and Dub Poetry: 19 Poets from England and Jamaica. His LKJ Records began production in 1981 with two singles by Mikey Smith, www.abc-clio.com

another Jamaican dub poet. In 1981–1982, Johnson produced From Mento to Lovers Rock, a radio series on BBC1. In the 1980s, he continued to produce other Caribbean poets, such as Jean Binta Breeze and Shake Keane, as well as tour with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band. In 1990, Johnson was honored in Italy for his accomplishments in poetry, with the XIII Premo Internazionale Ultimo Novecento. He also has received fellowships from the University of Warwick in 1985 and Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1987, and from his alma mater of Goldsmith’s College in 2003. Perhaps because of Mikey Smith’s premature death in 1983, Johnson has become an outspoken advocate for Smith’s work, giving lectures on Smith for scholarly communities. Johnson lectured at the Second Conference on Caribbean Culture, held in Jamaica in 2002, and was an honorary visiting professor of creative writing at Middlesex University in London in 2004. Johnson has performed his poetry in Europe and Africa, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, in 1984 and 1996, and on a Broadway stage in New York City as part of the “Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry” in 2003, which aired on HBO. For comparative purposes, one should hear other dub poets, such as Benjamin Zephaniah, Mutabaruka, Oku Onuora, Mikey Smith, and Jean Binta Breeze. Reggae/dub poetry CDs include: Dread Beat an’ Blood (1978), Bass Culture (1980), LKJ in Dub (1981), Making History (1983), LKJ in Concert with the Dub Band (1984), Tings an’ Times (1991), LKJ A Capella Live (1996), Independent Intavenshun (1998), More Time (1998). Poetry collections: Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974), Dread Beat an’ Blood

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(1975), Inglan Is a Bitch (1980), Tings an’ Times (1991), Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems (2002). David W. Hart See also: Black Panther Party; Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Caribbean Literature; Creole/Criollo; Morris, Mervyn; Mutabaruka; Smith, Mikey References Donnell, Alison, and Sara Lawson Welsh, eds. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature London: Routledge, 1996. Habekost, Christian, ed. Dub Poetry: 19 Poets from England and Jamaica. Neustadt, Germany: Michael Schwinn, 1986. Johnson, Linton Kwesi. “Jamaican Rebel Music.” Race and Class 17, no. 4 (1976): 398. “Linton Kwesi Johnson.” official homepage. http://lister.ultrakohl.com/homepage/ lkj/lkj.htm. “LKJ Gives Professorial Lecture.” http://www.lkjrecords.com/. May 10, 2005. Morris, Mervyn. Is English We Speaking. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999.

JONES, CLAUDIA (1915–1964) Claudia Jones was a radical journalist, poet, and political activist. She is an important but neglected political and cultural figure of black transatlantic experience. She made wide-ranging contributions to the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), including campaigns against the Italian fascist occupation of Abyssinia and against the unjust rape trial of nine black youths, “the Scottsboro boys.” After deportation to Britain, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and began to publish a black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette. Jones was born Claudia Cumberbatch in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1915; her www.abc-clio.com

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family emigrated to the United States when she was nine. They settled in Harlem and lived at the epicenter of many antiracist movements, including the Marcus Garveyled Universal Negro Improvement Association, which suffered brutal attacks. Her mother was a garment worker who died of exhaustion when Claudia was twelve; her father became unemployed as a result of the Great Depression. Jones became politicized at an early age, and in 1936 she joined the Young Communist League. She was a gifted child who was forced to leave school during the depression. After an intense period of self-education, she took up a technical post on the Daily Worker, the U.S. newspaper of the Communist Party. In the United States, her activities were regarded, along with those of other notable black figures such as C. L. R. James and Paul Robeson, as subversive, and she was denied U.S. citizenship. Between 1948 and 1955, she was arrested several times and imprisoned on Ellis Island under the 1940 Smith Act. Treated as an undesirable alien, she was deported from the United States in 1955. As she urgently needed medical attention, and Trinidad was reluctant to allow her return, she sought asylum in Britain. Following racist attacks and riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill in 1958, Jones organized the first black indoor carnival, held in St. Pancras Town Hall in the winter of 1959. Jones’s experience campaigning for civil rights in the United States enabled her to calm a volatile situation in London following the murder of Kelso Cochrane. The idea of organizing a carnival was politically astute and signaled that the migrant community would assert itself through its culture, countering racial oppression with positive self-definition and an assertion of the presence of black culture’s

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presence in Britain. Subsequent carnivals attracted performers, such as the calypsonian the Mighty Sparrow, and evolved into the London Notting Hill Carnival, which now attracts over a million participants. In the course of a day in London, Jones might have written for the West Indian Gazette, intervened in the case of a homeless immigrant, and advised a visiting political figure of the standing of Norman Manley and Martin Luther King Jr. She lived and died during a time of intense activity— antiracist movements in the United States, independence struggles in the colonies, and conflicts arising from mass migration to Britain. She was determined to fight oppression and provided leadership in the black communities of the United States and Britain in spite of frequent hospitalizations for heart problems. One of Jones’s greatest achievements was that she was able, through tenacity and charisma, to bring together very different groups of people in spite of conflicting interests. In the struggles against imperialism, she united African, Asian, and West Indian factions who could be divided over Cuba, Vietnam, Aden, and Ghana. In London, writers, performers, artists, activists, and workers met at political rallies organized by her, including a march on the U.S. Embassy in support of Martin Luther King Jr. She kept a divided and frightened migrant community fully informed of national and international civil rights matters through the West Indian Gazette. The paper, edited by Jones and Amy Garvey, was first issued in March 1958 and reflected broad interests. It carried information of cultural developments and reviews of new creative projects, in addition to political news. Jones was able to communicate with a range of people and important West Indian www.abc-clio.com

figures often sought her political and cultural analysis when they visited Britain. The West Indian Gazette was written, printed, and circulated against considerable odds and it survived only two issues after her death. Periods of imprisonment and poverty, together with the effort associated with production of the Gazette, contributed to Jones’s deteriorating heart condition. She was discovered dead in her flat on Christmas Day in 1964. Some private papers were removed and the autobiography that she was writing, which she had read to friends, disappeared. The literary work of Claudia Jones survives in fifteen poems that appeared occasionally in the issues of the West Indian Gazette. Sandra Courtman See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Civil Rights Movement; Notting Hill Carnival in London References Boyce Davies, Carole. “Poems by Claudia Jones.” Macomère 1 (1998): 35–37. Hill, R. “Fosterites and Feminists, or 1950s Ultra-leftists and the Invention of AmeriKKa.” New Left Review 228 (March–April 1998): 67–90. Johnson, Buzz. “I Think of My Mother”: Notes on the Life and Times of Claudia Jones. London: Karia Press, 1985. May, Claudia Rosemary. “Nuances of UnAmerican Literature(s): In Search of Claudia Jones. A Literary Retrospective on the Life, Times and Works of an ActivistWriter.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996. Sherwood, Marika. Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999.

JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY The Journal of Negro History was an African American scholarly journal established by historian Carter Godwin Woodson in

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1916. Woodson also was the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, “Negro History Week,” and Associated Publishers. The Journal of Negro History was instrumental in providing African American scholars with an outlet whereby they could publish works that reflected the history of the “Negro” race. Before its publication, issues of slavery, abolition, and other facets of black history were left to the interpretation of white scholars in leading historical journals. In an attempt to counter racist notions that often persisted in white scholarship, African American scholars included articles in the Journal of Negro History that outlined the challenges and accomplishments of enslaved Africans, which often incorporated primary source material. The use of primary source material was one of the early outstanding features of the publication. Through primary research, black scholars and white alike dispelled the belief that primary data relevant to the African American past did not exist. Diaries, letters, and oral testimonies were utilized, among other sources, to accomplish the task of educating the American populace about the history of blacks in American society. Talitha LeFlouria

JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ, SOR (1651–1695) Several of the nun Sor Juana’s literary works celebrate the African voices heard in Colonial Mexico. While Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and her works have primarily been associated with and analyzed from a protofeminist point of view, a number of her writings also reflect a consciousness of the African presence and influence in seventeenth-century Mexico. African voices reverberate in her villancicos, religiously themed, songlike polyphonic poems with festive or burlesque features, as well as her play Los empeños de una casa (The House of Trials). These articulations forge a multidimensional image of the Other in Spanish America as seen through their linguistic, cultural, and historical contributions to New World society. Mabel Moraña sees both blacks and Native Americans at the margins of Creole society in the villancicos of Sor Juana. She

See also: Slave Narratives References Goggin, Jacqueline. Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Goggin, Jacqueline. “Countering White Racist Scholarship: Carter G. Woodson and the Journal of Negro History.” Journal of Negro History 68 (1983): 355–375. McKissack, Patricia, and Fredrick McKissack. Carter G. Woodson: The Father of Black History. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 2002.

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Portrait of nun and poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. (Library of Congress)

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concludes that Sor Juana’s longstanding interest in this type of popular genre of marginalized tongues highlights the significance and rise of the Creole nation within the Old World imperial project. As a result, the nun’s writings reflect a cultural synthesis that is uncommon during the time period: “Sor Juana represents the sprit of cohabitation among different races under the banner of a single faith” (Orellana, 1990, p. 85). In the theatrical piece Los empeños de una casa, the character of Castaño, whose name translates as “chestnut” and alludes to his skin color, figures as the comic relief providing gracioso. However, as some critics have pointed out, Castaño can alternatively be seen as a “comic hero” (Johnson, 2001) and operating as a tool of satire, assessments that equally reaffirm the character’s range and agency. Sor Juana’s writings exhibit not only an interest in the marginal voice of women but also deal with questions of racial identity and integration in the fabric of Spanish America. Bonnie L. Gasior See also: Creole/Criollo; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic; Latin American Literature; Mexico; Mexico (Afro-Mexican Identity) References Johnson, Julie Greer. “Sor Juana’s Castaño: From Gracioso to Comic Hero.” South Atlantic Review 66, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 94–108. Moraña, Mabel. “Poder, raza y lengua: La construcción étnica del Otro en los villancicos de Sor Juana.” Colonial Latin American Review 4, no. 2 (1995): 139–54. Orellana, Margarita. “The Fever of the Image in Castas Painting.” Artes de Mexico: La Pintura de Castas 8 (1990): 84–85. Sabat de Rivers, Georgina. “Blanco, negro, rojo: semiosis racial en los villancicos de Sor Juana.” In Crítica semiológica de textos

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literarios hispánicos. Vol. 2 of las Actas del Congreso Internacional sobre Semiótica e Hispanismo celebrado en Madrid en los días del 20 al 25 de Junio de 1983, edited by Miguel Angel Garrido Gallardo. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1986. Weimer, Christopher. “Sor Juana as Feminist Playwright: The gracioso’s Satiric Function in Los empeños de una casa.” Latin American Theatre Review 26, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 91–98.

JUDAISM The history of Judaism, the monotheistic religion of the Jewish people that draws its spiritual and ethical principles from the Bible and the Talmud, also encompasses the history and historiography of Jewish ethnicity and African identity. The search for Jewish traces in Africa has long been a stimulus for colonial fantasies. Until the mid-twentieth century, European ethnographers had a tendency to Judaize any African civilization that did not fit their conventional representations of blackness. They based their assertions on such questionable clues as biometric measurements (the famous “Semitic nose”), backed vaguely with linguistic speculation: Ntoro, the Ashanti spirit, for example, apparently came from the Torah; Yam, their supreme being, was said to derive from Yahweh the god of Israel. The Fulani, Maasai, Tutsi, Igbo, Soninké, and Wolof, among others, were thus credited with mysterious Jewish origins. Current claims of Jewish roots are by far less numerous. They are also better documented, even though the descent of King Solomon, who built the First Temple of Israel in the tenth century BCE, remains a puzzling issue. According to Kebra Nagast (the Ethiopian national saga), Makeda, the

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Queen of Sheba, bore a son to Solomon, and this son, Menelik, founded the Solomonic dynasty in Aksum. Ethiopian Jews, claiming descent from Menelik, call themselves the Beta Israel (House of Israel, in Hebrew), a name which they prefer to the derogatory term Falasha (“gone into exile,” “landless ones” in the ancient Ge’ez language). Some historians rather consider the descendants as the tribe of Dan, one of the ten tribes dispersed after the Assyrian conquest in 721 BCE. Others believe they were Judaized at a later date through contact with Jewish merchants from Yemen. In any case, their Judaism predates the Talmudic commentaries that are the inspiration for most contemporary Jewish rituals. The religious observances of the Beta Israel are directly prescribed by the Torah. They ignore festivals and rituals based on rabbinical traditions. Their religious leaders are not rabbis but cahenat, a priestly caste, just like in biblical times. The Balemba, in southern Zimbabwe and the Limpopo Province of South Africa, also claim Solomonic descent. Their symbol is an elephant in the middle of a Star of David, and their diet, marriage ceremonies, burial rites, musical instruments, agricultural patterns, and harvest festival (Uturunga) seem manifestly Hebrew in origin. A genetic study carried out in the 1990s found a set of DNA sequences in the Balemba that is distinctive of Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Moses’s brother, Aaron. This genetic signature (Cohen Modal Haplotype) is particularly common among men of the Buba clan. Unlike the Beta Israel in Ethiopia, the Balemba gradually converted to Christianity over the centuries, but this genetic study has prompted a wave of reconversions to Judaism. www.abc-clio.com

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Conversions to Judaism, a religion generally hostile to proselytism, are uncommon, but the case of the Balemba is not an isolated one. In the 1920s, subsistence farmers from eastern Uganda, the Abayudaya, founded Kibina Kya Bayudaya Absesiga Katonda (the Community of Jews Who Trust in the Lord) and remained Jewish even under the repressive regime of Idi Amin Dada. The Abayudaya, numbering about 3,000 before the destruction of their synagogues and the persecutions of the 1970s, are in 2004 only about 500, but they have rebuilt their synagogues where they sing Jewish chants in Luganda and Hebrew. Other collective conversions occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century in Rusape (eastern Zimbabwe), and more recently in western Ghana, where the House of Israel community of Sefwi Wiawso and Sefwi Sui was founded in 1976. Several synagogues were also built throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Malagasy. Their founders declared they had had a “vision” revealing that their peoples belonged to the Lost Tribes of Israel. Since these are fairly recent conversions, their rites bear the most resemblance to western forms of modern Judaism. Substantial migrations into North Africa began after the Babylonian armies destroyed Jerusalem and its First Temple (586 BCE), and they increased further when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple (70 CE). Over the centuries, North African Jews have for the most part remained in contact with other Jewish communities around the world, while at the same time incorporating Berber, Arab, and Spanish customs. Moroccan Judaism, influenced by the Talmud from the time of its writing between the second and fifth

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centuries, became an important center for kabbalistic teaching. Two important events occurred in the seventh century: first, the Arab Conquest, marked by the resistance and defeat of the Kahina, the legendary queen of the Aures who reigned over the Jarawa, a tribe of Jewish Berbers; and next, the first expulsion from Spain, decreed in 694 by the Council of Toledo. North African Jewish communities, swelled by the arrival of Spanish Jews, would in the future be reduced to the status of dhimma: tolerated in the land of Islam but discriminated against and sometimes also persecuted. The second expulsion from Spain, in 1492, generated the last and largest wave of Jewish migration to North Africa. Some families went farther south, assisted by Jewish artisans and traders who had settled along the trans-Saharan routes for centuries. The best-known example is the Ka’ti family, who founded several villages that still exist around Timbuktu. Although under threat from Askia Muhammad, who forbade Judaism in the Songhay Empire, the Timbuktu Jews practiced their religion in secret for several generations before converting to Islam. Portugal waited until 1497 to expel its Jews. Before this expulsion, it applied a discriminatory head tax with the purpose of financing its colonial expansion. In 1493, as not all Jews were able to pay, King Manuel deported about 2,000 of their children, aged two to ten, to São Tomé. The aim was both to “punish” the Jews and to “whiten the race,” as the king put it. Only 600 children survived—and when they grew up, they continued to practice their religion, much to the anger of the Portuguese bishop. Today there are no practicing Jews in São Tomé but the memory of this tragic episode remains keenly felt. Other Portuguese Jews www.abc-clio.com

fled to Cape Verde to escape the Inquisition and gradually converted to Catholicism over the centuries. The Malian and Cape Verdean descendents of Spanish and Portuguese Jews are today rediscovering this aspect of their history through communitybased learning programs. North African Judaism, along with Ethiopian Judaism, died away during the second half of the twentieth century with the massive emigration to Israel, Europe, and North America. Today, only a few thousand Jews remain in Morocco, and a few thousand also in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa and the region around Gonder, on the border with Sudan. From the end of the 1940s, there were several waves of antiJewish riots, and communities that had been settled for thousands of years in Libya and Egypt were totally wiped out. JewishArab relations and, as a result, Judaism in Africa would today be very different if the Zionist movement in Europe had accepted the proposal by the British secretary of state for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, to create a national Jewish homeland on the uninhabited Uasin Gishu plateau (in present-day western Kenya). Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, was personally in favor but the Russian delegates to the Sixth Zionist Congress, held in Basle in 1903, were fiercely opposed. South Africa now has the largest Jewish community in Africa; they are considered part of the white minority. The community was formed after the 1880s with the arrival of European immigrants, mainly from Lithuania. A few white South African Jews distinguished themselves in South Africa’s liberation struggle, such as Joe Slovo and Ronnie Kasrils, but for the most part they tended to adapt, collectively, to apartheid. This attitude, coupled with the extensive

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cooperation between Israel and the apartheid regime, contributed to the increase in negative representations of the Jews and Judaism in Africa and the Americas. The irony is that until the mid-1960s, Israel often voted against South Africa in the United Nations. Relations between the two countries only improved after the Six-Day War in 1967, when most African states, in a movement of solidarity with the Arab cause, broke off diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv. Political processes in the Middle East, South Africa, and the United States have greatly shaped black-Jewish relations since the 1970s. The common bond of suffering that once brought the two peoples together has now loosened. The Judeophile attitude of the first African American Pan-Africanists, such as Edward W. Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, or Marcus Garvey, who saw in Zionism a model for a return to Africa, is now just a memory. Michel Ben Arrous See also: Egypt; Falasha (Beta Israel); Religion (Africa); Songhay (Medieval Empire); South Africa, History and Politics; Zimbabwe References Chouraqui, André. Between East and West, a Story of the Jews in North Africa. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Parfitt, Tudor, and Emanuela Trevisan Semi, eds. The Beta Israel in Ethiopia and Israel: Studies on Ethiopian Jews. Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 1999. Primack, Karen, ed. Jews in Places You Never Thought Of. Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 2003.

JUNETEENTH Juneteenth is an African American holiday commemorating the emancipation of all slaves. Major General Gordon Granger along with Union soldiers arrived in www.abc-clio.com

Galveston, Texas, with the announcement that the Civil War had concluded and all slaves now were free on June 19, 1865, which commenced the celebration of Juneteenth and led to the holiday’s name. General Order Number Three included the following: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.” The announcement, greeted with thanksgiving and jubilation by slaves, came almost two-and-a-half years after President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The reason for the delay possibly had to do with a combination of factors, including General Lee’s surrender in April 1865 and a shortage of highranking Union troops in Texas. But scholars have disagreed upon why it took so long. As the holiday developed, celebrations moved from church grounds to public accommodations like Emancipation Park in Houston, Texas, and Booker T. Washington Park, Mexia, Texas, where thousands annually celebrated. In 1980, Juneteenth was recognized as an official Texas holiday, as a result of the leadership of Al Edwards, an African American state legislator. In recent times, national Juneteenth organizations have contributed to an increase in cultural awareness, official state recognition beyond Texas, and the resurgence of the oldest ongoing African American celebration of emancipation. The celebration has taken on a variety of expressions from parades and commemoration programs to cookouts

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and dances. Yet a prominent feature has remained the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and reflection upon the significance of freedom. Roland Barksdale-Hall See also: Emancipation Proclamation; Slavery (Economics); Slavery (History)

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References Anyike, James C. African American Holidays: A Historical Research and Resource Guide to Cultural Celebrations. Chicago: Popular Truth, 1991. Taylor, Charles A. Juneteenth: A Celebration of Freedom. Greensboro, NC: Open Hand Publishing, 2002.

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K KANEM-BORNU EMPIRE Kanem and Bornu were two ancient Islamic empires populated chiefly by the Kanuri ethnic group and located in the Lake Chad region of West Africa, in modern-day Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Libya. The empires, throughout their history, amalgamated and separated several times, but were always closely associated. Mai Idris Alawma (r. 1570–1603) united and expanded the empires in the sixteenth century, and by the eighteenth century Bornu had established itself as a major power in the Sudanic region. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the Fulani jihads and establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate in neighboring Hausaland began having an impact on the western border of Bornu. Fulanis in Bornu attacked major cities in hopes of incorporating the empire into Sokoto. The ruling Mai sought aid from Kanem and the forces of Muhamad al-Amin al-Kanemi responded by repelling the Fulani onslaught. Although Kanem-Bornu was largely populated and ruled by Muslims, the Fulani jihadists insisted that paganism and the persecution of Fulanis were rife in Bornu. Years of hostilities followed, but ultimately the Sokoto Caliphate and Bornu came to a compromise whereby the most westerly provinces became part of Sokoto and the balance

remained Bornu. After preserving Bornu, al-Kanemi became its ruler, but less than a decade after his death Kanem-Bornu came under control of the Sultanate of Wadai in 1846. A major effect of years of internecine warfare and the larger jihad in Hausaland was the enslavement of captives on both sides, who were often sent to other parts of Africa or the Americas. Brent Singleton See also: Fulani; Nigeria; Sokoto Caliphate References Cohen, Ronald. The Kanuri of Bornu. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967. Hiskett, M. “The Nineteenth-Century Jihads in West Africa.” In The Cambridge History of West Africa, edited by John E. Flint. Vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Webster, J. B., A. A. Boahen, and M. Tidy. The Revolutionary Years: West Africa since 1800. London: Longman, 1980.

KAUNDA, KENNETH (1924–) Kenneth Kaunda was the first president of Zambia, a position he held from 1964 to1991. He was born at the Lubwa Mission in Chinsali, Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Kaunda’s long political career was launched in 1950 when he formed the

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Lubwa branch of the African National Congress (ANC). Within three years he had risen to the position of secretary general of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress. In 1958 Kaunda and others, including Simon Kapwepwe, broke from the ANC to form the Zambia African National Congress (ZANC). When ZANC became the United National Independence Party (UNIP), Kaunda was elected as the group’s president. The UNIP went on to win fourteen seats in the Legislative Assembly in 1962 and Kaunda was named minister of Local Government and Social Welfare. The elections of 1964 were swept by UNIP, with Kaunda becoming prime minister of Northern Rhodesia in January of that year. Kaunda held the prime ministership until October 24, 1964, when he became the first president of the newly independent Zambia. Following an outbreak of violence during the 1968 elections, Kaunda, already intolerant of opposition, banned all opposition parties. In 1972 he officially made Zambia a one-party state. A major figure on the postcolonial stage in Africa, Kaunda served as president of the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa (PAFMESCA) in 1962 and as chair of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) from 1970 to 1973. During the 1970s and 1980s, Kaunda was sharply criticized for meeting personally with representatives of the South African apartheid regime. By the mid-1980s Zambia’s economic downturn, exacerbated by Kaunda’s policies that left the country largely dependent on copper exports for revenue, combined with government corruption, sparked renewed opposition to UNIP rule. In the face of www.abc-clio.com

growing public calls for a return to multiparty politics, Kaunda finally relented and allowed multiparty elections in 1991. Kaunda’s unopposed rule of Zambia ended after those elections, which saw the presidency go to Frederick Chiluba of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD). Kaunda’s attempt to win back the seat in 1996 was barred following a cynical constitutional change that excluded candidates with foreign parentage (Kaunda’s parents were Malawian). Since leaving the electoral realm, Kaunda has established the Kenneth Kaunda Peace Foundation, addressing issues of conflict resolution and peace in Africa. As the first Balfour African president in residence at Boston University, Kaunda has addressed audiences across the United States on issues of HIV/AIDS and social and economic development in Africa. Jeff Shantz References Burnette, M. M. Zambia: Between Two Worlds. Boulder, CO: Western Press, 1988. Kaunda, K. The Riddle of Violence. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1980. MacPherson, F. Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia: The Times and the Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

KENTE CLOTH Kente cloth is a striking, colorful textile woven by the Ashanti people of Ghana. Silk and cotton are the main raw materials, and it is traditionally woven by men on narrow horizontal looms. Strips of woven fabric three to four inches wide and seven to ten feet long are sewn together to make the cloth—eight to ten strips sewn together for women’s garments, and twenty to twenty-five strips for those of the men. Colors are symbolic: gold represents royalty

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and wealth; red, danger, war, and death; blue, love, harmony, and affection; green, fertility or vitality; and white, purity and innocence. Men wear the cloth draped toga style, whereas women wear it as skirts, tops, and headpieces. Kente has played an important role in the lives of the Ashanti. Thousands of different patterns commemorate people, events, and sayings. It is also used ritually to indicate royalty, wealth, and status. Historically, kente was worn by the king and his court, but beginning in the early twentieth century, wealthy merchants dealt commercially in the cloth, and it became a widespread commodity. Kente, however, is still treasured by the people of Ghana, who wear it on special occasions. Kwame N’krumah, the first president of Ghana, was instrumental in introducing kente to the United States by wearing it on official state visits. Later, during the 1960s, African Americans adopted the cloth as a symbol of black pride and unity. Presently, kente is used not only in ethnic fashions but also on ceremonial occasions. Kathy A. Campbell See also: Ghana; N’Krumah, Kwame References Adjaye, Joseph K., and Adrianne R. Andrews, eds. Language, Rhythm, and Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twenty-first Century. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Adler, Peter, and Nicholas Barnard. African Majesty: Textile Art of the Ashanti and Ewe. London: Thames & Hudson, 1992.

KENYA Located on the east coast of Africa, the Republic of Kenya has a population of approximately 32,022,000. The country is bisected by the equator and has always been rich www.abc-clio.com

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agricultural land. For many centuries Kenya was a rich trading area for Arab and later European merchants. In 1827 Charles Millet, a merchant from Salem, Massachusetts, arrived on the brig Ann and became the first American trading captain to visit the East African coast. He traded in the port of Mombasa. By the 1840s and 1850s, American traders came to dominate the Kenyan coast. Many of them brought with them the unbleached cotton cloth woven in Massachusetts, which is still known as merikani in Swahili. During the American Civil War, Confederate raiders attacked U.S. merchant ships with the CSS Alabama sailing along the Kenyan coastline. These raiders caused major losses to the U.S. merchant navy, not only in ships physically lost at sea but also to those having to be sold or “reflagged” owing to massive rises in insurance premiums. By the late nineteenth century, British, and to a lesser extent, French ships, dominated the East African coast. The British had originally taken over Kenya under the auspices of the Imperial British East Africa Company, with, from 1890, a protectorate over the sultanate of Witu. Some missionaries, such as Ohioborn Willis Hotchkiss and Wisconsin-born John Stauffacher, came to Kenya during this period. In 1906 the area was put under the control of the British Colonial Office with a governor appointed to administer the region. Although there were a few settlers from before World War I, after 1920 large numbers of British settlers, and also some other Europeans and Americans (including big-game hunter Paul Rainey from Cleveland, Ohio), started migrating to Kenya. There were large farms available and the central highlands was quickly dominated by large white-owned farmsteads which grew tea, coffee, and bred cattle.

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By this time significant numbers of British and American tourists had started taking safaris in Kenya. Theodore Roosevelt was one of the more celebrated visitors when he toured Kenya in 1910, his account being published as African Game Trails. Another famous American to tour Kenya was Ernest Hemingway, who went on a safari in the mid-1930s and this experience was incorporated in his novel Green Hills of Africa (1936). He also used the trip to write The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936)—Mount Kilimanjaro being in Tanzania. Others had been inspired by films and also by traveling exhibitions such as those organized by American James Barnes as far back as the 1920s. U.S. physician George Crile, after a safari in 1927, established a laboratory at Maji Moto, where he was able to research comparative anatomy in animals. There was also trade, with Berry Boswell Brooks buying cattle in Kenya and taking them back to Arkansas and Tennessee. However, after World War II, increasing nationalist agitation led to the Mau-Mau Uprising and attacks on white-owned farms. Eventually, with escalating violence and the British clearly unable to maintain law and order, negotiations began and on December 12, 1963, Kenya gained its independence. Jomo Kenyatta, a key figure in the Pan-African movement, would become the nation’s first prime minister and then its first president. When Kenya became independent, the United States provided £3,206,000 in financial aid to the new country, and the United States has remained on good relations with Kenya ever since. It has maintained a consulate in Mombasa since at least 1916, and in Nairobi from at least 1919. The first U.S. ambassador to Kenya was William Attwood, a former journalist who had been ambassador to Guinea from 1961 to 1963. He was www.abc-clio.com

in Kenya from 1964 until 1966, describing his experiences in The Reds and the Blacks (1967). This period saw a massive increase in U.S. tourists visiting the country. Writer Elspeth Huxley, whose famous The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) encapsulated the life of the British in Kenya, had studied at Cornell University. Her books increased interest in Kenya in the United States, as did Joy Adamson’s famous Born Free (1960), about Adamson’s life with a lioness. It was made into a film in 1966 by American film producers Sam Jaffe and Paul Radin. In addition, many U.S. academics researched in Kenya, with Irven Devore and Richard Borshay Lee writing on the primates of Kenya, and Herbert Friedman working on the birds of Kenya. Kenya still remains popular with U.S. and Canadian tourists, and with increasing numbers from South America. Sadly, a grimmer transatlantic connection was created in August 1998 when the U.S. embassy in Nairobi was bombed. Some 247 people were killed and 5,000 injured. It caused a massive increase in security at all U.S. embassies around the world and attention being focused on Osama bin Laden, who was identified as the perpetrator. Justin Corfield See also: British Empire; Pan-Africanism; Terrorism References Amsden, Alice H. International Firms and Labour in Kenya 1945–1970. London: Cass, 1971. Ochieng, William R. A History of Kenya. London: Macmillan Kenya, 1985.

KHOISAN Khoisan is the generic term used to describe cultural and linguistic groupings currently existing in the western region of

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South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. Africa’s oldest cultural grouping. Modern scientists have declared the Khoisan to be the genetically closest surviving people to the original woman from whence all mankind emerged, also known as the Mitochondrial Eve. Although widely studied by cultural anthropologists and linguists alike, they remain one of the most misunderstood cultural/linguistic groupings in the world. Much of the misconception surrounding the Khoisan finds its roots in the historical legacy of racially and culturally biased observations of colonial explorers and missionaries. The term has been used to describe groups of people—including but not limited to the Khoikhoi (also referred to as Khoi; pejoratively referred to as Hottentot) and the San (derogatorily referred to as Bushmen)—as if they were one people. In actuality, the Khoikhoi, translated to mean “the real people,” were historically nomadic herders of cattle and sheep who lived in large groups, whereas the San, translated to mean “outsider,” were hunter-gatherers who lived in much smaller groups. Interestingly, anthropologists report that because the hunter-gatherers did not have a collective name for themselves in their own language, they prefer to be called “Bushmen,” as the term “San” was used by the Khoikhoi as an insult. What is more interesting is that if such accounts are accurate, the group seemingly fails to recognize the insult inherent in the term “Bushmen.” Khoisan has also been used to refer to a linguistic family reductively characterized by its use of “click consonants.” Early Dutch colonialists, baffled by the intricate sounds of the language, created the term “Hottentot” to describe what they had heard. Hottentot is actually the transliterawww.abc-clio.com

tion of the Dutch words hateren (to stammer) and tateren (to stutter), and as such labels the people stutterers. The most dysfunctional manifestation of European misconceptions about the Khoisan recorded to date is the case of “Hottentot Venus,” Saartjie (Sara) Baartman, who in life was put on exhibition throughout Europe during the nineteenth century, and after death, whose skeleton, preserved genitals, and brain were displayed in Paris Musee de l’Homme until 1985. Yaba Amgborale Blay See also: Exploration and Explorers, Africa; South Africa, History and Politics Reference Barnard, Alan. Hunters and Herders of South Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of the Khoisan Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

KINCAID, JAMAICA (1949–) Jamaica Kincaid is an author of short stories, novels, and essays. She was born Elaine Potter Richardson on the island of Antigua in 1949. Kincaid was educated in the British colonial system. At age seventeen, Kincaid left Antigua for New York to become an au pair. Kincaid also worked as a staff writer at several magazines including The Village Voice and The New Yorker, where her first short stories were published. These short stories were compiled later into her first book At the Bottom of the River (1992). The first essay in this collection, “Girl,” addresses colonial dominance and dominion, and specifically female impositions in a patriarchal society and sets the stage for Kincaid’s later works. Written from the point of view of the mother (although she is not mentioned once), this essay chronicles the complicated and

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complex love-hate relationship between a mother and her daughter. Underlying this personal relationship, fraught with ambivalence, is a political one. The mother-daughter dichotomy bears symbolic resonance to the relationship between the self and the colonial mother (country), England. This theme is further developed and given full critical attention in Kincaid’s first novel, Annie John (1986). In Annie John Kincaid exposes the ills of British colonial education, underscoring colonial indoctrination and subjugation. This book also incorporates African ancestral practices inhabited in the myth of the Flying African, embodied in the grandmother and spiritual healer and ancestress, Ma Chess, who miraculously appears and disappears on the island as she bridges the gap between Old World and New World. A Small Place (1988) is Kincaid’s most poignant critique of colonialism and colonialist ventures. Detailing the harsh present conditions in her lost paradise, Antigua, Kincaid addresses the double colonization, formerly by England and presently by the United States, of the island and its inhabitants. America has replaced Britain in its imperialist ventures as tourism becomes another, though subtler, form of colonization. Duped, the inhabitants have begun to see themselves through Western eyes; therefore it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the victor and the vanquished. The shameful legacy of Antigua’s colonial past lives on; there is no visible difference between the colonialists and the existing government that mimics and duplicates imperialist tendencies— political and economic exploitation and subjugation—of the colonials. Kincaid’s critique of America as present imperial power is given ample weight in her reference to www.abc-clio.com

the 1983 Grenada invasion by the U.S. government. The actual events of Kincaid’s second novel, Lucy (1991), unfold in America, the colonial mother (country). America’s might is both asserted and questioned in this novel as Kincaid repeatedly poses the question: “How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also” (1991, p. 41). This position of “privilege,” of being both victor and vanquished is only available to a “chosen” few (the powerful), a point Kincaid underscores in her comment about explorers who had crossed the seas in search of not only riches but also freedom: “On their way to freedom some people find riches, some people find death” (1991, p. 129). The pervasive mother-daughter motif that forms the crux of the novel is employed as a subtext for the colonial relationship, the relationship between the powerful and the powerless. In The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) Kincaid returns to the Caribbean landscape, to her mother’s homeland Dominica (although often stating that her works are a combination of fiction and truth, her truth, one cannot help but notice, is the recurrent autobiographical references in Kincaid’s works). In this third novel the theme of motherlessness occupies center stage and the notion of surrogacy is fiercely interrogated. The absence of the biological mother or mother figure lends to the rejection of the motherland. The barren state that categorizes Dominica is representational of the devastation that has afflicted many of the islands. While the mother (land), the Caribbean landscape, is obfuscated, imagery of an imagined colonial past, England, is ever present. This colonial presence (in spite of self-governance) is maintained and epitomized in the “father,”

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whether present or absent. It is this “reserved” male power that Kincaid refers to when she writes that the lives of men always could be found in the pages of a book (Lucy, 1991, p. 95). In her memoir, My Brother (1997), awarded the Prix Fémina in 2000, Kincaid offers a searing and uninhibited account of her brother’s death related to AIDS and her mother’s indifference to his impending death. The personal life story of her brother is the story of her family, the hardships they endured on the island of Antigua, and specifically about her mother who adopts the powerful suffocating image of a colonial mother. This text also chronicles Devon’s (Kincaid’s brother) relationship to the Caribbean community and its relationship to him and the disease AIDS. In Mr. Potter (2002) Kincaid returns to her obsession with the island of Antigua. The fictional story of Mr. Potter is the story of an impoverished community. His struggles are emblematic of the community’s continued struggles. Amidst these struggles Mr. Potter is obsessed with acquiring power, a symbol of status and a male preoccupation as Kincaid suggests. Language is another obsession of Kincaid. It is a symbol of both empowerment and disempowerment. Illuminating the disempowering effects of a colonial (adopted) language forced upon a people who were deprived of their original tongue, Kincaid sees the orphans and orphanages left behind as a result of this disenfranchisement: “the millions of people . . . made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods . . . and most painful of all, no tongue. (For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?” (A Small Place, 1988, p. 31). www.abc-clio.com

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Yet, Kincaid “chooses” to use the language of the criminal (evidence of her position as a member of the “powerless” for she hasn’t a choice), not to detail the “goodness” of his deeds, but to curse him, to chronicle the horror, the abuse, the injustices, the agony, and humiliation inflicted upon the weak and powerless. Simone A. James Alexander See also: Caribbean Literature; Colonialism References Alexander, Simone A. James. “Growing Pains: Construction of the Girl Child/Woman Child in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Mango Season: Caribbean Women’s Writing 31, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 54–63. Alexander, Simone A. James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Ferguson, Moira. “A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” Kenyon Review 16, no. 1 (1994): 163–188. Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Kincaid, Jamaica. At the Bottom of the River. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Kincaid, Jamaica. My Brother. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Vorda, Allan. “‘I Come from a Place That’s Very Unreal’: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” In Face-to-Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists, edited by Allan Vorda and Daniel Stern. Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1993.

KING JR., MARTIN LUTHER (1929–1968) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the most important leader of the black freedom struggle during the 1950s and 1960s known as the Civil Rights Movement. King grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and received a

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Martin Luther King Jr. led the African American civil rights struggle before his assassination in 1968. His powerful speeches, writings, and ideals of equality have inspired people internationally. (Library of Congress)

bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College before moving north to earn his PhD in theology, which he received in 1955. A year earlier, King had returned to the South to preach at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. It was the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, declared segregation illegal. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American native of Montgomery, was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a city bus to a white person. Local blacks, led by King, began to boycott the city’s buses not only in an effort to change things in their town but to test the nation’s commitment to enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling barring segregation. After more than a year of struggle both on the streets and in the courts, the city of Montgomery desegregated its public transportation system. Blacks nationwide, inspired by the example www.abc-clio.com

set by King and his charges, organized similar protests, and these spiritually connected crusades were coined the Civil Rights Movement. In 1957 King was named president of a confederation of black ministers that would come to be known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This position, combined with King’s heroic efforts during the Montgomery campaign, secured his place as one of the nation’s most important leaders, a moral voice whose courage and speaking ability gave the black freedom struggle nationwide credibility. A year later, King published his first book, Stride Towards Freedom, which further publicized the urgency of the cause. Although he was not a black nationalist, and believed that freedom and morality would be won through integrated cooperation between American blacks and whites, King always had an interest in the worldwide underpinnings of racism and poverty. He believed that the same systems that kept African Americans from first-class citizenship were similar and connected to those that had maintained the subjugation of Asia and Africa under European powers. In March 1957, King traveled to Ghana to attend the inauguration of Kwame N’krumah, whose ascent to power marked the country as the first African nation to achieve independence from colonization. As the Civil Rights Movement wore on, King more explicitly began to tie events and historical processes in Africa and the Caribbean to things that were happening in the United States. In his December 1964 speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, King drew parallels between the fights by blacks in Africa and America for political power. In a January 1965 interview with Playboy, King mentioned repeatedly the

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connections between Africa and America, claiming that black Americans were the cultural and spiritual descendants of Africa and that their struggles for freedom and independence were mutual. In one of his most famous works, the 1967 book Why We Can’t Wait, King cited the rise of thirtyfour African nations from colonization as a clarion call to African Americans that freedom was achievable in their own country. Had he not been murdered in 1968, it is quite possible that King would have even more strongly paralleled the struggles of Africans and African Americans, perhaps ultimately trying to coordinate efforts between both the continent’s blacks, as panAfricanists like Marcus Garvey had tried to do in the past. Michael Ezra References King, Jr., Martin Luther. Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. King, Jr., Martin Luther. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. Edited by James M. Washington. New York: HarperCollins, 1986. “Playboy Interview: Martin Luther King.” Playboy 12 (January 1965): 117.

KONGO The word Kongo refers to both the Bakongo, a population group from West Central Africa, and to an array of cultural and religious practices shared by large numbers of people in Central Africa and the Americas since the era of the Atlantic slave trade. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Kongo group consolidated a large territory of vassal provinces around their capital of Mbanza Kongo, under the leadership of their king, the manikongo. This kingdom extended from south of www.abc-clio.com

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today’s Gabon to the northern parts of Angola and east into the actual Democratic Republic of Congo’s interior. Its political system was formally organized, hierarchical, and centralized in the hand of the manikongo. In 1482, with the arrival of the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cam, the Kongo kingdom entered into European history. The manikongo adopted Catholicism as its state religion and built economic and diplomatic links with Portugal and the Papacy. Soon after, however, the kingdom started to suffer from the combined disruptive effects of waves of invasions, civil war, and the growing Atlantic slave trade. Following the decisive battle of Mbwila (1665), lost by the Kongo to the Portuguese, the kingdom crumbled into small warring chieftaincies. This situation lasted through the following centuries up to the nineteenth century Belgian colonization. As a part of the larger Bantu cultural and linguistic area, the Kongo share with the populations around them key religious, linguistic, and social features. Kikongo, the language of the Bakongo is a Bantu idiom related to the adjacent Swahili and Shona and to a small extent mutually understandable. Kongo religion is centered on ancestor worship and a belief in the close relationship between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The centuries-long relationship with European traders and missionaries has had some bearing on the Kongo belief system and religious art, both of which integrate in their discourse traits and icons of Christianity. Socially, one of the long-lasting effects of the mixing of Christianity and Kongo worldviews has been the proliferation of prophetic or messianic politico-religious movements from the early eighteenth century Antonians to 1920s Kimbanguism.

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Central Africa has been one of the main gateways for the deportation of Africans to be sold as slaves in the Americas. On the foreign continent, Bantu slaves from Central Africa have recreated a culture based on the common traits of their groups of origin and identified by the word Kongo. Kongo has taken different forms in various parts of the Western Hemisphere, but has remained the vibrant manifestation of shared beliefs. Practicing and employing paquets congo in Haiti or prendas in Cuba is believing in the agency of the same spirits that the bottle-trees from the United States’ South try to capture. Kongo also serves to describe sociocultural space of empowerment among the members of the African Diaspora. In Brazil as well as in Cuba or Haiti, distinct groups have formed calling themselves Kongo Nations and symbolically electing their own kings. Cecile Alice Fromont See also: Africa, Precolonial; Ancestor Worship; Diaspora, Demography of; Religion (Africa) References Balandier, Georges. Daily Life in the Kingdom of the Kongo from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. 1st American ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968. Thompson, Robert Farris, Joseph Cornet, and National Gallery of Art. The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981.

KRU SAILORS The name “Kru,” also spelled “Kroo,” refers to the West African ethnic group who originated in eastern Liberia and migrated and settled along various points of the West African coast, notably Freetown, Sierra Leone, but also the Ivorian and Nigerian

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coasts. Kru people also migrated to the British port cities of Liverpool, London, Cardiff, and elsewhere. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the name Kru became synonymous with seafaring in West Africa, though its associations with the sea stretched back much further. Initially, Kru people developed maritime skills through their work as fishermen and traders along the Liberian coast. These skills allowed them to secure work on European ships as sailors, navigators, and interpreters. By the eighteenth century, Kru people were invaluable in shipping the live “cargoes” from shore to ship in lighters along the treacherous Liberian coast. Evidence also suggests that Kru people were involved in the actual trading of slaves with Spanish traders. Kru sailors also worked aboard slave ships bound for the Americas; they were employed as interpreters, navigators, and as stevedores loading and discharging cargoes. Kru people were more valuable as traders and sailors on slave ships than as slave labor. To ensure their status as “freemen,” they initiated the practice of tattooing their foreheads and the bridge of their nose with indigo dye to distinguish them from slave labor. With the abolition of the slave trade, Kru sailors sought alternative economic opportunities and many migrated to Freetown to work on British vessels trading there. They also were able to find work aboard American and British warships operating out of Freetown that were used to combat the illegal trade in slaves. Freetown became the British headquarters of the Royal Navy’s antislave trade squadron. Many factors operated in the decision to employ Kru people as sailors on British ships. Initially, they were used to fill labor shortages left by white crews who had died

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or fallen sick on the malaria-infested West African coast. Secondly, they were used as laborers or stevedores on the coast to save white labor from the arduous task of loading and discharging cargoes in the steamy climate of tropical West Africa. Kru labor was also cheaper to employ and were slower to organize in trade unions. Kru seamen and auxiliaries were employed on U.S. trading ships on the Windward Coast of West Africa in the 1830s and 1840s. Evidence suggests they were frequent visitors to America from at least the nineteenth century. Kru labor and other African people became an important part of the Atlantic working class. They emerged as a direct result of the historical evolution of Atlantic capitalism. Europe, Africa, and the Americas became inextricably linked in a triangle of Atlantic global trade. There were many actors in this trade: the wealthy and powerful, and those who had only their labor power to sell. The Kru’s involvement as workers in this transatlantic system of trade transported them not only up and down the West African coast as well as farther afield to Europe and America. Thus opportunities for waged employment not only existed along the West African coast in Freetown and elsewhere but also in Britain and the Guianas in the Caribbean. Migration from Liberia in search of waged work saw relations between the Kru people and the Settler-Liberian government (also referred to as Afro-Americans) break down over the introduction of taxes at all ports on labor and commodities in the 1840s and 1850s. The American Colonization Society had colonized Liberia in 1821, and then proceeded to settle freed American slaves there. In their struggle

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against the Liberian government, the Kru began to trade arms and gunpowder in preparation for armed conflict with the Liberian state. Waged labor on board ships became a means of buying arms to resist Liberian encroachments on Kru land and the introduction of taxes on Kru leaving and entering Liberia. By 1910, different Kru communities were at war with the Liberian government. The latter had at their disposal the Liberian militia, the Frontier Force, and the American cruiser Birmingham. In addition, in an attempt to crush the Kru, the United States sent to Liberia weapons and officers to lead the Frontier Force. The Birmingham was used to bombard Kru settlements on the coast, while others inland were burned to the ground. Around 100 miles (161 kilometers) of this coast became involved in the Kru revolt—an armed struggle against the American-backed SettlerLiberian government. Established Kru communities have grown up in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and in Liverpool and Cardiff in the United Kingdom. Such communities emerged out of the need of British capitalism to utilize free waged labor during the slave trade, and later during colonization and postcolonization. With the demise of world shipping, the introduction of containerization, and the use of cheaper Far Eastern crews, Kru people are no longer prominent in shipping conducted from West Africa. In Liverpool, the Kru community is not being replenished with the settlement of Kru migrants. This community consists of a mere handful of elderly Kru men (with even fewer Kru women). The children of first-generation Kru often identify themselves in the context of Liverpool with the larger group

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identity of “black British” or Liverpoolborn black or “black of African descent.” Such identities often indicate an ancestry of mixed heritage which might include African-Irish, African-English, AfricanCaribbean, African-Arab, African-Chinese, or in some cases a heritage that incorporates several of these over three or more generations. Diane Frost See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Liberia; Sailors; Slavery (History)

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References Brooks, Jr., G. E. The Kru Mariner in the 19th Century: A Historical Compendium. Liberian Studies Monograph Series No 1. Newark, NJ: Liberian Studies Association, 1972. Frost, D. Work and Community among West African Migrant Workers. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1999. Schuler, M. “Kru Emigration to British and French Guiana 1841–1857.” In Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade, edited by P. E. Lovejoy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

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L LAING, KOJO (1946–) Kojo Laing is a contemporary Ghanaian novelist writing in English. From the mid1980s, Kojo Laing has been recognized as one of the most innovative African writers. Drawing inspiration from ancestral cultural forms, he pushed the boundaries of the novel to unexplored extremes and (alongside other authors like Ben Okri and Syl Cheney-Coker) contributed to the development of a specific kind of West African magical realism, which departs from Latin American authors. Born of an educated middle-class Ghanaian family, he studied in Scotland from 1957 to 1968, graduating with an MA in political science and history. There he also published his first poems, expressing his feelings of alienation in the face of European racism through a concrete and graphic conception of language. Back in Ghana, he worked as a district administrative officer in various regions and at the University of Ghana. From 1984 he has dedicated himself to managing some secondary schools (a family enterprise), keeping aloof from academic and intellectual circles. His first novel, Search Sweet Country (1986), focuses on a variegated group of characters struggling to define their personal identities between 1975 and 1977, during Acheampong’s military rule. Laing’s lyricism,

his insertion of neologisms and of terms from several languages reproducing Accra’s multilingualism, his use of formal devices from the oral tradition, his magic realism mixing spirits and witches amidst the living, and his concentrated imagery won Laing isolated praises and a few awards, and also puzzlement and neglect. Laing’s following novels continued this search for a new identity capable of harmonizing ancestral traditions and Western culture, spiritual and material dimensions, through even bolder literary experiments. Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) is set in the other-dimensional town of Tukwan, Ghanaian and invisible at the same time, inhabited by immortals who long for a multicultural identity and therefore visit the immortal Scottish town of Levensvale. Anything can apparently happen in the novel, such as characters swapping parts of their bodies and the town sage blowing pipe smoke in the shape of words. Rather than magic realism, Woman builds a world approaching cartoons, or an outlandish folktale dimension; Laing has always identified nonrepresentational art, African and European, as one of his major inspirations. This dimension is also evident in his only collection of poems, Godhorse (1989), similarly marked by a humorously disrespectful attitude toward language and meaning.

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Laing’s novel Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992) constitutes another carnivalesque enterprise, this time with a science-fiction strain. Set in 2020, it narrates the “Wars of Existence” between the greedy Western nations and a Ghana where only the eponymous town is still existing, whereas the rest of the country has mysteriously vanished. Laing turns symbols into concrete images (symbols and shadows actually become real characters in the novel), and the disappeared land is to be seen as a fictional rendering of today’s ideological assault on Africa. The success of Achimota’s strategy becomes tangible when pieces of the vanished land float back from the Atlantic: on one small plot, a Ghanaian man is found constantly moping—“his favourite occupation was refusing” (p. 123), an obvious reference to Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1856), the emblematic victim of Western civilization’s sterility. Pietro Deandrea See also: Ghana References Deandrea, Pietro. Fertile Crossings— Metamorphoses of Genre in Anglophone West African Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Kropp Dakubu, Mary Esther. “Kojo Laing.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander. Vol. 157, Twentieth Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, Third Series. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman/Gale, 1996. Laing, Kojo. Search Sweet Country. London: Heinemann, 1986. Laing, Kojo. Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars. London: Heinemann, 1992.

LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE The European presence in Latin America has always been accompanied by an African presence, and this is the case with Latin American literature. When Christopher www.abc-clio.com

Columbus was arriving in the New World on the Santa María, an African named Pedro Alonso Niño was serving as the pilot of La Niña. By 1502, things had quickly changed; no longer working as pilots, blacks were arriving in Hispaniola as Spanish-born (ladino) domestic servants. With the number of dying enslaved Amerindians rising and the number of black slaves from Spain diminishing, African slaves (bozal ) were sought to fill the gap in free labor left by the dead Amerindians. Blacks were eventually moved from Africa to the islands and ultimately on to the mainland where they occupied a gambit of roles from domestics to hard laborers, and sometimes their roles even included being co-conquistadors. There are reports of blacks traveling with Hernando Cortés in 1519 to Mexico, with Francisco de Montejo in 1521 to Yucatan, and also with Pedro de Alvarado to Guatemala in 1524 and later to Peru in 1534. It was not until circa 1569 that blacks were first represented in Latin American literature. In Alonso de Ercilla y Zúniga’s La araucana that was published in three installments in 1569, 1578, and 1589, there is a black slave who functions as a would-be executioner of an Araucanian Indian chief who ostensibly executes himself rather than be the victim of the slave. Next, the black slave is seen in Sylvestre de Balboa’s poem “Espejo de Paciencia” (1608), where he rescues a Spanish bishop from French pirates and is ultimately granted his freedom as recompense for his good deed. Balboa’s work does more than simply reinterpret the black slave as a character with some redeemable qualities; it also discusses the themes of slavery and freedom while presenting the idea that the enslaved may wish to be something other than victimized. This concept is revisited and further explored

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throughout the Latin America canon. In 1806 Pantaleón Rivarola produced a balladlike work “Romance de la Defensa” in which he recounts the tale of the courageous slave Pablo Jiménez, who kills two English soldiers in his effort to rescue his brother. In 1821 Juan Francisco Manzano offered Poesías líricas (Cantos a Lesbia) as the first published book of poems by a black author in Cuba. After gaining his freedom in 1836, Manzano published Autobiografía (1840) in London, but the work had been circulated in manuscript form from 1835 until its publication. In Autobiografía, Manzano discusses the tragedy of slavery from the slave’s perspective, and that telling directly criticizes the cruel system of slavery along with the perpetuators of the system in the way of its slaveholders. His indictment is so scathing that only the first portion of his work survived his former master’s friends’ wrath and destruction. This work serves as a great example of the intrinsic tensions that exist between those who wish to have freedom, especially the literate marginados (marginalized), and all other parties involved with the slavery system. For the oppressed, the literature— while not always intentionally political— finds itself being seen as a polemic document opposing the powerbrokers atop the economic, political, and social hierarchy. The black artist, just as other artists of that time, may have tried to use art as a possible means of expression, a form of therapy, or a mode of financial advancement; but this marginalized voice of artistic expression relating his view of the world was interpreted as a blow against the well-defined establishment. Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, a free black in Cuba, writing under the pseudonym Plácido, wrote verses that gently challenged Spanish autocracy and www.abc-clio.com

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consequently caused his imprisonment. Later he was sentenced to death because of his rumored connection with the Conspiracy of the Ladder slave revolt. Ultimately it was determined that Plácido and his works were too volatile to be allowed to continue, so he was finally executed. The tragedy beyond Valdés’s death rests with the effect it had on Manzano’s literary aspirations. Manzano was reminded that his written thoughts were in fact in diametric opposition to the beliefs and desires of the rulers of the kingdom of slavery. His earlier plan of writing a novel detailing the most horrific elements of slavery that he omitted from his diary died with Valdés. These two virtual contemporaries—one enslaved and one free—laid the paradigmatic groundwork for many future writers. One functioned as the individual working to improve the personal lot of one (Manzano), while the other functioned as the individual working to improve the lot of the masses (Valdes); both, however, used literary expression as the means for advancement. Through their efforts, they left a long-lasting imprint on Latin American literature and culture. Directly to Manzano’s credit is the imitation by white intellectual/abolitionist writers who saw his work and attempted to recreate works similar to his in an effort to shift thoughts about slavery. This imitation presents the greatest irony in that the white modeling of the slave narrative functions as the nexus where the two worlds of Manzano and Valdes met; Manzano’s attempt to improve his personal lot becomes the means by which the collective lot of many may be improved. In 1845 Martins Pena produced his theatrical works treating the everyday life of Rio de Janeiro Brazilians. While AfroBrazilians did not function as the primary

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theme of his work O Cigano, they did appear in marginalized roles. Pena presents blacks as stupid and easily manipulated. In his work, three principal characters run a smuggling ring in which they convince slaves to leave their present place of servitude to work in the mines of Minas Gerais. This happens by the promise that eight days of mine work will grant slaves their freedom. In 1850 Agrario de Meneses presented a play with Brazil’s first protagonist of color entitled Calabar, based on a true story of Calabar, a mulatto. Calabar, who begins as a Portuguese officer, betrays the Portuguese army during the Dutch Wars because he is a scorned lover; when the woman he loves loves another within the Portuguese ranks, he allies himself with the Dutch in order to seek revenge. He has no great loyalty to either side because both forces essentially represent the same thing—a European presence in Brazil. Between 1851 and 1855, when José Mármol presented his Amalia, blacks in Argentina are presented as an economically depressed but free group of individuals who in a muted way contribute to the political structure under the dictator Juan Manuel de Rojas. In 1860 José de Alencar gave the world his play Mãe in which a slave cares for a successful young man who does not initially realize that the slave is his mother, but the truth is eventually uncovered. In 1867 Jorge Isaac published his work Maria in which the reader sees the conditions of Colombian slaves during the early portion of the nineteenth century. In 1877 the Afro-Colombian poet Candelario Obeso, also known as the “Colombian Othello,” published the controversial Cantos populares de mi tierra, which functioned as the precursor to Poesía negra (Black Poetry). His works, just like his life, were focused www.abc-clio.com

around his frustrations of living within a racially oppressive environment. In 1881 Arthur Azevedo’s Brazilian play O Liberato has a slave as the central character, but he never actually enters the stage. While all of the other characters talk about him and his fate, he dies before being able to direct his own life. By 1884, the issue of slavery and sexuality began to surface in Latin American literary works, with Arthur Azevedo treating the theme in O Escravocrata, where the black protagonist Lourenço fathers his mistress’s child. Elsewhere, black women in Latin American literature in a fashion moved into the company of corrupted white men and women from both Europe and the United States. With the publishing of Tradiciones y Leyendas Mexicanas, the world hears of “The Mulatto of Córdoba,” the beautiful woman of black blood who makes a deal with the Devil. After being discovered, she is punished by the community; this story is slightly reminiscent of the Faust legends and the Salem Witch Trials. During the period of the 1880s, Cuban writers actively began to use literature as a means of political protest and critique. Through the hard work of Domingo del Monte, authors such as Alselmo Suárez y Romero and Cecilia Villaverde were encouraged to present slavery realistically and to examine slavery as a formal theme. Works by these Cuban writers, coupled with Brazilian abolitionist works like Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s As Vítimas Algozes (1869), Júlio Ribeiro’s A Carne (1888), and Aldolfo Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo (1895), actively worked to present the horrors of slavery in such a way as to eventually attract the attention of the Western world. By the beginning of the twentieth century, blacks and their literature were being

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considered in terms of their collective similarities and not necessarily in terms of strict geographical confines. Europe began to evaluate Africa and its descendants in a very new way; they were no longer only a means for free labor but a source of an alternative culture. This culture extended itself beyond offering simple self-sustenance; it was a viable contributor to the Western world. In 1910 Leo Frobenius published The Black Decameron and in 1917 Oswald Spengler published Decline of the West. Not only offering a theme for European writers but also for the visual arts, Africa was having an influence on Apollinaire’s African statues as well as Pablo Picasso’s “The Damsels from Avignon,” where he presents black imagery in cubist form. Europe in a sense was looking for and finding itself in parts of Africa. By the 1920s a major shift took place with respect to black writers and whites’ appreciation for African contributions to the Latin American landscape in the way of the literary movement known as negrismo. Negrismo, also known as black poetry or Afro-Antillan poetry, initially began as a literary movement in which white writers, such as Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos, Cubans Emilio Ballagas and Ramón Guirao y Zacarías Tallet, among others, offered a folkloric, primitive, and exotic vision of blacks. They attempted to integrate their impressions of Africa into literature through an overt and intentional placement of blackness and Africanism within poetry through the use of true and morphed African lexicons that sometimes created Spanish neologisms. Negrista works from white authors provided a framework or a literary corpus to embody and present the theme of Africa to the mainstream, but it was not until the entrance of black practitioners like Nicolás www.abc-clio.com

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Guillén that negrismo came to possess and reflect the authentic spirit of the African within the movement. Later in the 1930s the negritude movement, an intellectual conduit for black French speakers, began to take root. Both negrismo and negritude celebrated African ancestry, and both showed the historical progress of the African descendant while simultaneously forecasting the possibility for future writers wishing to tackle the themes and challenges historically associated with African influences in Latin American literature. After Guillén’s publications, there seemed to be a virtual explosion of works treating the theme of the African and his descendants in the Latin American world. No longer the slave to whom the Aruacanian Indian chief refuses to submit himself for execution, the African descendant is praised; and the African descendant is praising his own heritage. He is no longer only the subject but he is the agent evaluating his history and himself. Ordner Taylor See also: Calabar; Caribbean Literature; Guillén, Nicolás; Literature, African; Literature, African American; Négritude; Spanish Empire References Chang-Rodriguez, Raquel, and Malva E. Filer. Voces de Hispanoamerica: Antologia literaria. 2nd ed. Boston: Heinle, 1996. Cortada, Rafael L. “Introduction.” In Dictionary of Afro-Latin American Civilization, edited by Benjamin Nuñez. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Jackson, Richard. Black Writers in the Hispanic Canon. New York: Twayne, 1997. Luis, William. “History and Fiction: Black Narrative in Latin America and the Caribbean.” In Voices from Under: Black Narrative in Latina American and the Caribbean, edited by William Luis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

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682 LEAGUE OF COLOURED PEOPLES Matheus, John F. “African Footprints in Hispanic-American Literature.” In Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays, edited by Miriam DeCosta. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977. Rassner, Ronald M. “Palmares and the Freed Slave in Afro-Brazilian Literature.” In Voices from Under: Black Narrative in Latina American and the Caribbean, edited by William Luis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. Rout, Leslie B. The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Spratlin, Valaurez B. “The Negro in Spanish Literature.” In Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays, edited by Miriam DeCosta. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977.

LEAGUE OF COLOURED PEOPLES The League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) was the largest British pan-African organization in the 1930s and 1940s. It was founded in London in March 1931 by Dr. Harold Moody and modeled on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). League membership was multiracial, but the leadership was exclusively in black hands, predominantly West Indian and African. The LCP aims were to promote the welfare of “coloured peoples in all parts of the world” and to improve race relations. Effecting these aims involved lobbying government and private institutions to end racial discrimination that was widely practiced in Britain and in the colonial Empire. The LCP quarterly journal, The Keys, first published in 1933, reflected James Aggrey’s aphorism that both the black and the white keys of the piano had to be played together for effective melody. Throughout its life the league was always plagued by lack of money www.abc-clio.com

and overreliance on voluntary workers. League funds were supplemented from Moody’s pocket and much of the work undertaken by his family—to the extent that the LCP was often accused of being a Moody family affair. Initially the league was mainly concerned with social and welfare activities and was unfairly thought to represent only the interests of professional and middle-class black people. In 1935 it began an effective enquiry into discrimination by shipowners and trade unions that deprived black colonial and British seamen of work by labeling them as “aliens.” More widely, the LCP lobbied over the Scottsboro Boys and protested various colonial policies. One of Moody’s aims was to cultivate the support and good will of influential people as a means of bringing about change in racial policies and attitudes. He was probably more successful in the former than the latter. At times the league cooperated with other black organizations in London, such as WASU (West African Students’ Union). Relations with WASU were soured by a dispute over the control and direction of a student hostel largely funded by the Colonial Office. The LCP was also accused by radical black spokesmen, such as the Marxists George Padmore and C. L. R. James, of being conservative and too closely identified with official, particularly Colonial Office, interests, although both men and other radicals wrote for The Keys and respected Moody. The LCP was radicalized in the mid1930s by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, became more pan-African, and began to cooperate with other black radical groups to denounce British weakness in the face of fascist aggression. That cooperation continued over labor unrest in the British

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Caribbean with a league resolution demanding radical social and welfare changes, selfgovernment, and federation for the British West Indies. The LCP also campaigned for black Britons to be eligible for commissions in the armed forces, against land alienation by white settlers in Africa, and denounced Nazi and fascist policies on race. League membership and influence reached its zenith in 1943 with several branches in Britain and the colonies. Britain’s black population increased in wartime as people from the empire came to join the armed forces and to work in industry and agriculture. The presence of large numbers of black GIs and the racial discrimination policies of the U.S. armed forces often exerted a baleful influence on British people and institutions. The LCP campaigned to break down racial barriers and to end racial discrimination in hotels, public houses, restaurants, and dance halls. It also argued for changes in the school curriculum. The twelfth annual general meeting of the LCP in Liverpool in 1943, attended by 500 people, agreed to a “Charter for Colonial Freedom.” In 1944 a more strongly worded “Charter for Coloured Peoples” called for “full self-government at the earliest opportunity” for colonial peoples, and for legislation to end racial discrimination in employment and in public places in Britain. Although the LCP had discussed a future pan-African congress, it played only a minor role in the congress held in Manchester in July 1945, largely because of Moody’s hostility to its leftist focus. Thus the LCP, the main pan-African organization in Britain, bypassed an opportunity to bring its influence to bear on a gathering that is now seen as having considerable political significance. Largely under the thumb of Moody, LCP policy was mainly concerned www.abc-clio.com

with establishing cultural centers in a number of cities that would provide accommodations for black people and promote good race relations. Moody died in April 1947. Robbed of his leadership and his many official contacts, the League of Coloured Peoples became a less effective body. There were internal disputes over policies, finance, and leadership. Although it had become more radical in voice, by the early 1950s the LCP was greatly reduced in members and was only one organization among several seeking to represent the interests and claims of a black population that was growing steadily as a result of new immigration from the Caribbean. David Killingray See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Decolonization, African; Marson, Una References Killingray, David. “‘To Do Something for the Race’: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples.” In West African Intellectuals, edited by Bill Schwarz. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003. Macdonald, Roderick J. “Dr Harold Arundel Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples 1931–1947: A Retrospective View.” Race 14, no. 3 (1973): 291–310. Macdonald, Roderick J. “Introductory Essay.” In The Keys: The Official Organ of the League of Colored Peoples, Vols. 1–7 (1933–1939). Millwood, NY: KrausThomson Organisation Ltd., 1976. Rush, Anne Spry. “Imperial Identity in Colonial Minds: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples, 1931–50.” Twentieth Century British History 13, no. 4 (2002): 356–383.

LEAGUE OF NATIONS The League of Nations was a post–World War I organization formed to prevent international conflicts. At the end of World

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Exiled Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie speaks before the League of Nations in 1936, urging the group to renounce Italy’s claim on Ethiopia. Selassie had previously appealed to the League in 1934, when Italian and Ethiopian forces first clashed. Conflict was followed by a full-scale invasion of Ethiopia by the forces of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. (Library of Congress)

War I (1914–1918), the idea surfaced among world leaders that such an organization was needed to prevent international conflicts. At the Paris Peace Conference in January 18, 1919, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson chaired the committee with the responsibility of drawing up a covenant for such an organization. In a speech, Wilson framed his Fourteen Points for a new world order that resulted in the League of Nations. The covenant, ratified as part of the Versailles Peace Treaty, instituted the league on January 10, 1920, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The league began with forty-two members; at its peak in 1934, it had fifty-eight member states participating. www.abc-clio.com

The league’s assembly consisted of representatives of its members; a council, which included permanent members and members elected by the assembly; and a secretariat. The five world powers, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States, were to make up the permanent members of the council; however, Wilson failed to get the Versailles Peace Treaty ratified in the senate and so the United States did not participate in the league. The league was further weakened in the 1930s when Japan and Germany withdrew their membership in 1933, and with Italy following in 1937. The Soviet Union (USSR) was elected as a permanent member in 1934 but was expelled in 1938 after it attacked Finland.

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Various articles made up the charter of the league. The covenant contained 26 articles, most of which were dedicated to maintaining peace and promoting international cooperation. Other articles, such as number ten, stipulated that sovereignty and independence of individual states would not be undermined by the league. Article twenty-three dealt with securing humanitarian rights, while twenty-five made provisions for Red Cross societies. The league also made provisions for handling diseases, drug addiction, and traffic in women and children worldwide. Its judicial branch, the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) at The Hague, which arose out of article fourteen of the covenant, heard 65 cases and successfully reached 37 judgments. In addition, the International Labor Organization (ILO) was also successful in improving working conditions worldwide. However, the league had weaknesses. It wielded no considerable military force and attempted to impose economic sanctions on offenders that were largely ineffective. Most poignantly, the league was unable to prevent any of the events that led to World War II. Where Africa and the Caribbean region were concerned, the league was only indirectly related to the extent that it wielded theoretical power over the nations that claimed parts of Africa and the Caribbean for themselves. Article twentytwo, for instance, mandated that colonies taken from the defeated powers should be turned over to other members of the league for administrative purposes, since it was felt that these peoples could not successfully govern themselves. However, the body was hardly able to protect these so-called embryonic territories from outside disturbances. For instance, in 1935 the league www.abc-clio.com

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sanctioned Italy for attacking Abyssinia (Ethiopia) but failed to prevent the invasion. The success of the league relied heavily on the ability of the “great powers” to unite and enforce disarmaments and impose military sanctions on aggressors. Only Britain and France remained permanent members throughout the life of the league, and this, among other factors, undermined its peacekeeping ability. The league was dissolved on April 19, 1946, and replaced by the United Nations. While the league did not prevent conflicts from occurring, it did play an important role in world politics and created a model for the United Nations, which continues to have a role in international peacekeeping and arbitration. Dalea Bean See also: Decolonization, African References Butler, Sir Geoffrey. A Handbook to the League of Nations. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1925. League of Nations home page. http://www .indiana.edu/~league/ (accessed May 8, 2005). Rappard, William. The Geneva Experiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931. Zimmern, Alfred. The League of Nations and the Rule of Law 1918–1935. London: Macmillan, 1939.

LESOTHO A landlocked country entirely surrounded by South Africa, the Kingdom of Lesotho has a population of about 1,865,000. It was originally the British colony of Basutoland, which was established when Moshoeshoe, the Sutu ruler, concluded a treaty with the British to protect his country from the Boers. Initially, British government agents oversaw the protectorate, but after the Disannexation Act of 1883, a resident

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commissioner was appointed. He served under the high commissioner for South Africa until South Africa became a republic in 1961. During the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1901, Canadian soldiers served alongside the British and other British Empire soldiers, and some were garrisoned in Basutoland. In 1910 Basutoland refused to be incorporated into South Africa, and retained its separate identity. As with all colonial administrations, many civil servants in British Africa previously served in the Caribbean. Two of the governors of Basutoland previously served in the West Indies: Edwin Porter Arrowsmith, who was governor from 1951 until 1955, was governor of Turks and Caicos Islands and Dominica in 1946 and later governor of the Falkland Islands; and Alexander Falconer Giles, governor from 1961 until 1966, had been governor of St. Vincent. Basutoland was granted independence on October 4, 1966, and became the Kingdom of Lesotho. Being a member of the British Commonwealth, there were relatively few contacts with the Americas. The U.S. Peace Corps started work in Lesotho in 1967; the Presbyterian Church in the United States from the 1970s; and the Congo Inland Mission from 1973. One of the major works on the country, The Guide to Lesotho, first published in 1974, was written by David Ambrose, a British-born schoolteacher who had studied at the University of Colorado. During South Africa’s era of apartheid, Lesotho supported activities against apartheid, including taking in refugees from South Africa. In turn, Lesotho became visible to the United States in the context of antiapartheid activities. It also became a relatively small trading partner, with Lesotho www.abc-clio.com

exports to the United States largely being textiles. Justin Corfield See also: British Empire; South Africa, History and Politics Reference Ambrose, David. The Guide to Lesotho. Maseru, Lesotho: Winchester Press, 1976.

LEWIS, MARY EDMONIA (1845–1911?) Mary Edmonia Lewis was the first African American woman to gain recognition as an artist and as a sculptor both in the United States and internationally. Her most famous works include Death of Cleopatra (1875) and Forever Free (1867). Unfortunately, little information remains about Lewis’s life and career. Her father was an African American freeman, and her mother was of Ojibwa (Chippewa) and African American descent. Born in upstate New York, she was orphaned at a young age. Two aunts, who belonged to a Mississauga Chippewa band, “adopted” her and her siblings. Lewis claimed that her Chippewa name meant “wildfire.” Her older brother was a gold miner, and he sent Lewis to New York Central College and Oberlin College. Oberlin was a major center for abolitionists, and the college accepted African Americans and women as students. However, the artist confronted racism in this liberal setting. During the winter break of her third year at Oberlin, the artist was accused of poisoning two young women. Lewis supposedly gave them spice wine before they went on a sleigh ride. During the ride, the girls suffered stomach pains, and the artist was accused of foul play. Soon after she was accused, Lewis was abducted

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and beaten. The charges against her were dropped because of insufficient evidence. Lewis suffered emotional scars because of this incident, and she moved to Boston. She apprenticed under Edmond Brackett and eventually opened a studio. After gaining a successful reputation, Lewis sailed to Italy in 1865. She moved to Rome where she established another studio and continued her studies. She joined many expatriate artists in Rome. During her stay in Rome, Lewis was influenced by the Greco-Roman sculpture. Thus, her work represented her transatlantic experiences with European styles and American subject matter. Her Forever Free was carved in marble, and its figures wore dress reminiscent of classical Roman attire. It was the first sculpture to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation that freed America’s slaves. Her Death of Cleopatra was famous and notorious internationally and nationally. This sculpture was neoclassical, and it captured the moment of Cleopatra’s death. Cleopatra represented black identity because Egypt was the symbol for black Africa in the nineteenth century. Lewis’s masterpiece was noted as an affirmation of African American identity. In Rome, Lewis sculpted altarpieces for the Roman Catholic Church. In 1874, Lewis returned to the United States and was honored for her international success. One critic claimed that she was the most interesting representative of America and he hoped other American artists would follow her example. In 1876, Lewis’s sculptures were well received at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. After 1876, her artwork declined in popularity, and she sank into obscurity. Her remaining sculptures represent her amazing transatlantic journey as an artist. Kelly J. Baker www.abc-clio.com

See also: Smithsonian African Art Museum References “Edmonia Lewis.” In A History of AfricanAmerican Artists from 1792 to the Present, edited by Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Wolfe, Rinna Evelyn. Edmonia Lewis: Wildfire in Marble. Berkeley, CA: Muse Wood Press, 2001.

LIBERATION THEOLOGY The term liberation theology was popularized by the Roman Catholic Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino and is often used in reference to a movement within Latin American Roman Catholicism. However, the terms liberation theology or theologies of liberation are now regularly employed to refer to a number of other related theologies that seek to integrate an active concern for social justice with a belief in Christianity. Liberation theologies have developed in both Africa and the Americas, including Latin American liberation theology, Latino/Latina liberation theology, mujerista theology, black theology, South African liberation theology, and womanist theology. All liberation theologies are contextual theologies that take into account the particular social, political, historical, and cultural settings of religious inquiry. Not all contextual theologies are theologies of liberation, however. Theologies of indigenization and enculturation, for example, also take cultural setting into account. These theologies seek to more adequately fit Christianity to a particular culture and in this way effectuate a more thorough process of religious conversion. Theologies of liberation, however, are not primarily concerned with evangelization, but with overcoming oppression and injustice. Liberation theologians promote earthly

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as well as heavenly justice for those who are oppressed. Thus, theologies of liberation emphasize the importance of both spiritual and physical freedom. The birth of Latin American liberation theology is often located either during the creation of the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) in the 1950s or during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) initiated by Pope John XXIII. Nevertheless, many of the ideas that contributed to the growth of the movement in the late twentieth century have been present in Latin America for centuries. In fact, Latin American liberation theologians recognize the Spaniard Bartolomé de las Casas as a predecessor to contemporary practitioners of liberation theology. Las Casas, whose father traveled to the Americas with Christopher Columbus, participated in the conquest of Cuba and joined the Dominican order of the Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century. Las Casas was one of the first people, if not the first, to be ordained to the priesthood in the Americas. Las Casas, who became bishop of Chiapas, used his position to vocally condemn the abuses committed by the Spaniards against the indigenous people of the Americas. His famous Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de las Indias (Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies) published in 1552 and the posthumously published in 1875–1876 Historia de las Yndias (History of the Indies) made his views public and cemented his reputation as defender of the Indians. Las Casas did not initially condemn the treatment of enslaved Africans, and even suggested that the importation of African slaves could help to alleviate the burden the Spanish had placed on Native Americans. Las Casas later regretted this suggestion, however, and his www.abc-clio.com

unrelenting indictment of Spanish atrocities in the Americas demonstrated a lifelong commitment to fighting injustice. Those who practice Latin American liberation theology, like Las Casas, have dedicated themselves to exposing injustices and improving the lives of the subjugated and the underprivileged. Camilo Torres Restrepo, a Catholic priest from Colombia who later became a guerilla commander, is often cited as a predecessor of liberation theology. He was a professor who cofounded the sociology department at the National University in Colombia before he died in an armed struggle against the Colombian military. He is one of a number of priests who took up arms to defend the cause of liberation for the poor in Latin America. While many liberation theologians have been politically active, most have used peaceful methods to promote social change. One of the most influential theologians and practitioners of liberation theology was Brazilian archbishop Hélder Pessoa Câmara. In 1967, he led a group of bishops who published a message promoting a “preferential option for the poor.” This phrase would later become synonymous with the goals of Latin American liberation theology. In 1971, Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, considered the founder of liberation theology by many, published his monumental Theology of Liberation and the term he had coined a few years earlier began to receive extensive international recognition. The Brazilian Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of liberation theology along with Gutiérrez, published Church: Charisma and Power in 1981. In 1985, the Vatican condemned Boff to silence and removed him from religious duties for the ideas he expressed in this book. In 1986, the decision was reversed after an outpouring of international support

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for Boff. However, facing renewed criticism by the Vatican in 1992, Boff made the decision to leave the Franciscan order and continue his struggle as a lay theologian, writer, speaker, and professor. Other important figures in the development of liberation theology include the Argentinean Miguel Ramondetti, founder of the Movement of Priests for the Third World (MSTM), the Brazilian Hugo Assmann, author of Oppression-Liberation (1971), and the Uruguayan Juan Luis Segundo, author of The Liberation of Theology (1975). Additional well-known figures from Latin America associated with liberation theology include the Nicaraguan priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal Martínez, the Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, assassinated in 1980, and the former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Noted practitioners of Latin American liberation theology who are not Roman Catholics include the Methodist minister José Miguez Bonino from Argentina, author of Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (1975); the Presbyterian Rubem Alves from Brazil, author of A Theology of Hope (1969); and the Presbyterian Elsa Tamez from Mexico. A noted theologian, professor, and author of Through Her Eyes: Women’s Theology from Latin America (1989), Elsa Tamez incorporates the insights of both liberation theology and feminist theology in her work. Based in Costa Rica, Tamez has successfully encouraged other liberation theologians to give greater consideration to the importance of women’s voices and women’s lives. Tamez, Miguez Bonino, Alves, Gutiérrez, L. Boff and his brother Clodovis Boff, author of A Church for the Next Millenium (1998), are among the many theologians who continue to actively promote and practice liberation theology in Latin America. www.abc-clio.com

Latino/Latina liberation theology in the United States, also known as U.S. Hispanic theology, maintains strong ties to Latin American liberation theology. However, while some theologians, such as James Cone, have argued that contemporary Latin American liberation theology continues to marginalize issues of racial and ethnic oppression in favor of focusing on political and economic oppression, Latino/ Latina liberation theology has kept issues of ethnic discrimination in the forefront along with the continuing problems of economic oppression. Latino/Latina liberation theology’s most prominent contemporary theorist and practitioner is Virgilio Elizondo. A Mexican American born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Elizondo is a Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and author of many books including A God of Incredible Surprises: Jesus of Galilee (2004). Founder of the Mexican-American Cultural Center (MACC) and former rector of San Antonio’s San Fernando Cathedral, Elizondo was influenced by the Second Vatican Council and is a coeditor of the collection Teología y Liberación (Theology and liberation) published in 1991. Elizondo’s interest in liberation theology is apparent in his concept of the Galilean Jesus. Elizondo analyzes the specific multicultural context of Jesus’s life in Galilee and the prejudice Jesus was exposed to as an ethnic outsider in order to better understand the contemporary context of Mexican-American communities. Other influential theologians in this area include Arturo Bañuelos, Orlando Espín, Roberto S. Goizueta, and Justo L. González. Mujerista theology, or Latina feminist theology, is a growing field of inquiry that has also contributed significantly to the development of Latina/Latino liberation

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theology. Mujerista theology attempts to enable Latina women to liberate themselves as members of a shared Latino/Latina community and also strives to have a positive impact on mainstream theologies. This theology was first elaborated by Ada María Isasi-Díaz in her book En la Lucha: A Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology (1993). Isasi-Díaz, a Cuban-born Catholic theologian and the leading proponent of mujerista theology, promotes the importance of creating bridges between various groups of Latinos and Latinas. Isasi-Díaz expanded her earlier work in La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology (2004). Other key figures in Latina feminist theology include María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodriguez. Black theology in the United States highlights issues of racial and ethnic discrimination. Unlike Latin American and Latina/Latino liberation theologies, which are largely though not exclusively Roman Catholic, black theology has been primarily produced and practiced within Protestant communities. While many date the development of black theology to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the late twentieth century in the United States, others locate black theology’s roots in the great revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and some situate it still earlier in the arrival of enslaved Africans to the American continent in the sixteenth century. Prominent predecessors to contemporary black theology include the slave rebellion leader Nat Turner, the abolitionists David Walker, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass, as well as the African Methodist Episcopal bishop Henry McNeale Turner. James H. Cone, African Methodist Episcopal minister, theologian, professor, www.abc-clio.com

and author of numerous books, including Black Theology and Black Power (1969), was the first to formulate a systematic black theology, and he continues to play an active role in the ongoing dialogue on black theology. Other highly influential proponents of varieties of black theology include J. Deotis Roberts, author of Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology (1971; 1994); William R. Jones, author of Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology (1973; 1997); Gayraud S. Wilmore, author of Black Religion and Black Radicalism (1983; 1998); Kelly Brown Douglass, author of The Black Christ (1994); and Dwight Hopkins, author of Heart and Head: Black Theology Past, Present, and Future (2002). South African liberation theology or black theology shares many parallels with U.S. black theology. While contextual Christian theologies in other countries of the African continent have tended to emphasize issues of enculturation and Africanization rather than liberation, numerous South African Christian theologians responded to the evils of apartheid and the lingering inequality between whites and blacks in South Africa with a strong appeal to political mobilization against oppression. Even as the Black Power Movement in the United States helped prepare the ground for the emergence of black theology in the late 1960s, the black consciousness movement, founded by Steven Biko in South Africa in 1977, helped to pave the way for a unified response to apartheid. Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize and the first black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, has made equal rights and a shared educational system the center of his campaign against

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inequality in South Africa. His sermons, speeches, and other statements have been collected in edited volumes, including Crying in the Wilderness: The Struggle for Justice in South Africa (1982). In postapartheid South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission met from 1996 to 1998 under Bishop Tutu’s leadership. Alan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches from 1982 to 1991, is the author of the influential Farewell to Innocence: A Socio-Ethical Study on Black Theology and Black Power (1976). Boesak has argued for a worldwide theology of liberation and dislikes the tendency among certain U.S. black theologians to employ blackness as the symbol of oppression. Roxanne Jordan, author of “Black Feminist Theology in South Africa” from We Are One Voice (1989) identifies a common struggle against white supremacy, shared by blacks in the United States and South Africa. Other key figures in South African liberation theology include the Lutheran bishop Manas Buthelezi and the Pentecostal reverend Frank Chikane, a pastor in the Apostolic Faith Mission. Womanist theology seeks to address some of the blind spots in the previously mentioned theologies of liberation. Developed around Alice Walker’s concept of a womanist as a black feminist or feminist of color, womanist theology focuses on the necessity of eliminating all forms of oppression, including race and gender discrimination. Womanist theologians include Katie Cannon, author of Black Womanist Ethics (1988); Jacquelyn Grant, author of White Woman’s Christ, Black Woman’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (1989); Dolores Williams, author of Sisters in the Wilderness: Womanist Theology (1993); and Diana L. Hayes, author of www.abc-clio.com

Hagar’s Daughters: Womanist Ways of Being in the World (1995). Womanist theologian Renee Hill was the first to criticize the lack of attention paid to sexuality and particularly to lesbianism in womanist theology. Hill argued that issues of sexuality cannot be divorced from womanist concerns about community and survival. Kelly Brown Douglass, also influential in the area of black theology as noted above, is another contemporary practitioner of womanist theology who has written on the subject of sexuality. An Episcopal priest, she has employed womanist theology to address the issue of sexual orientation, most notably in Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (1999). Sara Armengot See also: Douglass, Frederick; South Africa, History and Politics; Truth, Sojourner; Turner, Nat; Tutu, Desmond References Boff, Leonardo, and Clodovis Boff. Introducing Liberation Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. 1987. Cone, James. Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968–1998. Boston: Beacon, 2000. Dussel, Enrique. Philosophy of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985. Grant, Jacquelyn. Sisters in the Wilderness: Womanist Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993. Hayes, Diana L. And Still We Rise: An Introduction to Black Liberation Theology. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1996. Hill, Renee. “Who Are We for Each Other? Sexism, Sexuality, and Womanist Theology.” In Black Theology: A Documentary History, Volume II: 1980–1992, edited by James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993. Jordan, Roxanne. “Black Feminist Theology in South Africa.” In We Are One Voice, edited by Simon S. Maimela and Dwight N. Hopkins. Johannesburg, South Africa: Skotaville, 1989.

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692 LIBERIA Pilar Aquino, María et al. A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice. Austin: University of Texas, 2002. Rowland, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Watson, Natalie K. Feminist Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Young, Josiah U. Black and African Theologies: Siblings or Distant Cousins? Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986.

LIBERIA Liberia, whose name means “free,” is an African nation with a history of relations with the United States from nineteenthcentury abolitionism and repatriation plans to current political and economic issues. The long relationship has influenced the history, politics, and culture of Liberia’s people, making Liberia the African nation most noticeably connected to the United States.

History Officially known as the Republic of Liberia, the tropical country was once a trading post for Portuguese explorers in the 1400s. Its location on the western side of Africa, just north of the equator, makes Liberia an easily accessible port of entry from the Atlantic Ocean. The Portuguese traded ivory, spices, and slaves from the interior. In 1822, the repatriation movement of the American Colonization Society (ACS) established Liberia as a colony for freed African slaves. This colony was the beginning of Liberia’s close connection to the United States. The ACS consisted primarily of Quakers and slaveholders. The former believed in the abolition of slavery and the latter believed that the freed slave would destroy the American economy. They both agreed that freed slaves and free-born blacks should be taken to Africa, despite www.abc-clio.com

opposition from blacks. Over the next forty years, 19,900 African Americans, a few West Indians, and about 5,000 Africans recaptured from slave ships settled in Liberia. After being ruled by the ACS for 25 years, Liberia gained independence on July 26, 1847, making it today Africa’s oldest independent nation and the second oldest independent nation of primarily black citizens (Haiti is the oldest). Liberia is one of only two African countries never colonized by a European country; Ethiopia is the other. Liberia became an example of independence to the many African countries. Its independence was first recognized by England and France in 1848 and 1852, respectively, but was not recognized by the United States until 1862, after slavery in the United States had been abolished. Most visibly tying Liberia to the United States is its flag. Known as the “Lone Star,” it has six red and five white alternating stripes and a white star in the upper left corner against a blue canton. For many years, Liberia used American currency, but as the Liberian economy declined and was burdened by foreign debt in the early twentieth century, particularly after World War I, the American dollar became scarce. However, the United States continued to provide financial support in loans to its African ally for years to come.

Politics Liberia’s political values stem from U.S. colonization. As a result, Liberia is a republic: it has a constitution, with a bill of rights, that divides the government into executive, legislative, and judicial branches; the Supreme Court heads the court system. Descendants of the freed slaves who settled in Liberia are known as AmericoLiberians. After gaining independence,

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Americo-Liberians led both the government and the economy even though they represented a very small percentage of Liberia’s population. This small percentage controlled the government for many years through the True Wig Party (TWP). A free-born black raised in America, Joseph Jenkins Roberts was Liberia’s first president. The political division between the emigrants and indigenous people was revealed through the division of labor—for years the indigenous people did most of the menial labor and were not allowed the educational, housing, and political opportunities or representation they deserved. As a result, there was increasing tension between ethnic groups. The TWP was in power until 1980 when Samuel K. Doe, of the Krahn ethnic group, led a successful coup d’état during which President William R. Tolbert was assassinated. When Doe was officially elected in 1985, the 133-year-long rule by Americo-Liberians was ended by the People’s Redemption Council (PRC). However, from the time Doe took control in 1980, his rule was brutal and continued to distance ethnic groups from each other. Doe eliminated his political rivals by enforced exile or assassination. Members of his cabinet were primarily Krahn even though Krahns made up only 5 percent of Liberia’s population. Liberia’s civil war began on December 24, 1989, when Charles Taylor, leader of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), invaded Liberia from its neighboring country, Côte d’Ivoire. On September 9, 1990, President Doe was assassinated by rebel forces led by Prince Johnson, who was once a member of the NPFL and had formed the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL). By October 1990, Liberia’s Interim Government of www.abc-clio.com

National Unity (IGNU) was established. Amos C. Sawyer was named president of Liberia, but Charles Taylor continued the war, refusing to cooperate with the new government. While civil war continued, the Cold War ended and Liberia was no longer a strategic interest to the United States, which was concentrating on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. As a result, Liberia’s most prominent international supporter was not eager to physically intervene though it gave $500 million in humanitarian assistance. Peacekeeping efforts by the Economic Community of West African States Cease-fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) were ignored by the NPFL and challenged by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which was divided over intervention. On July 19, 1997, elections were held after the United States, United Nations, Africa Union, and ECOWAS successfully negotiated disarmament and demobilization of the warring factions. It was the first election in twelve years. Taylor won the election, but six years later, Liberia had not seen much improvement. Taylor aided the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone; his actions led to the resurrection of armed fighting against him from his adversaries, and corruption and social unrest continued. As a result of Taylor’s support of the RUF, the United Nations imposed sanctions against Liberia in 2001. Relations between the United States and Liberia were already strained, especially since the United States was hesitant to supply much intervention during Liberia’s civil war. After a considerable amount of pressure from the international community, Charles Taylor resigned on August 11, 2003. He was granted asylum in Nigeria, an act that

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caused dissension between Liberians who wanted Taylor tried in a court in Sierra Leone and the United States who helped negotiate Taylor’s exile. The National Transitional Government of Liberia was established on August 21, 2003. Gyude Bryant was chair and Wesley Johnson was vice chair of this two-year ruling body. In October 2005, Liberians voted for their next president. In preparation for the election, a team of election monitoring experts was sent from the United States to Liberia. Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the team spoke favorably about the successful voters’ registration led by the National Elections Commission (NEC) and the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL). Over a million Liberians registered to vote and the registration process was effective and free of any major concerns. Liberians elected Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who became the first woman president in Africa.

Culture Liberia’s cultural landscape reveals its close connection to the United States even though Americo-Liberians are the only people who have a direct connection to the United States. They are the channels through which much of America’s social, political, and economic values have been transmitted to the rest of Liberia’s population. Christianity is one of those values. Some 30 percent of the population is Christian, while 60 percent is animist and 10 percent is Muslim. Ninety-five percent of Liberia’s population is from indigenous African tribes: Kpelle, Bassa, Gio, Kru, Grebo, Mano, Krahn, Gola, Gbandi, Loma, Kissi, Vai, Dei, Bella, Mandingo, and Mende. Two and a half percent are Americo-Liberians and 2.5 percent are www.abc-clio.com

Congo people (descendants of immigrants from the West Indies who had been slaves). Bordered by Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia’s indigenous ethnic groups have much in common with groups in those countries, language being one. However, because of American influence, English is Liberia’s official language, making it one of a few African countries to which English is pervasive. Nevertheless, most of the population speaks at least one language from the Niger-Congo language group of about twenty languages. The more widely spoken languages are Mande, West Atlantic, and Kwa, none of which are unique to Liberia. Education is one aspect of Liberia’s culture that was significantly disrupted by the civil war. With an unemployment rate of 85 percent in 2003, and a literacy rate of 57.5 percent in 2005, Liberia’s government faced the need to implement plans that would provide the schooling, healthcare, and other basic services needed by all its citizens. In February 2004, the United States cohosted an international reconstruction conference on Liberia during which over $524 million was pledged in total aid. Some of this aid is helping rebuild Liberia’s schools, many of which were badly damaged or completely destroyed during the war. Liberia’s educational system began during its early years as settlers and missionaries built schools and universities modeled after schools in the United States. Cuttington University is one of Liberia’s most prestigious institutions, previously attracting Rhodes scholars from around the world. Founded in 1889 by an Episcopal bishop, Cuttington is known for primarily teaching Liberia’s elite. Much of the school was destroyed during the war, including parts of its Africana Museum, a prominent

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learning center. As Cuttington and other schools reopen and plans are made to make education free on the elementary and secondary levels, more of Liberia’s citizens will get the education they need to continue the country’s journey toward stability. Michaela V. Lawrence See also: Economic Community of West African States; Kru Sailors; Taylor, Charles References Adebajo, Adekeye. Building Peace in West Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Desk Study on the Environment in Liberia. Switzerland: United Nations Environment Program, 2004. Harris, Katherine. African and American Values. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985. Henk, Rossouw. “A Liberian University Rises Up from the Ravages of War.” Chronicle of Higher Education 48, no. 11 (2001): A58–60. Keating, Tom, and Andy Knight. Building Sustainable Peace. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2004.

LIBYA A former Italian colony, Libya became an independent kingdom under Idris I in 1951. The discovery of significant petroleum resources in 1959 rapidly expanded the Libyan economy. In 1969, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi deposed King Idris. Libya’s relations with the United States have often been tense under the leadership of Qaddafi. The new Libyan republic promoted Arab unity, and Qaddafi advocated a personal brand of Islam-inspired socialism that he articulated in a three-part book entitled The Green Book (1975). Already fragile relations with the United States became worse in the 1980s when the U.S. government accused Libya of producing chemical weapons and condemned Qaddafi’s support www.abc-clio.com

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for international terrorist organizations. Meanwhile, Qaddafi became close to African American groups such as the Black Panthers and, in particular, Louis Abdul Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. The tension between the U.S. and Libyan governments increased after U.S. bombing raids on the major cities of Tripoli and Banghazi in 1986. Following the ostensible involvement of Libyan terrorists in the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the United States and the United Nations applied a series of economic sanctions against Libya. Most of these sanctions were dropped in 2003 when Libya formally acknowledged responsibility for the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 and agreed to open its weapon programs to U.N. inspectors after announcing that it would stop producing chemical weapons. Ziad Bentahar Reference Qaddafi, Muammar. The Green Book. Ottawa, ON: Jerusalem International Publishers, 1983.

LITERATURE, AFRICAN African literature encompasses the mutual exchange between African American and African writers and intellectuals linking literature and politics through transatlantic cultural connections. The history of African written literature can be divided into four periods: the pioneers’ era (1910–1930), the negritude period (1930–1960), the decolonization and its aftermath (1960–1990), and the postcolonial legacy (1990 onward). These near one hundred years have seen a constant and fruitful exchange between writers and an enduring American influence. It was in the United States that blacks first awoke to the consciousness of their

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condition and started writing about it. The Middle Passage was part of the process of identity transformation that turned Africans into African Americans, and slave narratives thus became one of the earliest forms of African American culture, dating back to the 1760s and Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography (1789). More narratives were published in the 1850s, drawing on plantation oral narratives, trickster tales, and myths of slave flying and transmigration. In the early years of the twentieth century, fictional works appeared that still drew on slave legends, plantation songs, jazz, and blues. Booker Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey had sociopolitical agendas that proved to be an enduring part of African literature. Garvey greatly influenced theorists of African independence and was instrumental to the birth of the negritude movement. Literature flourished in this context. James Weldon Johnson published the Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922. In 1925 Alain Locke drew together major voices of the Harlem Renaissance with The New Negro, an anthology that gave a place to writers like Langston Hughes, Claude MacKay, Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. Born in the Virgin Islands in 1832, Edward Blyden traveled to the United States in 1850 before settling in Liberia in 1851. He exerted a great influence on Garvey, Kwame N’krumah, George Padmore, and others; laid the foundation of West African nationalism and Pan-Africanism; was an ambassador to Britain and France in the 1880s; and is considered as an example of a new transatlantic reality or a black Atlantic, in which bonds were forged among English-speaking West Africans, between African countries, between Africa and the Diaspora, the www.abc-clio.com

Christian and the Islamic world, and Africa and the West. West Indian writers played a major part in the development of African literature, joining Paris-based African students in using journals as a means of disseminating their ideas. They were actively involved in the Revue des griots (1915), La Race nègre (1927), Lucioles (1927), La Revue indigène (1927), Le Cri des nègres (1931), La Revue du monde noir (1931), and Légitime défense (1932), Most of these journals were short-lived, yet they achieved their aim of bringing African students and writers of all horizons together and helping the black Diaspora to discover its identity. Poet Nicolás Guillén brought the AfroCuban voice to the movement in the1930s. In Martinique, Aimé Cesaire in the 1940s propagated the new ideas in his journal Tropiques, encouraging new writers like Frantz Fanon, Glissant, and Zobel and strengthening links with Central and South America. Authors now expressed themselves in different ways, with literature and politics often side by side, as in Maran’s Batouala (1921), considered as the first African novel, Jean Price-Mars’s Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928), and Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée (1946). After West Indian nations began to gain independence, West Indian writers separated into three groups, and while some continued identifying with the negritude movement, others focused on the Creole identity. A third group, including Maryse Condé, shared a multiple identity, equally close to African, West Indian, and American literatures. Pan-Africanism started out as an ideology of blacks in the United States in the 1920s, with Du Bois organizing the first and second Pan-African Congresses in Paris. At that time, the

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coming of Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, and Alioune Diop to the French capital encouraged the pan-African movement. The journals Légitime défense and L’Etudiant noir spearheaded by Cesaire and Senghor, united black writers, focusing on black identity and on the fight against European colonial assimilation. For many years, Paris served as the rallying point for black writers from all horizons, cutting across the linguistic divides and facilitating a mutual discovery, either through personal meetings or through the reading of each other’s works in the original or in translation. Senghor acknowledged being indebted to Sterling Brown and Claude MacKay. Diverse writers including Senghor, Aime Césaire, Richard Wright, and Jean-Paul Sartre gathered around Alioune Diop to support the new Présence africaine journal, launched in Paris in 1947. In France, the Communist journal Nouvel Age, devoted to African American songs and poetry, published in 1930 and 1931, and Senghor’s anthology of New African and Malagasy Poetry in French in 1948, contributed to the discovery of black American literature. The first two congresses of black artists and writers in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959), organized by Présence africaine, and the black arts festival held in Dakar in 1966, brought African and West Indian writers together once more and paved the way for the inclusion of African literature in French university programs in the 1970s. Very early on, African writers formed a united front, encompassing geographical, linguistic, and cultural barriers along with transatlantic slavery as a common history. In Africa, works published in European and African languages have been depicting the national experiences of slavery since the early days, through Nigerian Yoruba plays www.abc-clio.com

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and to the first Igbo novel, Pita Nwana’s Omenuko (1933). Later, African literature would flourish with the publishing of Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence (1968), Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1969), and Kofi Awoonor’s Comes the Voyager at Last, a Tale of Return to Africa (1992), around the same time that American black literature such as Booker Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) were being translated, the first into Yoruban in 1966, the second into French in 2002. The struggle for emancipation, inherited from slavery and drawing more recently on similar experiences like that of Native Americans, has been a recurrent theme of African Diaspora writing since the Negro spirituals and the poetry of Harlem Renaissance, with some writers— Richard Wright (Native Son, 1940; Black Boy, 1945), Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun, 1959), and James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time, 1963)—close to political movements such as the Civil Rights Movement. Other related themes—exile, dispossession, hybridity, and a search for ancestral roots—have equally inspired many writers, including David Diop, and, more recently, Alex Haley and TsiTsi Dangarembga. The gradual fragmentation of black African literature into national units deprived writers of the global platform that had brought them together, with African American and Caribbean literatures growing as literatures on their own merit while women writers like Toni Morrison emerged. Yet the plot, characters, and scenes of many African novels still testified to the mobility of their authors, and in the 1990s, Anyidoho and Awoonor both chose the Diaspora as the theme of their poetry, using images of

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slavery, suffering, dispossession, and dislocation as their primary material. From the start, higher education played a major part in the development of African literature as Anglophone writers tended to look toward British and, increasingly, American universities for support. The years 1945–1975 saw American assistance for the development of higher education in Africa; the opening of departments of Anglophone, African, and American studies in European countries; an increased involvement of African writers in American universities; and the development of black studies and African American literature in the United States. Since then, most of the leading African writers have either studied or lectured there: Chinua Achebe, Chukwuemeka Vincent Ike, Valentin Mudimbe, Ngandu Nkashama, Niyi Osundare, Wole Soyinka, and Adaora Lily Ulasi. This led to a growing American presence in their works, such as with Mudimbe’s Carnets d’Amérique (1976) and Ike’s To My Husband from Iowa (1990). If the black protest of the 1960s paved the way for the development of black studies in American universities, this development has been sustained and facilitated since the 1980s by an intellectual migration, often controversial, from African universities. Recent years have witnessed a shift in African writers’ location, with the United States, Britain, and France as new centers of African literary activity. A new African literature has emerged as well, a literature of several worlds by black writers of African descent born either in Europe or in the United States. Their work, informed by the authors’ lives and diasporic contexts, differs considerably from that of Africa-based writers, while sharing with them the themes of migration and exile. One hopes that this development will not www.abc-clio.com

eclipse the writings of the many black African writers still on African soil. Francoise Ugochukwu See also: Achebe, Chinua; Afrofuturism; Black Arts Movement; Caribbean Literature; Cliff, Michelle; Condé, Maryse; Dadié, Bernard Binlin; Diaspora; Emecheta, Buchi; Guillén, Nicolás; Harlem Renaissance; Ike, Vincent Chukwuemeka; Négritude; Pan-Africanism; Soyinka,Wole References Achebe, Chinua. Home and Exile: Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Basker, James G., ed. Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Carretta, Vincent, and Philip Gould, eds. Genius in Bondage: Literature and the Early Black Atlantic. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Cazenave, Odile. Afrique sur Seine. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003. Childs, Matt, and Toyin Falola, eds. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Fioupou, Christiane, ed. Seuils: Les littératures africaines Anglophones. Toulouse, France: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2000. Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Haigh, Sam. An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique. Oxford: Berg, 1999. Pettinger, Alasdair, ed. Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic. New York: Continuum International/Cassell, 1998. Rice, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum, 2003.

LITERATURE, AFRICAN AMERICAN African American literature specific to the United States has had ties to Africa and to Europe since its inception in eighteenthcentury America. Its earliest poets and authors had cultural roots in Africa. Phillis Wheatley, for example, was born in Africa

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and survived the Middle Passage before writing her poetry in America. Other eighteenth-century authors possessed a memory of Africa passed down by their forebears through the survival of oral traditions and other cultural practices. While eighteenth-century authors of African American literature had ties to Africa, nineteenth-century authors such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Josiah Henson, and other fugitive slaves who published their narratives carried their antislavery message to Europe, traveling in lecture circuits to Britain, Germany, and France and making the ethical issue of slavery and the slave trade a worldwide concern. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American authors have incorporated an African past into their works in an active attempt to revalue their African and American heritage, to conceive of themselves as members of a black Diaspora with roots in Africa, and to reevaluate their current status as citizens of another land and another nation. African American literary history tells the story of the African Diaspora that was forcibly created by the transatlantic slave trade. Through its earliest authors we see African and African-descended peoples demonstrating the cultural retentions, cultural adoptions and adaptations, and New World cultural creations that define the shared experiences of the black Diaspora. Christianity, one of the major subjects of early African American literature of the eighteenth century, was used by authors such as Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon in poetry as a tool through which to create an empathetic bond with their white, Christian audience, but more importantly as a way of expressing their humanity. They emphasized that their conversion to Christianity had made them better www.abc-clio.com

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people in introducing them to a Christian God, but that, perhaps more significantly, their adoption of it transformed Christianity into a better form of itself, representing the true ideal rather than the corrupted form of American Christianity that accommodated slavery (see, for example, Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” published in 1773). By mere virtue of learning how to write, these authors’ writings entered into the political debate about the ethics of slavery; at the same time, because of its content, their poetry forever transformed the American literary tradition. This theme of literacy was developed further in nineteenth-century African American literature. In fact, literacy—the experience of acquiring it, prevalent in most of the slave narratives—was directly connected to the transnational debate about African and African-descended people’s capacity for learning, which was correlated with their relative humanity. The revolutionary values of the Enlightenment that led to the American Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States of America—liberty, justice, equality— were at odds with the practice of enslaving African Americans, a contradiction that could be justified only by categorizing African Americans as something other than of the civilized humanity of the European world. Literacy was the barrier separating Africans and African-descended peoples from a shared standing with Europeans and European-descended people. According to the values of the Enlightenment, the ability to read and write demonstrated the level of one’s humanity; the ability to write poetry set a writer apart for his or her “genius” in shaping language into art. But proving the humanity of Africans and African

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Americans would consequently undermine the slave system as unethical, and the economy of colonial America and the United States rested on slavery. Therefore it was inevitable that the literary accomplishments of African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries enter into the realm of politics, not just art. Their productions took on a symbolic value whose meaning changed depending on the reader’s disposition toward ethics of slavery. Learning how to read and write, a central episode in many slave narratives, simultaneously described the author’s transformation from spiritual darkness to revelation and to manhood or virtuous womanhood; the very act of describing this process demonstrated the author’s success. (“Written by herself ” and “written by himself ” were frequently subtitles of the narratives, asserting the author’s status of full humanity in authoring his or her life story in an unmediated narrative voice.) These nineteenth-century narratives written by escaped slaves, directed largely at a northern reading audience, were used in the abolitionist cause. Many such authors (such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs) observed, however, the overbearing power of the abolitionist cause over their personal narratives, and the attempts of such prominent abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe to dominate and thus control their words and attitudes to fit their own political platform. Virtually every escaped slave’s narrative was published with a preface authored by a leading abolitionist who, while affirming that the author’s story was indeed true, also suggested the significance of his or her life story in the abolitionist cause. Because of this, escaped slaves felt themselves moving from one system of control to another, www.abc-clio.com

each depriving them of their individual voice and authority over their own lives. The symbolic value of African American literature in a transatlantic context— the meaning and significance of its works in the formation of a literary tradition— has been continually assessed and redefined by its literary critics and creative writers. Over the course of the twentieth century, these writers have described the ways in which being black and being American operate in contradiction, or at least in tension, with one another. (The issue of choosing loyalty to race or to nation emerges in early twentieth-century African American literature, in works such as James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.) These tensions, reflected in literature, also represented a political reality: choosing between national culture and cultural nationalism, in other words, between Americanism and cosmopolitan black identity. W. E. B. Du Bois acknowledged this tension as it resided in African Americans and proposed that it be maintained so that nothing was lost through assimilation to “African” or “American” values. The early twentieth-century push for African American civil rights—emblematized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League—was linked with democratic concern for Africa. The issue of world democracy, raised by World War I and President Woodrow Wilson’s vow to make the world “safe for democracy,” was taken up by the NAACP and other organizations and applied to African Americans within the United States, who had the status of second-class citizens. But an upwardly mobile, race-conscious African American middle class also sought to suppress those aspects of black creative culture

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that were considered shameful—too working class, too close to stereotype. Writers of the early- and mid-twentieth century, such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, called for recognition of the value of African American folk culture, distinct from a rising African American middle class that mimicked white values. In valuing folk culture, these writers affirmed working class forms of verbal, musical, and physical expression such as blues music and the Black Bottom dance that originated in rural, southern, and largely uneducated communities. Writers of the New Negro Renaissance era of the early twentieth century, in conceiving of a worldwide black cultural identity, shaped and were shaped by emerging artistic and political movements in other countries, from communism—specifically Marxism—to negritude. Writers of this era traveled to the Soviet Union, France, Britain, Spain, Morocco, Liberia, and other parts of Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois studied at the University of Berlin, Germany, later became an admirer of Marxism and the Soviet Union, and renounced his American citizenship and became a citizen of Ghana in 1963, one year before his death; Langston Hughes, Jamaican-born Claude McKay, and Trinidadian C. L. R. James traveled to the Soviet Union and had affiliations with the Communist Party; Richard Wright, who embraced Marxist ideology if not always the party itself, permanently relocated to Paris, where he lived and wrote from 1945 to 1960. These national, political, and cultural exchanges resulted in the development and use of the concept “art as propaganda” in these writers’ works. The Negritude Movement, founded in the 1930s by Senegal’s Léopold Senghor, Guyana’s Léon Gontran-Damas, and www.abc-clio.com

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Martinique’s Aimé Césaire, sought to affirm and celebrate peoples of African descent and their cultures. Emphasizing intercultural exchange between African and Caribbean writers, the Negritude Movement developed as a response to the colonial domination of black lives in virtually every aspect: political, intellectual, educational, and psychic. Its major authors sought the spiritual and actual reclamation of an African past, one that embraced plurality, dynamism, and tensions of culture. Negritude may have given formal status to meaningful exchanges that were already occurring as a result of African American and Afro-Caribbean writers interacting— for example, the Haitian poet Réné Maran and Langston Hughes. The Black Arts Movement, active from the 1960s to its peak in the mid-1970s, was formed in the context of and in response to the political upheavals of the Korean and Vietnamese Wars and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. This movement developed the internationalism of New Negro Renaissance era writers by identifying itself with third world subjects and explicitly developing the link to African nations such as Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania. Its aesthetic program ran parallel to the Black Power Movement and asserted the exclusive use of literature as a political platform, even a weapon. (Amiri Baraka famously called for “poems that kill” in his 1969 poem “Black Art.”) Radical works were authored in the fields of essay, poetry, and drama, literary forms that were seen to be the most useful platforms for the political exigencies of the time. The movement radically revised the notion of audience for its works, directing them at a mass black audience. At the same

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time, Maulana Karenga and others introduced the concept of Afrocentrism as an educational corrective to blacks’ widespread poor self-esteem. Black Arts helped shape the discourse on African American culture, social identity, and political rights into which the following decades of African American literature entered. The polemical and reflective literature of autobiography, modeled by Malcolm X (with Alex Haley) in 1965 was deepened by autobiographies by Gwendolyn Brooks, James Alan McPherson, and Alex Haley— all of whom traveled to parts of Africa and reflected on their identity both through the continent and outside of it. Black feminism—or womanism, as Alice Walker called it—grew not only out of the Black Arts Movement but also in response to it, as it sought to recover a black female creative tradition that had been devalued by maledominated definitions of “tradition,” be they black or white. Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, features a return trip to Africa for African Americans as missionaries. Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon incorporates the myth of the flying African as a central motif, and she explores the rupture of memory caused by the transatlantic slave trade and slavery itself in Beloved. African American writers have addressed the issue of cultural rupture (as a result of the transatlantic slave trade) and the question of homeland and belonging through the theme of the Middle Passage in literature that ranges in form from poetry and fiction to criticism and theory. The Middle Passage as a theme helps to explore rupture and connection in the paradoxical situation of African Americans, who are depicted as outsiders to, and yet part of, both African and American cultures. Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage” www.abc-clio.com

explores the way in which history lives in and through African Americans. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved shows how that history is, and must be, passed on. Alex Haley’s Roots explores the unspeakable nature of the Middle Passage and relates it directly to his family’s history. John Edgar Wideman begins his Homewood Trilogy with the short story “Damballah,” which traces the history of two families through generations from enslavement and memory of an African homeland through the 1970s. These authors use the Middle Passage to articulate the tensions of location, homeland, and literary traditions. Moreover, Caribbean authors whose parents immigrated to the United States have contributed to this theme’s development— authors such as Paule Marshall, June Jordan, Edwidge Danticat, and Michele Cliff—so that national distinctions of authors as “American” or “Caribbean” become blurred. (For example, Marshall, in Praise Song for the Widow, carries her protagonist from the United States to the Caribbean, and from tourist-defined vacation spots through a “middle passage” experience to a cultural homeland on a remote Caribbean island.) Literary critics such as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and Paul Gilroy have used the theme of the Middle Passage to articulate new critical-theoretical paradigms for the study of African American, Caribbean, African, and black British culture. Derek Walcott looks to “The Sea as History.” Arguing that modernism need not be a nationally defined artistic movement, Paul Gilroy shows that in fact black intellectual modernism predated American and European forms and that the forced, continuous movement of black peoples throughout the world has created this condition. These critical paradigms focus

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on the importance of memory in the creation of a homeland. Mid-twentieth-century African writers have been influenced by African American and Caribbean writers as well. As African and Caribbean independence movements occurred and discussion of decolonization were placed on the table, authors from these regions wrote about each other and used each other’s political models to understand their current situations. Derek Walcott wrote about the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in his poem “A Far Cry from Africa.” Jamaican author Victor Stafford Reid used the Mau Mau rebellion as a parable for Jamaican independence. Kenyan-born Ngugi wa Thiong’o used lines from Derek Walcott’s poem “The Swamp” for the epigraph to his novel Petals of Blood. Thus African American writers forged connections between aesthetic and political movements, nationally and internationally: the New Negro Renaissance and the first push for civil rights for African Americans in the early twentieth-century; negritude and African and Caribbean anticolonialism; Black Arts and Civil Rights, Black Nationalism and African decolonization. Noelle Morrissette

Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, Vols. 1 and 2. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was In Vogue. New York: Penguin, 1997. Rampersad, Arnold. Langston Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Shapiro, Norman, ed. Negritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean. New York: October House, 1970.

LOCKE, ALAIN LEROY (1886–1954) Alain LeRoy Locke was an African American scholar, intellectual, and editor of The New Negro. Born on September 13, 1886, to Pliny and Mary Hawkins Locke in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Locke, after graduating from high school, attended

See also: Afrocentrism; Afrofuturism; Baraka, Amiri; Black Arts Movement; Brooks, Gwendolyn; Cliff, Michelle; Danticat, Edwidge; Dash, Julie; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Enlightenment Philosophy; Gilroy, Beryl Agatha; Harlem Renaissance; Johnson, James Weldon; Marshall, Paule; Morrison, Toni; Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad; Slave Narratives; Universal Negro Improvement Association, The; Walcott, Derek; Walker, Alice; Wheatley, Phillis References Baraka, Amiri. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.

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Alain LeRoy Locke was a major philosopher and supporter of the arts during the Harlem Renaissance. (National Archives)

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Harvard University in 1904, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in three years. Locke was the first African American Rhodes scholar, and in that capacity spent three years at England’s Oxford University, graduating in 1910. He began a long, distinguished career at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1912 as an assistant professor of English and philosophy. Locke completed his doctorate at Harvard and returned in 1918 to Howard as a professor of philosophy, eventually becoming the chair of the Philosophy Department in 1921, a position he held until his retirement in 1953. In 1924, Locke took a research sabbatical with the French Archeological Society in Cairo, Egypt, after the discovery of the King Tutankhamen tomb. This experience allowed Locke to explore the richness and diversity of African art in Egypt and in Paris, which was the center of European art and culture at that time. Locke was one of the first Americans to amass a collection of African art. He wrote about the importance of African art, urging African American artists to look for inspiration from their ancestral homes. Locke urged the Howard University administration to institute a comprehensive African Studies program, one that would focus on anthropology, culture, and history. Although such a program was not instituted until after his death, Locke was instrumental in the reorganization of the liberal arts department at Howard, which resulted in the inclusion of programs and courses centering upon African society. Locke felt strongly that the African heritage of the American black must be explored and should become central to the future works of black artists, “an artistic vanguard.” A prolific writer, Locke www.abc-clio.com

published over 300 essays and articles on blacks, African politics, and the arts. He was the editor of The New Negro, published in 1925. A mentor of great influence for various artists, The New Negro featured the works of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas, and other artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke was a member of the International Institute of African Languages and Culture, an international exchange professor in Haiti in 1943, and an honorary fellow in the Sociedad de Estudios Afro-Cubanos. Locke died in 1954 of heart failure. Joan McCarty See also: Harlem Renaissance; Hughes, Langston; Hurston, Zora Neale References “Alain Locke.” http://www.africawithin.com/ bios/alain_locke.htm. Cain, Rudolph A. “Alain Leroy Locke: Crusader and Advocate for the Education of African American Adults.” A Journal of Negro Education 64, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 87–99. Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro, An Interpretation. New York: A & C. Boni, 1925.

LONG ISLAND:AFRICAN AMERICANS AND NATIVE PEOPLES Long Island has had cultural encounters in forced labor and has made cultural and political efforts to raise awareness of this history. Interactions between Africans and American Indians on Long Island predate the arrival of slavery in the area. Jan Rodrigues, described as a free mulatto from Santo Domingo in the employ of explorers seeking to dominate the area’s fur trade, spent the winters of 1613 and 1614 with the East Rockaway Indians and reportedly fathered some children among them.

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Soon after that, Africans and Long Island Indians encountered each other in situations of forced labor. African slaves, shipped north from Virginia, were imported to New Netherland by the Dutch West India Company as early as 1626 in an attempt to bolster the agricultural development of the colony. By the late 1640s, New Netherlanders were privately importing slaves from Angola and the Dutch colony of Curaçao, where slaves had already been conditioned to plantation existence and were therefore in far more demand than those coming directly from Africa. In 1664, the area came under the control of the English, whose policy was to promote the importation of African slaves. Some Long Island Indians were enslaved alongside Africans, and many more were forced into indentured servitude. Enslavement of Long Island Indians was officially prohibited in 1679, but continued for much longer. Enslaved Indians and Africans were allies in some recorded incidents of resistance against whites. In 1657, a group of Shinnecock men were accused of burning down several homes in Southampton, and later they implicated a fellow slave, an African woman, in planning the arson. In 1708, two slaves, one an African woman and the other an Indian man, were convicted of murdering their owner and his family. Later, four blacks and two Indians were taken into custody under suspicion of having played a role in the plot. Both incidents led to legal measures on the part of the colonial government that further limited the freedoms of blacks and Indians. In addition to slaves, Long Island had a population of free blacks who had gained their freedom by working off periods of indenture, were manumitted by owners, or had purchased their freedom. They also www.abc-clio.com

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intermarried with Long Island Indian populations, so much so that in the late 1700s local and tribal governments occasionally enacted laws to prevent blacks from settling on Indian reservations. In the 1780s, the Mohegan missionary Samson Occom led many Long Island and New England Christian Indians to upstate New York in what is known as the Brothertown Movement. Blacks and Indians with black ancestry were specifically excluded from this migration. The end of slavery in New York began in 1799 with the passing of the Gradual Manumission Act, which freed those slaves born after July 4, 1799, once they reached the age of twenty-eight (males) or twentyfive (females). The Act of 1817 declared that slaves born before that date would gain their freedom July 4, 1827. In addition to the slave population, New York had a large class of free blacks throughout this time. During the first half of the 1800s, blacks and Indians continued to interact in many ways. Neighborhoods made up of free blacks and off-reservation Indians sprang up in many towns, including Lake Success in Manhasset and the Freetown neighborhood in Easthampton. Excluded economically from many opportunities available to whites, blacks and Indians on eastern Long Island found work on whaling ships. In many cases, blacks and Indians came together in the sphere of Christian worship. African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches founded by black and Indian congregations existed in Manhasset and in the Eastville section of Sag Harbor. Some of these churches are said to have sheltered runaway slaves traveling the Underground Railroad on their way to New England. Black preachers that traveled a circuit on

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Long Island also reported visiting black and Indian congregations. Intermarriage between the two groups continued through the 1700s and 1800s, leading some whites to conclude erroneously that Long Island’s Indians were extinct. While Long Island Indians continued to recognize themselves as American Indians and maintained some traditional cultural practices, to outsiders they were often perceived as black, and therefore no longer Indian. Popular beliefs about race led many whites to conclude that black “blood” essentially erased any remaining Indian characteristics. While many African American Long Islanders have American Indian ancestors, and many Long Island Indians have African ancestry, the racial categories used by whites in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also incorrectly made it appear that the two groups, African Americans and American Indians, had conflated into one general “colored” population. For example, the census taken on the Unkechaug reservation in 1860 records several families as Indian. In the 1880 census, the very same families are identified as “black” or “mulatto.” Clearly, the perceptions of the census taker changed, not the ethnicity of the family. This belief that Long Island’s Indian heritage had been diluted or erased by intermarriage with blacks was also exhibited in newspaper articles and early ethnographic studies that focused on the physical appearance of individuals rather than on continued indigenous cultural practices. These attitudes often had disastrous consequences for the tribes. In 1910, the Montauk tribe filed a lawsuit against the developers of the Long Island Rail Road, charging them with treaty violations. The developers’ defense rested heavily on the www.abc-clio.com

argument that the Montauks had intermarried with blacks to the point that they were no long Montauk, and the judge agreed with them. The Unkechaug faced similar legal challenges to their identity as Indians, one involving educational aid from the state and one involving residency on the reservation. In both cases, the Indians were challenged on the basis that they were black, not Indian. Since the 1970s many of the surviving Indian communities on Long Island have begun cultural and political revitalization efforts, raising awareness of their survival on Long Island. Lisa Bier See also: Diaspora, Demography of; Race, History of; Slavery (History) References Day, Lynda R. Making a Way to Freedom: A History of African Americans on Long Island. Interlaken, NY: Empire State Books, 1997. Strong, John A. The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island from Earliest Times to 1700. Interlaken, NY: Empire State Books, 1997.

LOPES, HENRI (1937–) Henri Lopes, a poet, writer, and political figure, was born in Leopoldville on September 12, 1937. As a writer and poet in Congo (Brazzaville), he speaks about the struggles in modern African society and of people in the African Diaspora. He is a mulatto through his mother and defines himself as “sans identité fixe” (i.e., without stable identity). As a francophone writer and diplomat, he is convinced that French unites Africans and has become an African language; his work explores the unities of Africans on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Lopes spent his childhood in Brazzaville, where he attended school before moving to Bangui and Nantes. At Paris-Sorbonne he completed an MA in history. He taught in France for two years before returning to the Congo in 1965. He then taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Brazzaville. He was appointed national director of education before becoming minister of the same department in 1969. Lopes was prime minister of the Congo from 1973 to 1976, finance minister from 1977 to 1980. After leaving his national posts, he worked for sixteen years as deputy director, then director general of UNESCO in Paris. Since 1998 he has been ambassador of the Republic of Congo to France, England, Spain, Portugal, and the Vatican. Lopes’ literary career started in 1966 with a collection of poetry, but he soon opted to write prose. His topics are inspired by the ordinary life of modern African society and include dictatorship, the illegal enrichment of leaders and the elite, corruption, and the misery of the masses. His characters are striking, such as the desperate poor, the smart prostitute, and the inhumane tyrant. His aim is to moralize in what he thinks to be a decadent society. Tribaliks: Contemporary Congolese Stories (1971) presents eight novellas describing society and individuals; it won the Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noire in 1972. Nouvelle Romance (1976) is a novel about the condition of women. Sans Tam-Tam (1977) can be seen as an attempt to decolonize the mind. Pleurer-Rire (1982), translated as The Laughing Cry: An African Cock and Bull Story (1987), describes the abusive rule of President Bwaka Mabé who came to power by putsch. Le chercheur d’Afriques (1990) is the story of André Leclerc, a young mulatto student www.abc-clio.com

whose father, a former colonial agent in Africa, lives in Nantes, formerly a center of the slave trade. Sur l’Autre Rive (1992) is an artistic and existential quest for identity of a young lady torn between Africa and America. The Lily and the Blazing (1997) tells the life story of Simone Fragonard, directly linked to the mulatto community living across the banks of the Congo River. Dossier classé (2002) follows a similar theme. In 2003, Lopes published an autobiographical work, Ma grand-mère bantoue et mes ancêtres les Gaulois: Simples discours, which fully opens up a dialogue of cultures. Defining himself as a citizen of the world, he describes his affinity with the African Diaspora of the United Sates and the Caribbean represented by writers such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Nicolàs Guillén: “Ils constituent une partie des Afriques que découvre le ‘chercheur’ d’un de mes romans.” [They are part of the Africas that the ‘seeker’ of one of my novels discovers.] (Ma grand-mère, 2003, p. 16). Borges and Pessoa inspire him as well. In Sur l’Autre Rive the narrator is the writer himself in the skin of a female artist. Marie-Eve, a young Congolese, immigrates to Guadeloupe and presents herself as a Caribbean artist. The protagonist, by so doing, disqualifies Africa from its pedestal as the native land of all blacks and gives up her African heritage to adopt a Caribbean identity. From an inner dream, the journey becomes real when the artist joins the other shore. In his career Henri Lopes has received many prominent awards, such as the Francophonie Prize of the French Academy, and many international distinctions. He is a member of the High Council of

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Francophonie, and since 1999 a member of Conseil Supérieur of French Language. Kahiudi Claver Mabana See also: Wright, Richard; Hughes, Langston; Guillén, Nicolás References Bokiba, André-Patient, Antoine Yila. Henri Lopes. Une écriture d’ et d’enracinement. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002. Lopes, Henri. Ma grand-mère bantoue et mes ancêtres les Gaulois. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

LORDE, AUDRE (1934–1992) Audre Lorde was an African American lesbian poet and essayist whose works engage multiple female cultures of the African Diaspora. For the poet and feminist Audre Lorde, writing was an act of war against hegemonic racial and gendered discourses. As a black lesbian, speaking from the vantage point of one doubly negated in American society, Lorde defined her life as a revolutionary endeavor. She believed the search for the self involved at the profoundest of levels a war against those forces that would prevent one from naming that self. Lorde found both the strength and the words to wage that war in multiple female and feminist traditions of the African Atlantic, including the Caribbean Creole heritage of her Grenadian mother from which she renamed herself in her 1982 autobiography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Audre Geraldine Lorde was born in 1934 and raised in New York by parents who had migrated from Grenada ten years earlier. They were a working-class couple with a strong marriage and very clear ideas about raising their American-born daughter in a manner rooted in the cultural heritage of their Caribbean past. Like many other Afro-Caribbean women writers of the www.abc-clio.com

eighties, Lorde had a mother who played an early and formative role in the poet’s commitment to writing. In her autobiography, Lorde described her teenage struggles with her mother as the first engagement of many battles to come, in this instance, a battle to assert her own definitions of self and home against her mother’s experiences and perceptions shaped by a life of exile. Writing became both the means by which Lorde first distanced herself from her mother’s strong influence and then later, the very bridge that reconnected her to multiple female cultures of the African Diaspora from which she could draw new cultural and spiritual meanings. These very meanings shaped Lorde’s feminist politics and poetics. Cited by many as a central voice in the development of contemporary feminist theory, Lorde’s contributions to the field lay in her insistence in placing American feminism, as practiced by both black and white women, in dialogue with the feminisms of other women throughout the African Diaspora, and in dialogue with a gay politics of sexuality. Lorde first dared to question the “politics of location” of white American feminism in the 1980s, interrogating white feminists’ inability to locate themselves and their own gendered and racialized politics vis à vis women in Africa, the Caribbean, and closest to home, African America. Throughout her career Lorde ceaselessly traveled, both physically and psychically, integrating into her own life and work the different experiences of black women throughout the African Atlantic, in locations as disparate as Mexico, Grenada, Ghana, Germany, and Russia. Her black feminist poetics has become a bridge connecting women in far-flung places across the Diaspora. In addition to

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her critical contributions to and expansion of American feminist theory and practice, Lorde should be considered one of the central foremothers in an emerging transnational network of feminists of color, women across the colonial and postcolonial worlds who have been able to share and understand their diverse experiences while discovering together the tools to dismantle the oppressions that continue to master them. The “black woman warrior poet” (as Lorde first named herself ) fought her final battle in 1992, dying of liver cancer at the age of 58. In her battle with cancer, Lorde’s writing became her weapon and armor. Accustomed to using her words to fight the enemy without, from the mid-1970s Lorde turned to fighting the enemy within, publishing The Cancer Journals in 1980 and adding breast cancer survivor to her list of names and identities. Lorde’s account of her deeply personal battle to face down despair in the face of her own mortality provided new lessons in the use of words as tools to fight the oppressions which, still too silently, constrain the lives of women in communities throughout the African Atlantic. Michelle Stephens See also: Atlantic World; Caribbean Literature; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, African; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, U.S.; Pan-Africanism; Postcolonial Studies References Boyce Davies, Carole, and Elaine Savory Fido, eds. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

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Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1980. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1994.

LOST BOYS OF SUDAN The Lost Boys of Sudan are the approximately 20,000 orphaned refugees, both young men and women, left behind in the aftermath of north-south conflict in modern-day Sudan. Many young men were sent abroad to the United States and Europe, where they sought greater economic opportunities, but also experienced many cultural conflicts. In 2001, a group of about 3,600 Lost Boys, all young men, arrived in the United States. In the late 1980s, the Khartoum-based northern government of Sudan proclaimed itself an Islamic state and named Christians and non-Muslims enemies of the state. The Islamic government identified and pursued the Dinka people of southern Sudan as “separatists” and conducted raids on villages in the south. In the attacks, men, women, and children were assaulted and murdered. Many thousands of young men and women fled for hundreds of miles over difficult terrain with few supplies and in constant danger. Those who escaped were taken to refugee camps in Kenya. Aid organizations described them as “Lost Boys,” a reference to Peter Pan’s crew of orphans. Many young men were subsequently sent abroad to the United States and Europe. Abroad, they experienced the strain of cultural adjustment and of loyalties divided between those who remained in the refugee camps and to their new “home.” The

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economic opportunities and education they sought sometimes proved elusive. Noelle Morrissette

colonial rule for African Americans and the African Diaspora.

Louverture’s Upbringing (ca. 1743–1789)

See also: Dinka; Immigration, United States; Sudan (Darfur Region) Reference Mylan, Megan, and Shenk, Jon. Lost Boys of Sudan. Actual Films/Principe Productions, 2003.

LOUVERTURE, TOUSSAINT BRÉDA (CA. 1743–1803) Toussaint Bréda Louverture, a leader of the Haitian Revolution, was born a slave in Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) and became a general in the French army and the governor of Saint-Domingue before dying in exile in France. He became a heroic symbol of black emancipation from

Toussaint L’Ouverture led the Haitian uprising that gave rise to the first independent black nation in the Western Hemisphere. He became and remains an important symbol of liberation for peoples throughout the African Diaspora. (Library of Congress)

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Louverture was born around 1743 in SaintDomingue, which from 1697 to 1804 was a colony of France. Louverture’s father was the second son of Gaou-Guinou (or GaouGuinée), chief of the Arada (or Allada) nation in Dahomey (modern-day Benin). Louverture’s father was captured in combat, sold as a slave, and fathered five sons and three daughters (Louverture was the eldest son). Louverture himself was born near Cap Français and thus qualified as an American-born Creole (as opposed to the African-born bossales). The young Louverture worked as a slave on the Bréda plantation and may have belonged either to its absentee owner, the Comte de Noé, or to its manager, Baillon de Libertat. While a slave, Toussaint married black freedwoman Suzanne SimonBaptiste, who already had a son, Placide, from a mulatto called Séraphin. Louverture adopted the mixed-blood Placide and had two more sons, Isaac and Saint-Jean. Louverture’s exact physical appearance remains uncertain, for the many portraits that depict him lack consistency (he was given the nickname fatras bâton, which applied to lanky men). Spared the strenuous field tasks associated with sugarcane cultivation, Louverture oversaw the plantation’s draft animals (contemporaries described him as a coachman or as a veterinarian). Louverture spoke French, some unspecified African language, and the local creole. He may have been taught to read before the revolution, but his written French remained tentative throughout his

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life and he later relied on white secretaries for his correspondence. Tradition has it that he was inspired by Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1774), in which Raynal predicted that a black Spartacus would one day lead a slave revolt in the Caribbean. Recent research, however, indicates that Louverture was freed in 1776 and settled down on a plantation of his own as a free-colored planter exploiting slave labor. His alleged aristocratic ancestry, local birth, education, marriage, and early emancipation made him one of the more privileged elements among Saint-Domingue’s black population on the eve of the French Revolution.

Louverture’s Participation in the Revolt against France (1791–1794) The beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 had important implications in SaintDomingue. White republicans fought conservative monarchists afraid of the revolution’s increasingly radical tone. Free mulattos, inspired by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, fought against segregation rules that treated them as second-class citizens. The slaves, representing 90 percent of the colony’s population, revolted in August 1791 following a Voodoo ceremony in Bois Caïman on the Le Normand plantation in Morne Rouge. Within a few weeks, 100,000 slaves were in arms on Saint-Domingue’s northern plain. Louverture later depicted himself as a lifelong advocate of freedom to appeal to his black brethren, but his conduct in the early days of the slave revolt was far more cautious. A devout Catholic, he probably did not attend the Voodoo gathering at Bois

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Caïman. Instead, he helped his former master Baillon de Libertat and his family escape unharmed from their plantation. Only then did he join the ranks of the slave army as a surgeon. The rebel army’s leadership initially consisted of Dutty Boukman, who was quickly executed by the French, Jeannot Bullet, who was executed by his own for excessive cruelty, Jean François, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Georges Biassou. Louverture, acting as Biassou’s aide-decamp, helped draft a proposal in December 1791 to halt the revolt in exchange for a few concessions, but the planters of Cap Français rejected the plan and the fighting continued. Louverture, Biassou, and Dessalines joined the Spanish forces of Santo Domingo (modern-day Dominican Republic) as auxiliaries when Spain declared war on France in 1793. Spain promoted Louverture to colonel and gave him his own troops. Great Britain, also at war with France, seized the major ports of Saint-Domingue in 1793–1794. Faced with monarchist opposition, a slave revolt, and two foreign invasions, French commissioner Félicité-Léger Sonthonax abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue on August 29, 1793. This bold move, which the French National Assembly ratified and extended to other French colonies on February 4, 1794, was designed to attract black soldiers into French ranks, but Louverture fought for Spain until May 1794. Only then did he turn against his Spanish patrons and rally to the French army. He may have switched sides because his relationship with his superiors had deteriorated to the point that Jean François briefly threw him in prison in 1793; or he may finally have become a convert to the idea of general emancipation.

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General and Governor of Saint-Domingue (1794–1802) Continued instability in France and the high death rate among white officers in the tropical climate quickly made Louverture and his black soldiers France’s most potent military force in the Caribbean. In his memoirs, Louverture emphasized that he had been injured seventeen times and that a cannon ball had knocked off his front teeth (the gap in his teeth is one of the reasons given for his nickname l’ouverture, French for “opening”). But accounts of individual battles in which Louverture was involved do not support the claim that he was an exceptionally gifted general. His political acumen, however, was keen. Louverture befriended General Etienne Laveaux, who promoted him to brigadier general, and then division general, which made him the highest-ranked nonwhite officer in the island. Louverture cleverly maneuvered to send white generals and civilian commissioners, including Laveaux, Sonthonax, and Gabriel d’Hédouville, back to France under various pretexts. In August 1798, Louverture singlehandedly negotiated a treaty with Brigadier General Thomas Maitland under which England, whose losses in Saint-Domingue had reached 13,000 dead, would turn over British-occupied towns to Louverture’s army. In exchange, Louverture allowed British merchant ships in the colony despite France’s mercantilist trade rules and its ongoing war with England. Louverture also undermined French plans to attack British Jamaica for fear this would divert troops from the Saint-Domingue theater. Maitland secretly suggested that Louverture should break from France and declare himself king of Saint-Domingue under British protection, but Louverture declined the offer. www.abc-clio.com

Despite France’s quasi-war with the United States (1798–1801), Louverture also signed an April 1799 agreement with the United States that put an end to French privateering and opened Haitian ports to U.S. ships. In exchange, Louverture obtained crucial U.S. naval support during the siege of Jacmel in the War of the South (1799–1800). The bloody war, which pitted Louverture against mulatto general André Rigaud, ended in the defeat of the powerful mulatto party that had dominated the south of Saint-Domingue. Afraid that France could use Spanish Santo Domingo as a base to attack SaintDomingue and remove him from office, Louverture invaded Santo Domingo in 1800. Philippe Roume de Saint-Laurent, France’s last white civilian commissioner, was increasingly marginalized for opposing the invasion, imprisoned, and then expelled in 1801. That year, Louverture instructed his supporters to draft a constitution that made him governor-general for life and gave him the right to choose his successor. Louverture now controlled SaintDomingue quasi-independently, though he continued to pay lip service to the colony’s links with France. Convinced that continued production of sugar and coffee was essential to the economic survival of Saint-Domingue, Louverture kept some of the features of the prerevolutionary social order. The 1801 constitution institutionalized a system of forced labor under which former black slaves, now known as cultivateurs, were forced to remain on their plantations in exchange for a share of the crop. Louverture also incited exiled white planters to return to Saint-Domingue because their technical and managerial expertise was essential to the revival of sugar exports.

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Capture, Exile, and Death (1802–1803) Afraid that the 1801 constitution was the first step on the path to Saint-Domingue’s independence, First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte summoned a massive expedition as soon as a temporary peace with England made it possible to ship French troops across the Atlantic. The expedition, numbering 20,000 men and led by Bonaparte’s brother-in-law General Victor Leclerc, landed in Cap Français in February 1802. French troops were officially instructed to reinforce Louverture’s, but Louverture accused them, with good reason, of coming to Saint-Domingue to remove him from power and restore slavery. He instructed his men to fight holding battles, to destroy buildings and supplies, to retire to the island’s mountainous interior, and to wait for yellow fever and malaria to take their toll. Intense fighting followed, most notably during the siege of Crête à Pierrot, after which Louverture and Leclerc signed a ceasefire (May 1802). Louverture was allowed to retire to his plantation at Ennery, but the French accused him of plotting a second uprising and captured him in June 1802. Exiled on board the Héros with his family, Louverture was sent to Brest, then to the Fort de Joux in the Jura Mountains. There, he experienced humiliation and mistreatment motivated in part by his refusal to reveal where he had hidden the funds he had accumulated as governor. Hungry, cold, and old, he died of pneumonia in his cell on April 7, 1803. But his strategy ultimately paid off when the French, decimated by tropical fevers and guerilla warfare, abandoned Cap Français in November 1803. Louverture was a complex character, torn between his African roots, French www.abc-clio.com

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ideals of the Enlightenment, and the reactionary colonial order. But in death, he was lionized as a single-minded martyr of freedom in various works by the poets William Wordsworth and Alphonse de Lamartine, the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, and the historian C. L. R. James. Philippe R. Girard See also: Christophe, Henri; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; Dutty, Boukman References Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 1963. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Ott, Thomas. The Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973. Parkinson, Wenda. “This Gilded African:” Toussaint l’Ouverture. New York: Quartet Books, 1978. Pluchon, Pierre. Toussaint Louverture: Un révolutionnaire noir d’Ancien Régime. Paris: Fayard, 1989.

LUMUMBA, PATRICE (1925–1961) A political leader and popular hero of African liberation struggles, Patrice Lumumba was born in the Kasai province of what was then the Belgian Congo. Despite receiving only an elementary education as a child, Lumumba went to work in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and Stanleyville (now Kisangani) as a journalist. In 1955 Lumumba joined the Belgian Liberal Party. He also became regional president of a Congolese trade union association. In 1958 he increased his political involvement, helping to found the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC).

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Patrice Lumumba speaking with supporters in Congo on October 15, 1960. The first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lumumba inspired many as a voice of African national independence and anticolonialism. (Library of Congress)

The MNC emerged from the local elections of December 1959 with a strong majority, despite the fact that Lumumba, the MNC leader, was under arrest. The 1959 elections were crucial given that Belgian authorities had just announced a five-year timetable for Congo’s independence. During the 1960 conference in Belgium to establish the terms of independence, Lumumba played an important part in pushing the Belgians to move up the date of independence to June 1960, following May elections to establish a government. On June 23, 1960, the MNC formed the independent Congo’s first government, with Lumumba as the country’s

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first popularly elected prime minister and Joseph Kasavuba as president. Lumumba’s leadership was immediately opposed by the Belgian colonialists, as well as the U.S. government and corporations with interests in the Congo’s vast resources. In June 1960, the mineral-rich Katanga province, under Moise Tshombe, backed by the Belgians, seceded from Congo. With few alternatives, and facing U.S. opposition within the United Nations to his rule, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for aid. While Lumumba’s politics were those of a social democrat, the turn to the Soviets, a move made out of practical necessity, strengthened the view, especially among

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U.S. government leaders, that Lumumba was a communist. Documents later released reveal that the view of Lumumba as a communist contributed to Eisenhower’s call for his elimination. In September, after only 67 days in office, Lumumba was illegally dismissed from office by Kasavubu. On September 14, a coup d’état was initiated by Colonel Joseph Mobutu, the future dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who would terrorize the country for three decades. Lumumba was arrested on December 1 and with direction and assistance from Belgian forces was taken to Katanga province and turned over to his archenemy Tshombe. A Soviet resolution before the UN Security Council calling for Lumumba’s release was defeated

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eight votes to two. On January 17, 1961, Patrice Lumumba was executed by a squad consisting of Belgian officers and Katangan authorities. A martyr for African liberation upon his death, Lumumba remains a powerful symbol of anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles. His principled opposition to exploitation and oppression have made Lumumba an icon for resistance movements globally. Jeff Shantz References DeWitt Ludo. The Assassination of Lumumba. London: Verso, 2002. Kanza, Thomas. The Rise and Fall of Patrice Lumumba: Conflict in the Congo. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1997.

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M MAD MULLAH (1864–1920) “Mad Mullah” is the term the British gave to Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, a figure central to Somalia’s national war of liberation, and who is seen as an early jihadist. He was born in the Ogaden region of what was then called British Somaliland. Tutored by his father and other sheiks in childhood, Hassan, as a young man, went on trading voyages. In Egypt he was inspired by stories of the Mahdi in the Sudan. While in Mecca for the hajj he joined the Salihiya tariqa, a puritanical Sufi sect with strict beliefs and dervish practices. In the 1890s, Hassan returned to Somalia. He settled in the Nogal Valley where his preaching, conducted with great rhetorical and poetic skill, made him the mullah of the Salihiya, and the leader of a movement to expel the infidel from Somalia. In 1899, he attacked Burao, a trading center, beginning his first jihad. In October 1902, the British defeated the Mullah’s forces at Erigo. On February 22, 1903, the Mullah defeated a British force at Bumburu. In subsequent battles, the Mullah’s dervishes were usually defeated by British forces. In early 1905, the Mullah was driven into Italian Somalia and forced to sign a peace agreement. In 1907, the Mad Mullah launched his second jihad against the British. Fighting

continued, with victories and defeats on both sides, until 1920, when the British brought a squadron of airplanes from the Western Front. After his headquarters at Taleh was bombed, he fled to Ethiopia where he soon died. However, the death of the Mad Mullah did not stop his influence. He has been enshrined in Somali lore as an early hero of Somali liberation. Andrew J. Waskey See also: Islam, African American; Mahdi References Jardine, Douglas. The Mad Mullah of Somaliland. 1923. Reprint, New York: Negro University Press, 1969. Sheik-’Abdi, ’Abdi. Divine Madness: Mohammed ’Abdulle Hassan (1856–1920). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zee Books, 1993

MADAGASCAR The fourth largest island in the world, the Republic of Madagascar has been a longstanding trade partner of the United States and is of strategic importance because of its proximity to the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. It has a population of approximately 18,400,000. The nation was a French colony beginning in 1896 and gained full independence in 1960 as the Malagasy Republic. It was renamed Madagascar in 1975.

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Madagascar’s first contact with Europeans began in 1500 because of the slave trade. In the nineteenth century, under the rule of the Merina monarchy, Madagascar developed strong diplomatic relations with the United States. Trade with the Americans increased along with American influence in the region’s whaling industry. In the 1950s, American aid was offered, including an economic survey of the Lake Alaotra region. After independence, Malagasy officials visited the United States in search of private investments. American scientific and trade missions also visited Madagascar. In July 1963, the United States agreed to support American private investments in the island. While some of the island’s legislators were skeptical of American motives, many Malagasy were pleased to have investment from beyond their former colonial rulers. In 1964, Madagascar took on new importance as an alternative location for an American satellite-tracking station that was removed from Zanzibar. Subsequently, American financial aid to Madagascar grew to about $3.5 million in value. The aid promoted rural-welfare programs, trained manpower, helped in secondary-road building, and equipped the gendarmerie, a paramilitary force. This massive American aid was meant to preclude Soviet and Chinese communist influences in the region and protect Western security. Nonetheless, from 1978 until 1991, Madagascar aligned with socialist and radical regimes, including Cuba, Libya, Iran, and North Korea. In the 1980s, Madagascar abandoned communism in favor of a market economy and a democratic constitution. Successful political and economic reforms in the 1990s resulted in renewed U.S. support. Madagascar further strengthened ties with www.abc-clio.com

Canada, Brazil, and Europe. The U.S.funded Leland Madagascar Ground Station, inaugurated in 1997, is one major fruit of the cooperation between the United States and Madagascar. Because of the Leland project, the telecommunications sector in Madagascar is now equipped with modern technology. Several American trade delegations have visited the island since 2003 and U.S. trade missions have signed twelve commitments with the government of Madagascar to explore investment opportunities. With the United States as one of its principal trade partners, Madagascar was the first country to benefit from the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), an American aid program. Madagascar is also important to the United States because of the military base on Diego Garcia, northeast of the nation. Diego Garcia was a key military facility during the Cold War and is now indispensable for American interventions in the Middle East. Philip A. Ojo

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See also: Cold War; French Empire; United States Agency for International Development References Duignan, Peter, and L. H. Gann. The United States and Africa: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Hoover Institution, 1984. Houbert, Jean. “Creolisation and Decolonisation in the Changing Geopolitics of the Indian Ocean.” In The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, edited by Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. Rotberg, Robert I., ed. Africa in the 1990s and Beyond: U.S. Policy Opportunities and Choices. Algonac, MI: Reference Publications, 1988. Thompson, Virginia McLean, and Richard Adloff. The Malagasy Republic: Madagascar Today. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965.

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MADHI (1844–1885) The Madhi is the name for a historical figure, Muhammad Ahmad, who successfully waged a war of liberation for Khartoum in 1881, as well as an eschatological figure in both the Sunni and Shi’a traditions of Islam. The historical figure was born in 1844 as the son of boat builders. Ahmad pursued religious studies and held a strong interest in Sufism. In both the Sunni and Shi’a abstractions of Islam, the Madhi was viewed as a redemptive figure or deliverer on par with Christ in their respective eschatological frameworks. In 1871, Ahmad moved to Aba Island, where he built a mosque. Subsequently he traveled throughout Sudan for ten years, where he noted the Sudanese people’s hatred of the Ottoman Egyptians who ruled Sudan. In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed himself al-Mahdi al-Muntazar and raised an army known as the Ansar, in deference to the residents of Medina who welcomed the Prophet Muhammad during the Hijrah. For three years, Ahmad won battles throughout the Sudan and consolidated his power. Charles George Gordon, who had been appointed governor-general of Sudan by Khedive Ismail, was placed in the precarious position of trying to organize a withdrawal of Khartoum while fending off Ahmad. Khartoum fell and Gordon was killed in January 1885, at which point the Madhi formed a government. Ahmad required that all Muslims add to their statement of faith, the Shahada, that “Muhammad Ahmad is the Mahdi of God and the representative of His Prophet,” in effect equating him with the Prophet Muhammad. This requirement would be short-lived as Ahmad died from typhus six months after the fall of Khartoum. However, the career and movements of the Mahdi would be www.abc-clio.com

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carefully studied by Islamist intellectuals, such as Abdullah Azzam, Safar al-Hawali, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, as they formulated their own eschatological framework which would be carried out by their Mahdi heir apparent: Osama bin Laden. Ojan Aryanfard See also: Colonialism; Islam, African American; Mad Mullah References Cook, David B. Understanding Jihad. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Smith, Jane I., and Yvonne Y. Haddad. The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

MALAWI The land-locked Republic of Malawi was originally the British protectorate of Nyasaland. Surrounded by Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique, the eastern part of the country is dominated by Lake Nyasa (or Lake Malawi). Malawi has a population of approximately 11,907,000. Historically, U.S. and British missionary activities have been prominent in the country. British missionary activity started in 1874 and a consul was appointed nine years later. In 1889 a small protectorate was established, and enlarged in 1891 to cover the western shore of Lake Nyasa. From 1893 until 1907, it was called the British Central African Protectorate, but then reverted to its original name of Nyasaland, which it retained until independence. U.S. missionaries were always active in Malawi, with the National Baptist Convention sending staff from 1895; the African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1900; the Assemblies of God from 1930; the Church of the Nazarene and the United Presbyterian Church of

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North America soon afterwards; and the Pentecostal Holiness Church from 1950. Landon N. Cheek and Emma B. Delaney were with the National Baptist Convention in Nyasaland from 1901 until 1906 and from 1902 until 1905, respectively. Thomas H. Branch, from Missouri, was a missionary with the Seventh-Day Adventists in Nyasaland from 1902 until 1908, being the first American black to live in British Central Africa. Other important early missionaries include Walter B. Cockerill, from Wisconsin, who was with the Seventh-Day Adventists in Nyasaland 1914–1915, and Joel C. Rogers, who was in charge of Plainfield Mission 1907–1917. American Thomas Alexander Barns worked as a plantation agent in Nyasaland from 1880 to 1930 before settling in Northern Rhodesia. An early nationalist, John Chilembwe, met one of the early missionaries, John Booth, who took Chilembwe to the United States where he attended a black theological college. In 1900, when Chilembwe returned to Nyasaland, he established the Providence Industrial Mission (P.I.M.) and agitated for independence. The P.I.M. gained support from some prominent African Americans, including Landon Cheek and Emma DeLany. Chilembwe took part in the abortive 1915 uprising against British rule. Although it failed quickly and Chilembwe was shot dead by police, the British were worried and rushed extra soldiers to the colony. One of these, James L. Harper, was a Briton who had worked in Argentina. He became engineer-in-chief with the Royal Engineers in Nyasaland. In the early twentieth century, two men from Nyasaland went to the United States to train as doctors. The first, Daniel Sharpe Malekebu, was born in Nyasaland www.abc-clio.com

in about 1889, arrived in the United States in 1905, and attend Meharry Medical School. In 1920, he was living with his wife in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he was practicing as a physician. It is known that he recorded texts in his native Yao language. The other man, Hastings Banda, arrived in the United States in 1923, attended Wilberforce Institute in Xenia, Ohio, and after graduating in 1928, went to Indiana University and then to the University of Chicago, graduating in 1931. He then went to Meharry Medical School, afterward moving to Britain, where he was a physician in Liverpool during World War II. In 1938, the Rhodesia-Nyasaland Royal Commission was established to investigate the possibility of a closer union between Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. It included in its members Patrick Ashley Cooper, who subsequently moved to Argentina where he became the chairman and managing director of the province of Buenos Aires Waterworks Company Ltd., director of the Argentine Transadine Railway Company Ltd., and member of the Argentine Chamber of Commerce Advisory Board. In 1953, Nyasaland was joined with Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia to form the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. However, Nyasaland was a reluctant member. This reluctance led to the dissolution of the federation in 1963. Malawi gained status as an independent member of the British Commonwealth on July 6, 1964, and two years later, on July 6, 1966, became the Republic of Malawi, with Hastings Banda as its first president. Initially relations between the Banda government and the United States were good. However, the U.S. Peace Corps,

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which first arrived in Malawi in 1963, was not allowed in after 1972. In spite of slightly frosty relations, some Malawians continued to study at U.S. universities, and in 1978 Hastings Banda visited the United States, attending ceremonies at the University of Indiana and the Meharry Medical College. The Peace Corps returned to Malawi in the following year. American researchers have also been at the forefront of scientific research in Malawi, with Margaret M. Stewart writing Amphibia of Malawi in 1967. After the fall of Banda, the new government of Bakili Muluzi, a Muslim, established closer relations with Libya and Sudan and led to some tensions with the United States. The current president, Bingu wa Muthariki, has a positive relationship with the U.S. despite his harsh crackdown on corruption, which created political instability after he resigned from his party. Muthariki acknowledges the HIV pandemic in southern Africa, and in a recent press conference in 2007 called for a strategy of collaboration to fight the disease. The United States has responded to Muthariki’s leadership with a substantial foreign assistance program. Justin Corfield See also: African Methodist Episcopal Church; Pentecostalism References Kalinga, Owen J., and Cynthia A. Crosby. Historical Dictionary of Malawi. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001. Short, Philip. Banda. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.

MALCOLM X (1925–1965) Malcolm X was a minister for the Nation of Islam, a convert to orthodox Islam, and a world leader of the cause of African www.abc-clio.com

Malcolm X, an African American Muslim leader during the civil rights era, gave voice to ideals of African American and Pan-African self-determination through economic and cultural independence. He was assassinated on February 21, 1965. (Library of Congress)

Americans. Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925 to an active Baptist preacher whom white supremacists killed in 1931. Malcolm had a troubled beginning in life. He withdrew from school at age 15 because of discrimination. He was put into many foster homes due to his behavior, later joining his sister in Boston. He worked at several places in Boston and New York. He also engaged in many criminal activities, which landed him in jail in 1946 for carrying firearms, larceny, and burglary. It was at the prison that he had his salvation. There, he joined the Nation of Islam (NOI), which preached that blacks were superior to the white men who were devils and that Islam was the religion of the blacks. In prison,

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Malcolm learned and improved himself educationally before his release in 1952. On leaving prison, he worked at several jobs in Detroit and became active in the NOI. He was shortly appointed a minister at the NOI due to his fervent energy and his electrifying oratorical skills. He changed his name to Malcolm X and made it his mission to fight against racism, cruel treatment of blacks, and shaking off the yoke of slavery imposed upon blacks. Malcolm was imbued with the idea of Black Nationalism, which he had inherited from his father, a follower of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican activist who insisted that Africans abroad should go back to Africa and build it. Malcolm saw a great connection between African Americans and Africans: in his view they were the same people who shared the same culture and heritage, and yet were subjugated collectively by white people. He believed that freedom for Africans in the Diaspora was tantamount to freedom for all blacks all over the world; they were one people separated against their will. They shared the same values, culture, arts, music, and identity, and therefore, they needed to work together to liberate themselves. Malcolm also argued that since many of the slaves brought to the New World were Muslims, African Americans should embrace Islam because it is the religion of their ancestors. Malcolm’s unconditional love for blacks and his fervent desire to unite Africans led him to visit Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, and Senegal in 1959 to strengthen his relationship with African peoples and their leaders and to affirm their common heritage and culture. He believed that black Americans and Africans would prosper and resume their respected roles in www.abc-clio.com

world affairs if they united. To put this belief into practice, he helped establish the Organization of the African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa to unite all Africans. As he described it in his autobiography, African leaders and the masses received him warmly and accorded him great respect, something he had never enjoyed before. The Africans actually regarded his visit a blessing, and they were so impressed with him that they nicknamed him “omowale”—“a son who returns home.” In America, Malcolm had been an ardent follower of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the NOI. The relationship broke down after Malcolm made derogatory comments about the death of President John Kennedy. Malcolm felt stifled by the authoritarian organization of the NOI and decided to leave the group rather than being silenced by Elijah Muhammad after his excommunication for ninety days. He founded his own movement in Harlem in 1964 and called it Muslim Mosque. In April 1964, Malcolm visited Mecca and performed the Islamic pilgrimage. The journey was a spiritual discovery and enlightenment for him. At Mecca, he joined millions of Muslims in prayer, standing shoulder to shoulder and wearing the same gown to show the equality of all human beings before God. He confessed that he had never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced as he witnessed it in Mecca, for all pilgrims related to one another peacefully regardless of their color. He found that Islam was not exclusively for the blacks, but for all human beings. Thus, he renounced his previous erroneous charges against white men that they were devils. He boldly and publicly apologized for his previous misjudgment of all the white people.

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Upon his return to America in July 1964, Malcolm preached a new message of peace, accommodation, and tolerance. He became a witty person, a reformed leader, who perceived all human beings as equal. He reverted to the true orthodox Islam and adopted a new name, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He was afire with new spiritual insight. He welcomed the white men in his movement and fought for the rights of blacks and oppressed people. However, Malcolm’s openness to the white men, his accommodation of all blacks, and his change from a racist to a nationalist, humanist liberator for all the oppressed people angered some members of the Nation of Islam who did not share his universal and accommodative approach to the problems of the blacks. Thus, he was brutally killed on February 21, 1965, in Harlem, New York. With his death, black Americans lost one of their most able leaders and spokesmen. Malcolm X was a humanist, an ambassador of peace, a soul-saving leader, and a revolutionary person who followed the truth wherever he found it. Many books, articles, autobiographies, films, and doctoral dissertations have been written and produced about him and his legacy, which survives as part of a collective culture of blacks in the modern world. Malcolm X has been described as a shining prince. He will never be forgotten in the history of Africans in America. He was and still is the source of pride for many Americans. Yushau Sodiq See also: Black Power Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Islam, African American; Nation of Islam References DeCaro, Jr., Louis A. On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

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Dyson, Michael. Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Haley, Alex, with Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Lee, Spike, with Ralph Wiley. By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X. New York: Hyperion, 1992.

MALE REVOLT The Male Revolt is the second largest revolt of freed and enslaved Africans in the Americas, after the Haitian Revolution. The Male Revolt happened in the city of Salvador in the state of Bahia, Brazil, in 1835. In the conflict, about 70 Africans died and about 500 were taken prisoner. The early nineteenth century was a period of economic decline and political turmoil in Bahia. As a consequence, between 1816 and 1835, there were many smaller revolts in the region. Yet, the Male Revolt was truly extraordinary, since the most common form of slave resistance in Brazil was taking flight instead of engaging in armed revolts. The Male Revolt was an African movement and not merely a slave revolt. In fact, it involved both slaves and ex-slaves almost equally in terms of numbers. Salvador was an urban slave society and all of the slaves who participated in the revolt were wage earners. In this sense, they had the freedom of movement to pass on messages to individuals in other areas of the city and the state. One characteristic of this movement was the involvement of large numbers of Muslim Africans. In fact, the term “male” means African Muslim and it probably derives from the Yoruban word imale, meaning any African who adopted the Islamic religion. Islam functioned as a

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unifying force among the rebels. Muslims organized the movement and enforced discipline in the group. They were a unifying factor in a nonunified community. However, the rebels were not spearheading a religious revolution in the region. The Male Revolt was not a religious war. The movement had as its objective to take power from the established elite and to give it to the African population. Muslim slaves became common in Salvador only in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the slave trade to Brazil increased significantly. Muslims comprised an elite group within the slave society, as some of them were religious leaders and possessed knowledge of reading and writing. However, it seems that they were also feared and hated by other blacks. News of the impending revolt was leaked to the authorities by two freedwomen, both African-born, and the revolt was crushed at its inception. This event illustrates the fact that there was little cohesion among the African population in the Americas. The African community in Salvador, as well as in many other parts of the Americas, was unable to overcome all of its differences and divisions. Slave masters were eager to exploit these differences in order to prevent the unification of a strong group of Africans. The people participating in the Male Revolt believed that their enemies were not only the whites but all of the Brazilian-born population regardless of their race. So, any Brazilian-born black was also considered an enemy. The plan was to kill everyone in Bahia who was not an African, including whites, blacks, and mulattos. Apparently, the mulattos who were not killed were to be enslaved. One of the results of the revolt was a wave of violence and racism toward Africans in Bahia. Many peaceful Africans www.abc-clio.com

were killed and persecuted by the dominant population. In fact, fear of a black revolt was a very real aspect of Brazilian life during the colonial period and during the first half of the nineteenth century. The violent slave revolution that began in Haiti in 1792 terrified whites living in the many slave societies of the Americas for many years after the event. When the sovereignty of the first slave-run nation was declared in 1804, it seemed possible that a similar revolt could occur anywhere where enslaved people outnumbered whites. The Male Revolt of 1835 reinforced this fear by clearly revealing the threat under which Brazilian whites were living. Rosana Barbosa See also: Brazil; Brazilian Culture; Islam, African American; Slave Revolts/Maronnage References Mattoso, Katia M. de Queirós. To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550–1888, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Nishida, Mieko. Slavery and Identity. Ethnicity, Gender and Race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808–1888. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Reis, João José. Slave Rebellion in Brazil. The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

MALI Located in West Africa, the Republic of Mali is landlocked, dominated by the Sahara desert, and has a population of about 11,957,000. In medieval times, the Mali Empire covered much of inland West Africa. It was founded in the thirteenth century and its capital, Timbuktu, became a byword for a location that was remote and inaccessible. In the late sixteenth century, the empire started to decline but the

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aura of the place remained, although most Europeans only had the description of a Spanish moor, Leo Africanus, to go on. This changed in 1816 with the publication of The Narrative of Robert Adams, a Sailor Who Was Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Year 1810, Was Detained Three Years in Slavery by the Arabs of the Great Desert, and Resided Several Months in the City of Tombuctoo. The author was not, in fact, called Robert Adams but Benjamin Rose, an African American sailor who had been born in Hudson, New York, and in 1813 managed to see the British Consul at Mogador (now Essaouira, Morocco). He said that he had been held as a slave and wanted to return to the United States but instead was sent to the U.S. consul at Tangier, from where he begged his way to London. There he met a man who had been told that he (Rose) had seen Timbuktu. Rose then “became” Robert Adams. Rose/Adams was illiterate, so his book, which described Timbuktu in negative terms, was ghost-written by Samuel Cook, a member of the British African Company. The book was published in London in 1816, and republished in the following year in Paris and then Boston. Some corroboration for his story emerged, and academics still disagree on whether or not Rose/Adams ever reached Timbuktu. After the decline of the empire of Mali, the French made inroads and established the Upper River Colony, which ran from 1880 until 1890. It then became French Sudan from 1890 until 1899. After becoming Upper Senegal and Middle Niger for three years, it was renamed Senegambia-Niger for three years, and then Upper Senegal-Niger until 1920 when it was renamed French Sudan. The French used it for expanding the growing of cotton. During World War I, www.abc-clio.com

large numbers of men from Mali were recruited into the French colonial forces and, in the last two years of the war, some fought alongside U.S. servicemen on the Western Front. As with many other colonial services, officials rotated around the empire and three of the French lieutenant governors of French Sudan had either served in, or were to serve in, Martinique in the West Indies. Louis Albert Grodet, lieutenant governor of the French Sudan from 1893 until 1895 had been in Martinique 1887–1889; Louis Jacques Fousset, governor of French Sudan from 1931 until 1935 went on to become governor of Martinique; and his successor, Mathieu Maurice Alfassa, was in Martinique when he was appointed governor of French Sudan, a post he held until 1936. Few people visited the French Sudan during this period without some attempt to get to Timbuktu. From October 1912 until May 1913, an American, D. W. Berty, and men of his American Trans-Saharan Expedition visited the city. The house they stayed at has been preserved and is almost opposite the Tomboctou-Boy Batouma Museum. Two U.S. religious groups sent missionaries: the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1924; and the Evangelical Baptist Missions from 1951. In addition, in the early 1950s, just before the colony became independent, U.S. anthropologist Peter B. Hammond conducted research in the country. In 1958, the French Sudan voted to become an autonomous member of the French community, and two years later, on September 22, 1960, became independent as the Republic of Mali. The United States sent Thomas Kenneth Wright to Bamako, Mali’s capital, and he was succeeded in 1961 by William Jules Handley. One U.S.

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diplomat, E. G. “Jay” Ruoff, from Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote of his experiences in Mali in his book Making a Difference (1997). During the late 1990s an American guitarist, Banning Eyre, went to Mali where he immersed himself in Mali’s music, which formed the basis of his book In Griot Time (2000). Other musicians include those who made up the group Afro-Jazz de Ségou, which was popular in Cuba in the 1950s. Cuban music was popular in Mali during the 1960s. Since early 2000, the U.S. government has supported Malian troops defending the government against attack by Tuareg rebels, who have been fighting for greater recognition, developmental aid, and political autonomy to the northern desert region they inhabit since the early 1990s. Justin Corfield See also: French Empire; Songhay (Medieval Empire) References Adams, Robert. The Narrative of Robert Adams, A Barbary Captive—A Critical Edition, edited by Charles Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Eyre, Banning. In Griot Time: An American Guitarist in Mali, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Gardner, Brian. The Quest for Timbuctoo, London: Cassell & Co., 1968. Ruoff, E. G. Making a Difference: An American Family in Pakistan, France, Vietnam, Laos, Turkey, Mali. Peninsula, OH: E.G. Ruoff, 1997.

MANDELA, NELSON (1918–) Nelson Mandela is a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, dismantler of apartheid, and was the president and architect of South Africa’s liberal constitution. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in Umtata, Transkei. Expected to follow his www.abc-clio.com

Nelson Mandela was South Africa’s first black president (1994–1997) and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. A leader in the struggle to overturn South Africa’s system of white domination and racial segregation known as apartheid, Mandela was known throughout both Africa and the Americas. Mandela spent 28 years as a political prisoner in South Africa under the apartheid government. (Courtesy: Embassy of South Africa)

father, a Tembu chief, into high tribal office, Mandela chose rather to become a lawyer. Expelled from one university for joining a protest boycott, he went on to complete his law degree and later opened South Africa’s first black law firm. In 1944, Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC) and helped form its Youth League (ANCYL), becoming its president in 1950. Mandela was central to the ANC’s adoption of a radical “Programme of Action” which advocated civil disobedience, strikes, and boycotts in order to attain direct parliamentary representation and equal rights for nonwhites, thereby ending apartheid rule. In 1952, Mandela was given

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a suspended sentence of nine months’ hard labor under the Suppression of Communism Act (1950) for leading the “Defiance Campaign.” Elected deputy national president of the ANC later that year, Mandela faced banning, arrest, and imprisonment. He was among the accused (all of whom were acquitted) in the protracted Treason Trials (1956–1961). Following the Sharpeville Massacre (1960), the government banned the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). Debarred from peaceful political activity, the organizations went underground. Living in constant fear of arrest, Mandela helped to organize a mass strike and to forge, as its commander-in-chief, the ANC’s military wing—Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”)—in order to mount an organized armed struggle. Having illegally left the country, Mandela was arrested on his return to South Africa in 1962 and was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. When police arrested a number of prominent ANC leaders in 1964, Mandela, still serving his previous sentence, was sentenced to life imprisonment— together with seven others—for planning armed resistance. In spite of the confines of his Robben Island cell, Mandela (and his then wife, Winnie, herself a political activist) became an internationally recognized symbol of the fight against apartheid. Mandela repeatedly refused a commuted sentence or release in exchange for a public acceptance of certain apartheid policies and a renunciation of violence. Under F. W. De Klerk’s presidency, Mandela was released on February 11, 1990 (after 27 years in prison). In 1991, he was elected president of the ANC and in 1993 accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with De Klerk. A landslide victory for the ANC in the first democratic elections in 1994 saw www.abc-clio.com

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Mandela, with De Klerk as his deputy president, form the “Government of National Unity.” As president, Mandela assisted the peaceful transition to racial equality, with the emphasis always on reconciliation and nation building, and was largely responsible for South Africa’s liberal constitution. Mandela also intervened in a number of international disputes (particularly in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East), and personally set about attracting foreign investment back to South Africa. Despite retiring as president in 1999 and from public life in 2004, Mandela, who remains one of the most revered statesmen of all time, has led major campaigns against poverty and HIV/AIDS. Laura Charlotte Pechey See also: Sharpeville Massacre; Sisulu, Walter; South Africa, History and Politics References Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston and New York: Little, Brown, 1994. Mandela, Nelson. The Struggle Is My Life. New York: Pathfinder, 1986. Meer, Fatima. Higher Than Hope: The Authorized Biography of Nelson Mandela. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

MANZANO, JUAN FRANCISCO (1797?–1854?) Juan Francisco Manzano was a Cuban Creole mulatto born into slavery. At an early age, he learned how to read and write in his first master’s house. Subsequently, he went on to publish a collection of poetry, expressing the suffering that dates back to the sixteenth century when the first African slaves were imported into Cuba from Africa, and also an autobiography that vividly describes the everyday life of African slaves in mid-eighteenth century Cuba.

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There is much debate as to the key dates in Manzano’s life: his birth, his manumission, the writing of his autobiography, and his death. Critics such as José Luciano Franco place his birth in 1797, whereas José Fornario and Joaquín Luaces believe it was 1806 or 1807. As to the date of his freedom, Franco gives 1837 and the critic Cintio Vitier establishes it as 1836, a year after he began to write his autobiography. He died in Havana, a free man with a broken spirit, either in 1853 or 1854. Until he was able to purchase his freedom, Manzano’s existence was consumed with a desire for independence. Thereafter, the driving force in his life became the desire to be recognized and respected by the ruling white society. In this effort to identify with the white culture, he rejected his African heritage, and consequently his own self-worth. The first opportunity for recognition came Manzano’s way in 1836 when the wealthy intellectual and patriot Domingo del Monte took interest in Manzano’s writings and invited him to read some of his poetry at one of his renowned literary gatherings. Manzano’s poetry expressed the hardships and humiliations of a slave’s existence. Such insight into a slave’s psyche was valuable material for the abolitionists of Manzano’s time. After the reading, del Monte put together a volume of Manzano’s poems in hopes that sales of the volume would bring in enough money to buy the slave’s freedom, and they did. Shortly thereafter, del Monte asked Manzano to write an autobiography recounting the life of a slave. Published in England in 1840, Manzano’s Autobiografía is the first text in Cuban literature written by a slave. It is very important to keep in mind that Manzano was still a slave www.abc-clio.com

when he began to write his autobiography. This fact explains why the narrator’s voice appears to be so timid and reluctant at times. Ivan Schulman points out that Manzano never broaches the question of slavery’s immorality or questions the codes of the master discourse. Instead, Manzano centers his attention on his personal experiences and feelings such as his love for his first masters, his privileged childhood, his fear of his second mistress, the ambivalence of the slave’s psyche, what appears to be his innate servility, and the circumstances that forced him to become a runaway slave. The critic William Luis believes that Manzano’s account served as an “ur” text for the early slave writers, and Salvador Bueno demonstrates that the Autobiografía inspired the Cuban slave narratives that followed. José Luciano Franco, who edited Manzano’s complete works in Spanish in 1937, points out that Manzano’s efforts were among the first to incorporate blacks into Cuban letters. At the end of the Autobiografía, Manzano promises a second part to his story. That text was lost soon after it was corrected, never to be found again. Beatriz Rivera-Barnes

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See also: Latin American Literature References Bueno, Salvador. La crítica literaria cubana del siglo XIX. Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1979. Del Monte, Domingo. Escritos. Havana: Cultural, 1929. Franco, José Luciano. Ensayos históricos. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1974. Luis, William. Literary Bondage. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Manzano, Juan Francisco. Obras, edited by José Luciano Franco. Havana: Instituto del Libro, 1972. Schulman, Ivan, ed. Autobiography of a Slave. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996.

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MARLEY, ROBERT NESTA (1945–1981) Robert “Bob” Nesta Marley was a musician and cultural figure of Jamaican reggae and Rastafarianism. No single figure has done more for the promotion of Jamaican reggae music and the Rastafarian religion worldwide than Bob Marley. He was born in the parish of St. Ann in Jamaica, West Indies, on February 6, 1945. By the time of his death in 1981, Marley and his music had spread across the African Atlantic from America to Zimbabwe. As a musician Marley contributed much to the formal development of reggae as a musical form. As a cultural figure Marley represented Rastafarian lifestyles, thought, and religious practices to a wider world. Marley’s legendary status, however, benefited most directly from the ability of his music to capture and express a century-long tradition of black freedom struggle across the Diaspora, from Africa to the Caribbean and through the United States, from the maroons of the colonial period to the buffalo soldiers of the nineteenth century, from the days of slavery to the decolonization movements in Africa of the late twentieth century. Born to Captain Norval Marley, a white quartermaster in the British West Indian regiment, and Cedella Booker, an eighteen-year-old Jamaican woman, Marley was known locally as a Creole “pickney,” a designation of mixed cultural and racial status which also describes the space of his Caribbean homeland and the very process by which reggae developed as a musical form. Marley and his mother’s move to Kingston, the capital city, when he was 10 was the first of many movements that would mirror the larger migration patterns of other black and Caribbean subjects in these middle years of the twentieth century. www.abc-clio.com

Jamaican reggae musician and composer, Robert Nesta Marley (Bob Marley) was a pioneer whose songs about oppression and struggle made him an international anticolonial hero. He remains a symbol of freedom struggles globally and his music continues to be artistically influential on both sides of the Atlantic. (AP/Wide World Photos)

As Jimmy Cliff portrayed in the film The Harder They Come, many Jamaican youth found themselves leaving the rural, peasant communities of their childhood for the newly developing world and job opportunities to be found in the urban city of Kingston. Many of those youth would find their best means to express that migration, and the conditions they would find in the ghettos of Kingston, in music. Reggae was created in the streets of Kingston from a combination of African American jazz and rhythm and blues beats, Jamaican music and dance steps such as those found in the folk-form mento and the popular music ska, and African rhythms practiced in the drumming and

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chanting rituals of Rastafarian musicians. In the ghetto trench towns of Kingston, Marley came under the mentorship of leading figures such as the singer Joe Higgs, who held lessons for up and coming singers in the tenement yards. Marley’s first significant move was to join with his stepbrother Bunny Wailer and friend Peter Tosh to form the Wailing Wailers. They signed up with record producer Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd, whose Studio One was the site where ska, an early form of popular Jamaican music from which reggae derived, was invented. Here the Wailers recorded their first single, “Simmer Down,” a tune that became a “rude boy” anthem for Jamaica’s urban male youth of the early 1960s. By February 1966, Marley met and married singer Rita Anderson, a local singer in the girl group the Soulettes. Hardship, however, soon led Marley to join his mother who had immigrated to America in 1964. Marley would stay in Wilmington, Delaware, for six months, earning money to take back to support himself on the island. In this respect, he followed the migration route of transnational, seasonal Caribbean workers that defined the Caribbean region throughout the twentieth century, as many traveled to America looking for work and the income to help them make a better life for themselves in the West Indies. Marley used his hardearned cash to finance his own record label when he returned to Jamaica in October. His second important musical step was to combine with another legendary producer, Lee “Scratch” Perry, a figure instrumental in transitioning Jamaican popular music from ska and rock steady to reggae proper. While both earlier musical forms took the conventional four beats to the bar of classic rhythm and blues and added an

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accentuated after-beat, reggae musicians added an additional half-note to the classic after-beat of the ska/rock steady formula. By 1968–1969, reggae had emerged as the new sound of Jamaican popular music, and Marley’s tunes and lyrics were at the center of that transformation. By the early 1970s, the Wailers had secured recording contracts in Britain and it was in the spring of 1972, while recording in London, that Marley had his third fateful encounter with a record producer, this time with Chris Blackwell, the Jamaican founder of the international label Island Records. As when he worked with previous producers, Marley’s music evolved; while working with Blackwell, his music both initiated and then reflected its development as an international form. Under the Island label, reggae and Marley’s music became both part of a world market and important in the development of a now multinational music industry. On his first record with Island, Catch a Fire, Marley played with Jamaican musical forms even further by incorporating rock and other elements of American music popular in the 1970s. Adding elements of soul, blues, and funk, Marley basically incorporated modern electronic sounds from a more metropolitan form of urban music. Marley’s first successful American tour, in 1973, included the Wailers opening for Bruce Springsteen and playing support for Sly and the Family Stone. By 1976, Marley and the Wailers were international stars. However, Marley was also at the center of a tense political situation in Jamaica, which destabilized even further in December 1976 when the government’s call for an election precipitated violence between warring political factions. On the eve of a planned free concert to

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emphasize the need for peace in the streets of Kingston, Marley was shot and wounded, and though he defiantly appeared on stage briefly and returned to the Jamaican stage once again in April 1978 to play at another concert for peace, the political situation was so fraught that he never returned to Jamaica. Unable to return to his island homeland, his interests turned to Africa, and he produced two Africaninfluenced albums, Survival and Uprising, within nine months of each other over 1979 and 1980. In April 1980, Marley was officially invited to perform at the independence celebrations in Zimbabwe, cementing his stature as an international, black, third world superstar. Later that year, after performing two shows at Madison Square Garden as part of his American Survival tour, he collapsed while jogging in New York’s Central Park on September 21, 1980. Bob Marley died on May 11, 1981, in a hospital in Miami, from complications developed from a cancer that had first been identified in the big toe of his right foot in July 1977. His musical legacy and heirs continue to proliferate. Michelle Stephens See also: Jamaica; Reggae References Davis, Stephen. Bob Marley. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1985. Johnson, Howard, and Jim Pines. Reggae: Deep Roots Music. New York: Proteus Books, 1982. Partridge, Rob. Booklet. Songs of Freedom, by Bob Marley. Island, 1992. Stephens, Michelle A. “Babylon’s ‘Natural Mystic’: The North American Music Industry, The Legend of Bob Marley, and the Incorporation of Transnationalism.” Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 139–167. White, Timothy. Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

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MARRANT, JOHN (1755–1790?) John Marrant was a Methodist preacher and author of A Narrative, a spiritual autobiography and captivity narrative. Marrant, who was born a free man in New York in 1755, made an impact on black communities during his lifetime through his preaching; he continues to make an impact through his two important published works. After his father’s death, Marrant was brought to Florida, and then Georgia, undergoing considerable education until moving to South Carolina at the age of 11. He became a Christian at the age of 13 after hearing George Whitefield, a Methodist evangelist, preaching. His family disapproved of Marrant’s committed devotion to prayer and study, causing Marrant to leave home. In young adulthood, Marrant preached, mainly to slaves, incurring the displeasure of their owners. After many adventures and perils, survival from which he credited to divine providence, he moved to Bath, western England, and was ordained a minister in the Huntingdon Connexion, a sect that followed a Calvinist-like version of Methodism. Marrant’s motivation for this ordination was the pleading of his brother, who suggested that English loyalists in Nova Scotia needed Christian guidance. In 1775 he moved to Nova Scotia and became a much-revered preacher. But Marrant, suffering financially, left for Boston in 1787, serving African Masons in the capacity of lodge chaplain. He married Elizabeth Herries, a daughter of black loyalists, in 1788, and returned to England in 1790. He preached in east and south London, dying in Islington in 1791, aged 35.

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Marrant’s first book, A Narrative, was first published in 1785; highly successful, many editions followed. The book is a compelling account of Marrant’s spiritual journey, telling of his flight from his family, his search for God in the woods, his capture by Cherokees, and his trying to convert the Native Americans who once considered killing him. Part spiritual autobiography and part captivity narrative, the book is renowned as a stirring account of the subjugated black experience in America during a period of immense change. Its factual details are questionable; for example, Marrant’s claims about being forced to serve as a musician in Britain’s Royal Navy cannot be supported by contemporary documentation. But the work is a seminal African American text, and has been reprinted and studied attentively since the 1970s. Marrant’s second major work, A Journal, was first published in 1790. This second book is celebrated as an important account of the black missionary life in late-eighteenth-century America. It complements A Narrative, as Marrant again stresses that black communities must maintain dignity in the face of never-ending hardships and maltreatment by domineering whites and become regenerate through God. Kevin De Ornellas See also: Christianity (African American); Diaspora; Nova Scotia, African American Diaspora in; Nova Scotia, Black Refugees in References Brooks, Joanna. American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Carretta, Vincent. “John Marrant.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Vol. 36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hill, James L. “Kohn Marrant (1755–1791).” In African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Mallory, Devona A. “John Marrant.” In American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. Vol. 14. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Marrant, John. A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black. In Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Vincent Carretta. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Potkey, Adam, and Sandra Burr, eds. Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

MARSHALL, PAULE (1929–) Paule Marshall is a novelist and essayist whose work explores American-Caribbean cultural connections and conflicts through female protagonists. Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke on April 9, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York. The daughter of firstgeneration West Indian immigrants from Barbados, Marshall was raised in a closeknit West Indian community, a factor that influences and informs all her works. Not only is Marshall’s work infused with the Caribbean (Diaspora) culture but also her fascination with the Caribbean “nation language” is strikingly obvious in all of her writings. Marshall attended Brooklyn College where she earned a first degree in English literature. After graduating in 1953, she worked as a writer and researcher for Our World, an African American magazine, at which time she began working on her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones.

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Since then, Marshall has assumed several professorships at academic institutions, such as Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and Virginia Commonwealth universities, and has won numerous prizes and awards, including in 1992 the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and an American Book Award. Set in Brooklyn against the backdrop of the Great Depression and World War II, Marshall’s autobiographical novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) depicts the real-life struggles of an Afro-Caribbean immigrant community in search of the American dream. This novel, while it speaks of community and kinship, or lack thereof, is also a coming of age story for the young female protagonist, Selina Boyce, who in addition to becoming embroiled in the struggle for selfhood independent of the Caribbean community, is also enmeshed in an ongoing struggle with her powerful mother, Silla, for autonomy. The brown girl, Selina, stands in stark opposition to white Eurocentric values symbolized by the brownstones that the mother, Silla, and others members of the Barbadian Homeowners Association, on the ride to upward mobility, purchase as a means of not only acquiring wealth but also status. In this novel Marshall questions the relentless pursuit of material possessions and the lack of spirituality and spiritual consciousness. Acknowledging her dual heritage, Afro-Caribbean and African American, Selina makes her own way, returning to her motherland, Barbados, enacting both a physical and spiritual return as a means of bridging the two communities, African American and Afro-Caribbean. This departure for the motherland is a marker of transatlantic connections. Marshall’s collection of four novellas, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), which won the Rosenthal Award of the National www.abc-clio.com

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Institute of Arts and Letters, is arguably a “detour” from her other works in which the leading characters are women, distinctively black women. In these short stories, geographically titled Barbados, Brooklyn, British Guiana, and Brazil, the leading characters are all middle-aged men who relentlessly pursue fame and wealth at the expense of love and companionship. In her own words, Marshall undertook this project in order to explore if she could write convincingly about men. In this short story collection, Marshall once again addresses the surrendering of one’s spiritual essence and the inexorable pursuit of material acquisitions, as she demonstrates the devastating effect of this “obsessive pastime” as each man eventually confronts a hollow and meaningless existence in spite of material wealth and/or personal success. The Bournehills community in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) is marked by its deep-seated sense of community and communal kinship while it refuses to relinquish its ancestral inheritances to modernization/Westernization. In this second novel, as in all of her works, Marshall is engaged with what Kamau Brathwaite calls the literature of recognition (of an African presence). Resisting and renouncing colonial intervention, the Bournehills inhabitants proudly embrace their past, their roots. Honoring their dead hero, Cuffee Ned, the Bournehills inhabitants restage and participate in an annual reenactment of the slave rebellion that Cuffee initiated years ago in Pyre Hill, now famously known as the Pyre Hill Revolt. This return to the past is both spiritual and physical for the main character, Merle Kinbona, who at the novel’s end is embarked on a journey to Africa to reclaim her lost daughter. In the process of reclamation, she will reclaim

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herself, mending her disparate selves and the community. History and memory are here employed as tools of empowerment. Marshall’s next novel, Praisesong for the Widow (1983), which was awarded the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1984, explores the theme of diasporic continuity and connectivity as the middleaged African American woman protagonist, Avatara (Avey) Johnson, voyages inadvertently to the off island of Grenada, Carriacou. This novel traces Avey’s spiritual unmooring, her rootlessness, and relinquishment of things ancestral to her return to self and embraces ancestral inheritances as she eventually is able to “call her nation” by invoking the ancestors. Consumed by materialism in White Plains, New York, Avey is able to reclaim herself, under the direction of Mothers, on the chosen island of Carriacou, where homage is paid religiously to the ancestors and African oral traditional practices are proudly practiced and preserved. The Mothers who redirect Avey’s wanderings and stage her rebirth are Marshall’s Mother Poets who have double vision and could see in more ways than one. Marshall’s collection of essays, Reena and Other Stories (1983), includes the introductory groundbreaking autobiographical essay “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen.” In this essay Marshall chronicles her emergence into a writer which began in her mother’s kitchen, where her mother and other women of the Barbadian community concocted their art—domestic chores as well as political issues—for they themselves were poets in the making. The common, everyday language used by these women poets are the “true” markers of their identity. The spoken word served as a refuge as well as functioned www.abc-clio.com

as a weapon according them visibility and empowerment. Daughters (1991) details the spiritual and physical journeys of an African American daughter, Ursa, who after living and working in the United States for several years, upon her mother’s request, returns to the fictitious Caribbean island Triunion to assist her prime minister father with his reelection campaign. Once an ardent historian who flaunted his historical knowledge and ties to the island, the incumbent prime minister, Primus McKenzie, in his quest for reelection, abandons his past oral traditions, surrendering not only his rights but also the community’s right to U.S. imperialist interests. Ursa eventually comes to self-realization as she merges with the ancestress Congo Jane and dedicates her life to community activism. Merging with the ancestress is suggestive of a possible convergence between the two worlds, Triunion and the United States, presently at odds. On the verge of achieving wholeness, Ursa returns not only to her homeland but also to her thesis project in Triunion, rejected earlier in the United States, documenting the lives of slaves in the New World and their resistance to enslavement in the United States. Marshall returns to the theme of bridging communities and communal relationship in The Fisher King (2000). The concept of binary oppositions, or opposing forces (a common feature in Marshall’s works), that is at the center of the novel highlights the need for synthesis—the need to unite disparate selves. Here again dual heritage, African American and AfroCaribbean, is celebrated in the young male protagonist Sonny, the Fisher King, who has a pivotal role to play in uniting and preserving family ties (the Holy Grail).

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Music functions as the threshold of familial ties and is posited as a recipe for healing and reconciliation. In the process of uniting his feuding great-grandmothers, Sonny, the keeper of the Holy Grail, comes to understand and acknowledge their combined heritage, Afro-Caribbean and African American, and by extension his own. Simone Alexander See also: Brathwaite, Kamau; Caribbean Literature References Alexander, Simone A. James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Alexander, Simone A. James. “Healing and Reconciliation in Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King.” Network 2000: In the Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance 11 (Spring 2003): 11–20. Brathwaite, Kamau. Roots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Graulich, Melody, and Lisa Sisco. “Meditations on Language and the Self: A Conversation with Paule Marshall.” NWSA Journal 4, no. 3 (1992): 282–302. Marshall, Paule. Soul Clap Hands and Sing. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1961. Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York: The Feminist Press, 1981. Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Penguin Books, 1983a. Marshall, Paule. Reena and Other Stories. New York: Feminist Press, 1983. Marshall, Paule. Daughters. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Marshall, Paule. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Marshall, Paule. The Fisher King. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

MARSON, UNA (1905–1965) Una Marson was a poet, playwright, and activist, who devised the London-based radio program Caribbean Voices. www.abc-clio.com

Born in Jamaica, Marson authored four volumes of poetry: Tropic Reveries (1930), Heights and Depths (1931), and The Moth and the Star (1937), all published by the author in Kingston, and Towards the Stars (1945), published in London by University of London Press. Her poetry continues and extends the pioneering work in the vernacular of her countryman Claude McKay. Her correspondence with James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, who would publish several of her poems in his 1949 anthology Poetry of the Negro, demonstrates that Marson was also influenced by the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the blossoming of African American cultural expression in the 1920s of which McKay is often described as the initiator. Marson lived in London in the 1930s and 1940s, working for Dr. Harold Moody, founder of the League of Coloured Peoples. Poems such as “Quashie Comes to London” and “Little Brown Girl” are early evocations of the Caribbean immigrant experience; the latter focalized through the female perspective that characterizes much of Marson’s writing. Her feminist journalism and lifelong commitment to the international women’s movement complements the womanist blues that Marson developed in poems such as “Kinky Hair Blues.” Marson subsequently worked with the exiled Haile Selassie, accompanying him to the League of Nations in 1935. Her first play, At What a Price, was staged in Kingston in 1932, and the following year made history as the first black colonial production to be staged in London’s West End; her second play, Pocomania, performed in Kingston in 1938, anticipates much postcolonial Caribbean writing in its exploration of folk materials as cultural resistance.

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In the 1940s Marson was employed by the British Broadcasting Corporation, where she devised Caribbean Voices, the radio program that would prove “the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative and critical writing in English” (Brathwaite, 1984, p. 87). On her return to Jamaica, Marson worked for the Daily Gleaner and the Pioneer Press, where she encouraged new writers, among them the young Andrew Salkey. Her considerable contribution to Caribbean and international culture was recognized in 1977 in a special “Caribbean Woman” issue of the journal Savacou, which was dedicated to the memory of this “poet, pioneer, patriot and people-person.” Nonetheless, Marson’s books remain out of print, although selections from her poetry appear in the Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. Lee M. Jenkins See also: BBC Caribbean Service and Caribbean Voices; Caribbean Literature; Harlem Renaissance; Jamaica, Women’s Role in; League of Coloured Peoples; Selassie I, Haile References Brathwaite, Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon, 1984. Burnett, Paula, ed. Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. New York: Penguin, 1986. Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998.

MARTÍ, JOSÉ (1853–1895) Born on January 28, 1853, in Havana Cuba, José Martí is an important political figure of Hispanic America and is known as a national hero of Cuba. His face, life, and memory are commemorated on stamps, in books, and in statues all across the world. www.abc-clio.com

Martí died on a Cuban battlefield at 42, after he and the Cuban Liberation Army launched an invasion of Cuba to fight against Spanish forces on May 19, 1895. Martí was a revolutionary, a journalist, a poet, a scholar, a teacher, a politician, a motivational speaker, a mentor, and a hero. As a teacher, Martí believed that race prejudice had no place in democracy or in education. He taught in New York City from 1891 to 1895 at La Liga (The League), a place where blacks and whites could study together. As a political activist, Martí wished to unite Latin nations and people together under a common goal of universal harmony and simultaneously build the Cuban nation. He spoke for the disenfranchised, believing everyone, no matter the color of one’s skin or the class they were born into, had the right to learning and wisdom. He was a nation builder. Martí’s revolutionary spirit began early in life. At sixteen, he became involved in antigovernment activity and his beliefs (written in numerous political writings in his school newspaper) led to his imprisonment for six years of hard labor and his deportation from his homeland. Exiled to Spain, Martí graduated from the University of Saragossa and founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892, which fought for the unity of Latin America against U.S. annexation and imperialism. As a journalist, Martí wrote for many newspapers, covering criminal trials, labor strikes, art exhibits, political turmoil, and elections all over the Americas, and wrote about such influential individuals as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Jesse James. Martí began publishing at an early age. His first poem was published in 1868, at the age of 15. He wrote many social and political pieces, including Nuestra

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América, Mi Raza, El presidio politico en Cuba, Versos Libres, Madre América, and Ismaelillo, and was also known for writing children’s pieces. In 1889, Martí published “A Vindication of Cuba” in the New York Post in response to an unjust criticism of his country and his people in the Philadelphia Manufacturer. This metaphorical response is a dialectical one about the struggle between defending one’s nation against the prejudices of the United States and the guilt and love that commingle in the desire of a patriot to see his land free from the unjust criminals who pretend to be leaders but are in reality thieves. At the same time, he defends his people against allegations of effeminacy and idleness, by historically recounting the many soldiers, builders, teachers, writers, thinkers, and metaphorical giants who fought in wars, built railroads, ate roots from the land, and died with honor in their hearts fighting for what they believed. Martí emphasizes that simple cowards would strike people down with machetes and unjust words and not raise a hand to help a fellow man and friend defeat the enemies that stand on their land. Versos Sencillos, written in 1891 and known as Simple Verses in English, is one of Martí’s most powerful writings and his last book of poetry. Evoking the ideological, social, and political struggles of Cuba, Martí employs the metaphor of nature to suggest that ties bind us to our countries not just through birth, but through death. As the plant grows and survives, so does mankind and Cuba, even in the light of betrayal and indignity of frost or government oppression. For Martí, mankind needed to evoke the spirit of the land in order to gain the spirituality necessary to conquer external demons (government oppression) that threatened one’s livelihood. At the same www.abc-clio.com

time, one needed to conquer the internal demons that struggled to dominate the mind-set of Cubans far greater than tyrants could. Martí was bound to the land, and there he struggled for solace against oppressive regimes, the materialism that brought man down, and the curtailment of human rights, which he felt most subjugated and silenced the black working class. In his poems, he speaks of the death of flowers, of repression, of pompousness, and the light that will shine through every morning bringing life and joy once again to Cuban liberators. On that battlefield is where Martí held his last stand in life and death, fighting for his principles that Cuba be free and liberated against racism, imperialism, and the control of other countries. Martí will be forever known as a revolutionary, whose commitment to cultural and spiritual strengthening will be remembered for centuries to come. Rosa E. Soto See also: Caribbean Literature; Cuba References Abel, Christopher, and Nissa Torrents, eds. José Martí: Revolutionary Democrat. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986. Kirk, John M. José Martí: Mentor of the Cuban Nation. Tampa: Board of Regents of the State of Florida, 1983. Montero, Oscar. José Martí: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

MASAI The greeting of “I hope your cows are well” illustrates the pastoral character of the Masai. Tall, slender, and garb characterized by bright red cloaks and elaborate beadwork, the Masai are descendants of one of three eastern Nilotic-speaking peoples who migrated out of Sudan into the Rift Valley

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of what is today Kenya and Tanzania during the first millennium BCE. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries CE, they dominated the Rift Valley from Mount Kenya to Mount Kilimanjaro. Masai society was and is polygamous, patrilineal, and organized around age grades. The basic social unit is the polygamous family compound (kral ). The Masai live in circular villages called enkangs, which are made up of numerous krals. Political and social authority is exerted by elders, shamans (laibon), or senior warriors. Young men become warriors (moran) once they undergo circumcision at approximately 13 years of age. At this time, they leave the enkang and move to a warrior village (manyatta) for up to eight years. Moran responsibilities are to defend their communities and their cattle. Traditionally known as lion hunters, the moran use only a club against a lion and such encounters bring great status to the individual. When the moran reach their late teens or early twenties, they are initiated as junior elders, return to the enkang, and establish their own families. Ultimately they transition to senior elder status. Masai women are also organized by age grade and undergo a circumcision ceremony. They are not allowed to own cattle, but do own other livestock such as donkeys and goats. Women build the distinctive dome-shaped homes and are considered to own the houses they build and live in. The central figure in Masai religious life is the laibon, whose activities include healing, prophecy, and divination. The Masai are monotheistic and refer to Enkai as the creator. It was Enkai who sent cattle to the Masai when the earth and sky separated. As a result of Enkai’s gift to them, the Masai believe all cattle in the world belong www.abc-clio.com

to them—a strong justification for raiding the herds of non-Masai neighbors to “regain” Masai property. Both cattle and the grass upon which cattle graze are sacred to the Masai and provide further justification for their pastoralist culture. The Masai believe that farming scars the earth. Reinforcing their interdependent relationship with their cattle, the mainstay of the Masai diet is saroi, a mixture of cow’s milk and blood. During the nineteenth century, competition over grazing lands, pressures of agriculturalists on grazing lands, and population migrations farther south along the Rift Valley led to the Masai Civil Wars, an internecine conflict for dominance in the region. The Masai cattle herds were decimated by disease in 1880 and a serious drought in 1881 resulted in famine. It was at this time Europeans began to establish control over East Africa and the Masai found themselves subject to British control. In 1904 the Masai were divided among two districts and then reunited in 1911 in a single territory termed “Masailand” overlapping the boundary between Kenya and Tanzania. Even today, the Masai move relatively unimpeded across this national boundary. Today, while their opportunity to hunt lions is curtailed, the Masai have been able to maintain their distinctive cattle-based seminomadic lifestyle to a great extent. Modern Masai move between village and city with relative ease, but the urban dress is quickly shed for the traditional scarlet cloak upon return to the enkang or manyatta. Heather Thiessen-Reily

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See also: Africa, Precolonial; Agriculture References Gilbert, Elizabeth. Broken Spears: A Maasai Journey. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.

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MAURITANIA Hollis, A. C. Masai Myths, Tales and Riddles. Mineola, NY: Dover Press, 2003. Saitoti, Tepilit Ole. Maasai. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. Saitoti, Tepilit Ole. The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior: An Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Viola, Herman, and Joseph Lemasolai-Lekuton. Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2003.

MAURITANIA Mauritania is located in the northwest of the African continent, north of Senegal and Mali, and south of Morocco and Algeria; nearly half of the country is desert, although it has a lengthy coastline. Mauritania has a population of about 2,999,000, with a quarter of the population living in Nouakchott, the capital. In early medieval times, it was a part of the empire of Mali and the Kingdom of Morocco. During the sixteenth century, the Portuguese used Mauritania as one of their sources of slaves for Brazil and their other colonies, but they did not occupy any part of the country. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mauritania attracted a few merchants from the Americas, mainly because of the trade in gum arabic. One of these merchants was James Riley, who was shipwrecked off the Mauritanian coast and survived to write An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, which was published in 1847 in Hartford, Connecticut, and has been republished many times since then. From 1857, the British had recognized French rights to Mauritania, on the west coast of Africa, but apart from occupying some of the coastline, the French made little attempt to control the hinterland until 1900. Much of this had been achieved by 1914, and in 1920 Mauritania became a www.abc-clio.com

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part of French West Africa. The main port of Mauritania was St. Étienne (now Nouadhibou). From 1928 until 1929, Alphonse Paul Albert Choteau was governor of Mauritania, later moving to the Caribbean as governor of Guadeloupe. The pilot Antoine de Saint-Exúpery was involved in some flights around Mauritania (he later flew in Argentina). Interestingly, the French colonial authorities in Mauritania often used horses imported from Argentina. Mauritania was administered from Senegal until 1958, when it voted to remain autonomous within the French Community. On November 28, 1960, it became independent as the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. The United States recognized Mauritania, and its first ambassador was Henry Serrano Villard. The U.S. Peace Corps sent volunteers to Mauritania from 1967 to 1968 and again from 1972. Since independence, there have been a number of U.S. researchers who have studied Mauritania, including James L. A. Webb, coeditor of an extensive bibliography on Mauritania, author of Desert Frontier: Ecological Change, Atlantic Commerce, and Regional Economy in the Western Sahel 1600–1850 (1995), and coauthor of Mauritania: Transformation in a Desert World, and Anthony G. Pazzanita, author of Historical Dictionary of Mauritania (1996). In 1984, the African Studies Center at Michigan State University published an anthology of oral tradition of precolonial Mauritania. Three Canadian scholars have also completed theses on Mauritania at the University of Montreal: Amadou Ba worked on aspects of demography; Amadou B. Sarr studied the political economy of Mauritania; and Sadio Traore wrote on the nomadic population between 1965 and 1976.

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Mauritania’s relations with the United States have been uneven. The country opposed U.S. policies in the Middle East in the first Gulf War of 1990–1991. Since then, however, it has supported the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Justin Corfield See also: French Empire; Peace Corps References Jennings, Lawrence C. “French Policy Towards Trading with African and Brazilian Slave Merchants.” Journal of African History 17, no. 4 (1976): 515–528. Pazzanita, Anthony G. Historical Dictionary of Mauritania. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

MAURITIUS The Republic of Mauritius occupies a single small island east of Madagascar with a population of 1.2 million. The government of Mauritius has also laid claim to a number of smaller surrounding islands, including Diego Garcia, the major U.S. military base for operations in the Indian Ocean region. Diego Garcia is part of the archipelago called the Chagos Islands and is under British administration. Like many African island nations, Mauritius’s history has been tied heavily to transoceanic trade. Arab and Indian Ocean sailors visited the island early in its history. Portuguese sailors reached it in the sixteenth century. Subsequently, the island passed through several colonial hands, claimed by the Dutch in 1598, taken and settled by the French in 1715, and taken over by the British in 1810 during the Napoleonic wars. Mauritius remained a British colony until independence in 1968. Today, Mauritius is a peacefully multiethnic nation composed of people of African, Arab, East Asian, South Asian, and European descent. www.abc-clio.com

Settled by successive waves of traders, merchants, planters, slaves, and laborers, Mauritius prospered economically under both French and British rule, and since independence. Sugar plantations are a major feature of the island’s landscape. French and British cultural and linguistic influences are strong; however, there are also many Muslim, Indian, and African cultural and religious influences. Mauritius is one of Africa’s strongest economies and is a member of various international organizations, including the African Union and the World Trade Organization. It has been a peaceful, multiparty democracy since independence. Much of Mauritius’s export earnings are from sugarcane, a traditional crop; however, the nation has been rapidly modernizing, becoming a site of light manufacturing, especially textiles, and of banking and international finance for countries in the Indian Ocean region. The independence of Mauritius in the 1960s was complicated by competing claims over the Chagos Islands, including Diego Garcia, some 1,200 miles (1,931 kilometers) west of the main island. The British refused to consider the independence of Mauritius without retaining control over the islands. The British had, in relative secret, already agreed to lease the island of Diego Garcia to the United States in order to construct a supply base for air and naval forces. The United States saw Diego Garcia, located near the center of the Indian Ocean, as critical to maintaining a strategic presence in the Indian Ocean, against the much closer communist presences of the Soviet Union and China. While U.S. diplomatic and economic relations with Mauritius are strong, Diego Garcia continues to be a point of significant contention. Mauritius continues to claim

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ownership of the Chagos Archipelago. Among the issues also raised by the construction of Diego Garcia was the forced relocation, by the British at the request of the United States, of approximately 2,000 people already living in the Chagos Islands. With the end of the Cold War, this issue has resurfaced as the descendants of those Chagos islanders, many of whom live in poverty in Mauritius, have demanded the right to return to the islands. Historical scholarship suggests that the United States was heavily responsible for organizing and financing the forced relocation. Since the late 1990s to 2007, the base at Diego Garcia itself has become a focus of Mauritian concern. Protesting the militarization of what they perceive to be part of Mauritius, the Mauritian organization Lalit, along with other national, British, and American groups, have sought to close the base on Diego Garcia. Richard Juang See also: British Empire; Cold War References Lutz, Wolfgang, ed. Population-DevelopmentEnvironment: Understanding Their Interactions in Mauritius. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1994. Vine, David. “War and Forced Migration in the Indian Ocean: The U.S. Military Base at Diego Garcia.” International Migration 42, no. 3 (2004): 111–143.

MAYS, WILLIE HOWARD (1931–) Willie Mays is widely considered the greatest all-around baseball player of the 1950s to 1960s. Mays started his professional career with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro National League in 1948, was acquired by the New York Giants in 1950, and reached the majors in 1951. Along www.abc-clio.com

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Baseball star Willie Howard Mays (left) with Roy Campanella (right) in 1961. (Library of Congress)

with his great baseball skills, including power, speed, and a strong throwing arm, he exhibited an infectious enthusiasm for the game that he never lost. By the time that he retired from the New York Mets, he was firmly positioned as one of the greatest players in baseball history. Mays learned baseball young, as his father had played in the industrial leagues near Birmingham, Alabama. Only seventeen when he signed with Birmingham, he quickly developed his baseball skills and while still a teenager attracted the attention of the New York Giants. After parts of two seasons in the minors, Mays was summoned to the parent club in 1951 and earned National League Rookie of the League honors. He then missed most of 1952 and all of 1953 while serving in the U.S. Army. Returning in 1954, Mays led the National League in batting with a .345 average and topped the league with 13 triples. He also

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hit 41 home runs and drove in 110 runners to win the Most Valuable Player Award in the National League. That magical season concluded with the pennant and a World Series triumph for the Giants over the favored Cleveland Indians, who had set an American League single-season record with 111 victories. The turning point in the 1954 series occurred in the eighth inning of the first game with the score tied. Cleveland’s Vic Wertz slugged a long drive to deep center field. Mays raced after the ball with his back to home plate, made an outstanding over-the-shoulder catch, whirled, and rifled a throw back into the infield that prevented one of the two base runners from advancing. The game remained tied, and the Giants went on to win in extra innings, their first victory in a four-game sweep. Along with his remarkable play in the 1954 series, from then on known simply as “the Catch,” Mays’ enthusiasm helped to establish fans’ perception of him. Mays loved baseball, and when he was not performing in a major league park, he might be participating in stickball games on the streets of Harlem. His zest for the game and his penchant for welcoming people with “Say hey” led to a lasting nickname—the “Say Hey Kid.” Yet Mays’ popularity and rise to baseball immortality did not make him immune to racism. Although he escaped the harsh treatment and overt hatred that Jackie Robinson endured, he faced more subtle aspects of racism. The grace and ease with which he played led people to view him as an instinctive ballplayer who did not need to work at the game, a conclusion they would not have arrived at regarding multitalented and graceful white players such as Joe DiMaggio. Similarly, many white writers saw his good www.abc-clio.com

humor as a childlike simplicity, viewing him as an eternal child, a boy wonder, rather than the dedicated, sensitive, and intelligent man he really was. In fact, the “Say hey” greeting was a thoughtful adult’s substitution for people’s names that he did not remember, and hence an attempt to avoiding insulting them. And the stickball he played on the streets of New York was an attempt to please his fans, by later standards an effective marketing tactic. Mays reflected seriously on his identity as an African American, remarking that scouting reports customarily identified African American players as a Negro first and a talented player next. In his case, he said that the reports talked first about his ability and then noted his race. The talent may have come first in the reports, but there was no overlooking his racial identity. Mays played in the majors through 1973, compiling a lifetime .302 average with 3,283 hits and 660 home runs. At the time, only Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron had hit more home runs. Twice he earned Most Valuable Player honors, and throughout most of his career seldom a year went by without his leading the league in at least one major category. The Sporting News selected Mays as the greatest player of the 1960s, and in 1979, in his first year of eligibility, he was enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Edward J. Rielly

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See also: Negro Leagues; Robinson, Jack Roosevelt References Burkhardt, Mitchell. Willie Mays. Los Angeles: Melrose Square, 1992. Epstein, Samuel. Willie Mays: Baseball Superstar. Champaign, IL: Garrard, 1975. Mays, Willie. Born to Play Ball. New York: Putnam’s, 1955. Mays, Willie. Say Hey: The Autobiography of Willie Mays. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

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MCKAY, CLAUDE (1889–1948) Claude McKay was a Jamaican-born poet and novelist writing in the New Negro Era. McKay was born in the Clarendon region of Jamaica, where his father was a relatively prosperous farmer. Although McKay retained a lifelong love of the soil, he chose to work not on the land but in the Jamaican constabulary, or police force, and it was during his time as a “constab” in 1912 that he published his first two collections of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. These were the first books of verse to be published in the Jamaican vernacular, a medium in which the young McKay was encouraged to write by an expatriate English folklorist, Walter Jekyll, the first of a series of white male mentors who would include Frank Harris and Max Eastman. With venerable exceptions, such as Lloyd Brown’s West Indian Poetry, McKay’s dialect volumes have long suffered critical condescension or plain neglect; rehabilitated to critical discussion by Michael North in his groundbreaking Dialect of Modernism, these poems may now be read not as crude apprentice work but as an essential if controversial part of McKay’s career as a writer. The most remarkable of the dialect poems are creole monologues, like “A Midnight Woman to the Bobby,” and subtle subversions of the iniquities of colonialism, like “Quashie to Buccra.” Written in the Jamaican vernacular but in traditional form, the dialect poems lack, for commentators like the Barbadian poet-critic Kamau Brathwaite, an authentic environmental expression. Yet all of McKay’s writing is driven by internal tensions. His poetry in standard English is characterized by a guiding tension between traditional, inherited forms, like that of the sonnet, and an urgent, often www.abc-clio.com

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topical, subject matter. The most famous of these sonnets, “If We Must Die,” was written amid the race riots of the Red Summer of 1919, and yet the poem has been countermanded to other occasions and other causes: it was allegedly quoted, without attribution to the author, by Winston Churchill during World War II. McKay had left Jamaica for the United States in 1912, intending to study agronomy at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama; he did not complete his studies, working instead as a waiter and on the railroads and eventually as a journalist. Although he would never return to the Caribbean, much of the poetry McKay wrote in the United States is inflected with nostalgia for his native place: writing from New York City about his island home, McKay’s major mode other than protest is that of urban pastoral. McKay is frequently described as a prime mover within the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the burgeoning of black culture at that time in New York and other Northern cities; however, McKay was at best equivocal in his response to the intellectual architects of the Renaissance. His inspiration came from the masses, from the ordinary folk, while his primary social and intellectual contacts in New York were with members of the white literary Left, principally Max Eastman, for whose journal the Liberator McKay was for a time the coeditor as well as a regular contributor. McKay spent a lengthy sojourn in England in 1920–1921, when he worked for the exsuffragette Sylvia Pankhurst’s radical newspaper the Workers’ Dreadnought. Moving in radical circles in London, he highlighted the prejudice afflicting black people, especially seamen, in Britain and made common cause between Irish, Indian, and African American nationalisms. On meeting his

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idol, George Bernard Shaw, McKay was disappointed that the Irishman did not share his perspective on the connections between various anticolonial causes; McKay was further disenchanted when Shaw advised him that as a black man he would be better advised to give up poetry to pursue a career as a boxer. Notwithstanding this, McKay published his first book of poetry in standard English, Spring in New Hampshire, in England in 1920; the majority of the poems from that volume were subsequently reproduced in his first American book publication, Harlem Shadows, in 1922. McKay did not remain long on his return to the United States. A self-styled vagabond wanderer, he traveled in 1922 to the then Soviet Union as a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International, and after a prolonged stay in the USSR, went on to France and thence to North Africa, not returning to the United States until 1934. He vividly documents his 12-year absence in his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937). McKay published two of his three novels in the 1920s, Home to Harlem in 1928 and Banjo in 1929. Home to Harlem was regarded by such pillars of the Harlem Renaissance establishment as W. E. B. Du Bois as a scurrilous exposé of the seamy underside of black American life, and therefore at odds with the philosophy of positive racial representation favored by Du Bois and other influential Harlemites. (Du Bois stated he felt like taking a bath after reading it.) McKay’s two major characters, Jake and Ray, represent the warring elements of the author’s own personality, the easygoing and natural drifter (Jake) versus the intellectual and Caribbean exile (Ray). Ray reappears in Banjo in much the same role and finds in that novel’s eponymous hero another version www.abc-clio.com

of Jake, the natural man, to offset his own intellectual and introspective propensities. Set in the French port of Marseilles, Banjo celebrates the international and transnational quality of black experience; in this respect, the novel would prove a crucial influence upon the Négritude movement led by the Martinican poet and statesman Aime Cesaire and the Senegalese writer and leader Leopold Sedar Senghor. In Home to Harlem and Banjo, McKay returns to the black vernacular and develops in both novels a version of the black picaresque— Banjo is subtitled “A Novel without a Plot.” Banana Bottom (1933), McKay’s third and final novel (he published a collection of short stories, Gingertown, in 1932), is quite different. Set in Jamaica, with a female protagonist, Bita Plant, the novel celebrates closure, with the marriage of Bita to Jubban, a peasant farmer who symbolizes the land on which he works and embodies the culmination of the organic metaphors that are found throughout McKay’s writing. McKay’s life, like his writing, is filled with often fierce contradictions: a Communist and then an equally fervid antiCommunist, who converted to Catholicism in the 1940s; born a British citizen in colonial Jamaica, he has frequently been seconded to the canon of African American literature despite the emphatically international contours of his career and experience. As an exile from his native Caribbean, McKay would long be regarded as an outsider to the indigenous culture of that region. And yet, as Kamau Brathwaite has pointed out, it is “McKay the exile” who is the founder of a Caribbean literary tradition characterized by migration and exile from home. Lee M. Jenkins

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See also: Caribbean Literature; Creole/Criollo; Harlem Renaissance; Négritude

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MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES References Brown, Lloyd W. West Indian Poetry. London: Heinemann, 1984. Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. McKay, Claude. The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912–1948. Edited by Wayne F. Cooper. New York: Schocken, 1973. McKay, Claude. A Long Way from Home. 1937. London: Pluto Press, 1985. McKay, Claude. Banana Bottom. 1933. London: Pluto Press, 1986. McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. 1928. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders is the world’s largest independent medical relief organization. It was founded in 1971 by a group of French doctors and journalists returning to Paris from a Red Cross mission to the Biafran War in Nigeria. MSF provides emergency medical assistance to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or excluded from health care. Realizing that more than 90 percent of all death and suffering from infectious diseases occurs in the developing world with insufficient health care systems, MSF rehabilitates hospitals and dispensaries, establishes rural clinics, provides vaccination and drugs, and trains local staff. MSF consists of not only doctors, but nurses, water and sanitation specialists, nutritionists, epidemiologists, logisticians, administrators, plumbers, radio operators, lawyers, mechanics, and accountants working alongside skilled local www.abc-clio.com

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staff ensuring that the essential medicines, food, fuel, personnel, vehicles, water bladders, and tools are delivered to those in the heart of the emergency. To maintain its independence, nearly 80 percent of MSF’s operating funds comes from the general public— individuals, foundations, corporations, and nonprofit organizations worldwide—while 20 percent comes from international agencies and governments. MSF’s decision to intervene in any crisis is based solely on an independent assessment of people’s needs. When MSF learns of a developing crisis, it sends an inspection team to assess the situation, and based on the team’s recommendations, volunteers and equipment are dispatched within hours to the troubled zone. Its large-scale logistical capacity ensures that emergency teams arrive with medical kits and equipment needed to start saving lives immediately. The teams accept responsibility for a range of medical interventions that include providing basic health care as well as prevention of epidemics, constructing water and sanitation facilities, providing supplementary foodstuffs to vulnerable groups, and training local health workers. For longerterm programs, MSF provides medical and psychological care to patients with infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, and HIV/AIDS. MSF addresses obstacles preventing people in the developing world from obtaining affordable treatments for diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Through its Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, MSF advocates to overcome trade and other barriers to treatments, lower drug prices, and to stimulate research and development of new treatments. Worldwide, MSF staff raises public awareness by speaking at conferences and

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showing traveling exhibitions. It also organizes special public education projects to address the stark realities of living without access to medicines and the devastation caused by war. Many critics, however, believe MSF is used as a convenient smokescreen to hide the lack of willingness of the international community to intervene in crises (the incident in Rwanda was a case in point). Esther F. Ojo See also: International Development; Peace Corps References Bortolotti, Dan, Hope in Hell: Inside the World of Doctors without Borders. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2004. Leyton, Elliot. Touched by Fire: Doctors without Borders in Third World Crisis. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1998.

MERCANTILISM Mercantilism is the political design of governments to encourage a favorable balance of trade with competing nations. Mercantilist strategies for a favorable balance of trade included granting monopoly privileges and tax incentives, restricting the outflow of gold and silver coin, and securing colonies as sources of gold and silver, slaves, and raw materials for commodities. In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, the colonialist governments and merchants of Europe collaborated to expand mercantile networks linking Asia, Africa, and the Americas. An illustrative example of the connection between Africa, the Americas, and mercantilist notions about money is the manner in which the English slave trade developed. In 1663, King Charles I licensed a slavetrading monopoly. To commemorate the event, the Royal Mint issued a new gold www.abc-clio.com

coin “in the name and for the use of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa.” The coin was the guinea, named after that part of Africa, and it continued to be minted until 1813. The company was created to encourage colonial development and raise money for the Crown. Less than 10 years later, however, the slave trade was given to a new monopoly, the Royal African Company. More successful than many other colonial ventures, the company greatly supported the colonies in the West Indies and North America. Among its many subscribers were the king, other members of the royal family, merchants of London and Bristol, and the famous philosopher of liberty and property, John Locke. Later, in 1695, Locke participated in a major debate about the supply of and demand for silver specie in England, after which he was asked to join the Crown’s Board of Trade. In 1698, Locke’s board ended the Royal African Company’s monopoly, opened the slave trade to independent merchants, and allowed the slave trade to expand and to become an essential element of Great Britain’s transatlantic economy. Although the word “mercantilism” is usually used to refer to either the economy or the economic thought of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, it was first coined in the nineteenth century, adapted from Francois Quesnay and Adam Smith’s analyses of the “mercantile system.” In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith explained that the popular understanding of the balance of trade committed the bullionist—or Midas—fallacy by confusing wealth with money. Indeed, one mercantilist writer, Thomas Mun, argued in 1623 that precious metals were indispensable to a nation’s wealth and power, and if a nation did not

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have access to such metals, then it should attempt to export more than it imports by encouraging and protecting domestic production. Smith’s critique of the mercantile system argued that protectionist policies designed to encourage the flow of money into the nation inhibited trade and in turn decreased productivity. Historians of economic thought have questioned the characterization of mercantilist economics as bullionist because Smith’s position was much closer to that of many early economic thinkers than he admitted. Hence the term “mercantilism” has been called a historiographic red herring because it obscures the diversity of early economic thought, exaggerates differences between free-market thinkers and mercantilists, conflates histories of thought, policy, and economic activity, and locates mercantilist thought within a determinate historical timeframe. In practice, the term mercantilism has been used differently to describe a historical period, a political program, and a set of ideas. Historically, the period after feudalism and before modern capitalism has been described as mercantilist. The growing merchant class, a more mobile labor force, and the development of secure lending institutions challenged feudal ties to land. Spanish and Portuguese ventures for territory and gold in the Americas and the African coast opened up new opportunities for their merchants as well as merchants from Italy and later from the Netherlands, France, and England. The period was marked by an almost constant state of war fought over the control of resources and trade, the seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch Wars being a paradigmatic example. European states without access to gold and silver mines attempted to achieve a favorable www.abc-clio.com

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balance of trade by promoting industry at home and the slave trade abroad or by accessing new markets such as the fur trade in North America. An increasingly integrated world economy of cash crops (notably sugar, tobacco, indigo, and tea), gold and silver mines, banks, slave labor, naval stores, food, and finished goods emerged. Politically, mercantilism means the policies and strategies of nation building. States became increasingly centralized, militarized, and absolutist as they sought to make merchants dependent on the state for protection, thus ensuring tax revenue. States developed increasingly efficient and strict bureaucracies to enforce lucrative customs duties on cash crops and African slaves as well as to centralize the flow of information. Merchants sought to gain protections for their interests from the state, but at the same time, they often complained about the limitations imposed upon them, especially restrictions on with whom they could trade. The dominant ideology was that of the “common good,” in which merchants defined their interests as identical with the public interest. Mercantilist propaganda urged the state to protect domestic industry and trade because, they argued, it would effect a general improvement of the national economy as well as make the labor force more industrious. Tax incentives and monopoly licenses were created to promote nascent industries and settlement in the colonies. Policies such as England’s famous Navigation Acts forbade manufacturing and the development of financial institutions in the colonies, which were seen as a captive market as well as a source of raw materials. Intellectually, nineteenth-century laissezfaire thinkers had more in common with the earlier mercantilists than they admitted. As

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early as the Salamanca school in midsixteenth century Spain, scholastics began to question the feudal acquisition of treasure and the moral teleology of the Christian state. They concluded that the influx of American and African gold into Spain along with a corrupt and bureaucratic court had caused inflation, the underdevelopment of Spanish industry, and a growing dependence on foreign merchants. For the next 200 years, different writers debated about the elasticity of supply and demand and the economic principle of comparative advantage, advocated commercial investment in domestic industry, encouraged the state to engage in commercially useful projects such as building roads and canals, and gave moral legitimacy to private interest, thus overturning the Renaissance Humanist belief that a republic ought to safeguard the moral virtue of its citizens from the corruption of the marketplace. The tendency of mercantilist authors was toward empirical and materialist explanations of human and social behavior rather than religious or Aristotelian notions about the “good” corresponded with the rise of the “new science” associated with Francis Bacon. In terms of thought and policy, laissezfaire economics differs from mercantilism in four respects. First, although most mercantilist authors did not subscribe to the naïve bullionist position often ascribed to them, they did see a fiscally liquid nation as more capable of successfully waging wars, engaging in trade, and dominating the market. Second, although mercantilists understood the elasticity of supply and demand, their focus on achieving a favorable balance of trade still privileged production over consumption and advocated protectionist policies. Against this understanding, Adam Smith argued that the market was www.abc-clio.com

self-correcting; therefore, the state ought to limit its domain to the rule of law, to securing basic property rights, and to providing necessary services, because ad hoc mercantilist policies that favored corporate monopolies interfered with the market and corrupted the state. Third, while mercantilism emphasized the wealth of a nation as a competition with other nations, freemarket economists argued that an open trade benefited the people of all nations. And fourth, while both mercantilist and free-market economists posited the utility of rational, private interest, mercantilists were more likely to see state intervention as necessary for promoting the public good. Steven W. Thomas See also: Company of Merchants Trading to Africa; Economic Community of West African States; International Monetary Fund; Royal African Company; World Bank References Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. New York: Verso, 1997. Coleman, D. C., ed. Revisions in Mercantilism. London: Methuen, 1969. Hancock, David. Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Magnusson, Lars, ed. Mercantilist Economics. Boston: Kluwer, 1993. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern WorldSystem II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600–1750. New York: Academic Press, 1980.

MERCOSUR MERCOSUR (Mercado Común del Sur, or Common Market of the South) is a trade organization formed by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. MERCOSUR was

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created under a treaty signed on March 26, 1991, in Asunción, Paraguay, with a provision that the common market was to be formed by December 31, 1994. MERCOSUR seeks to significantly extend the global economic reach of its member countries by creating ties to other developing markets around the world, including African nations. MERCOSUR is closely behind NAFTA and the European Union in economic power due to its members’ combined population of over 200 million. The most visible competition for MERCOSUR is the proposed formation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas, which has been under discussion nearly as long as MERCOSUR has been in existence. The Treaty of Asunción contains five annexes outlining trade liberalization provisions: the elimination of duties and other charges among the members; product rules of origin; dispute resolution; safeguards against economic damage to a member caused by unusually high imports of given products from other members; and ten working groups to advance the facilitation of these economic and sector-based policies. Three other documents set out further elements of how MERCOSUR is to operate: the Ouro Preto Protocol on the Institutional Structure of MERCOSUR (“Ouro Preto Protocol”); the Brasilia Protocol on the Resolution of Controversies; and the Olivos Protocol for the Resolution of Controversies (“Olivos Protocol”). Additional protocols set out rules for MERCOSUR in more specific areas such as intellectual property, competition, and government procurement. Two of the institutions making up MERCOSUR, the Common Market Council (or Council of the Common Market) and the Common Market Group, are considered by the Treaty of Asunción. The Ouro Preto www.abc-clio.com

Protocol specifies those two institutions plus four more: the MERCOSUR Commerce Commission, the Joint Parliamentary Commission, the Socio-Economic Consultative Forum, and the Administrative Secretariat. The Olivos Protocol provides for a Permanent Appellate Tribunal, and the Committee of Permanent Representatives is an additional institution formed by the Council as allowed under the terms of the Ouro Preto Protocol. Chile and Bolivia entered into separate Economic Complementation Agreements with MERCOSUR on June 29, 1996, and December 17, 1996, respectively. These agreements do not make Chile and Bolivia members of MERCOSUR in the usual sense. The countries do not participate in meetings or other activities of MERCOSUR. Rather, the agreements give a 10-year goal for the development of a free trade area with Chile and Bolivia and contemplate the establishment of judicial and institutional frameworks as well as the physical infrastructure needed to accomplish economic cooperation with the two countries. From August 12, 1999, through December 16, 2003, the Andean Community and various combinations of its component states of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela entered into several Economic Complementation Agreements with MERCOSUR. MERCOSUR has also reached out to countries in other world regions to form trade alliances, signing an agreement with India on January 25, 2004, and beginning discussions with Canada in early 2005. The organization entered into an agreement on December 16, 2004, with the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU), composed of Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland. The agreement with the SACU provides for mutual tariff

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between the two groups except in cases of duties charged for items in new industries. MERCOSUR also signed a framework agreement with Egypt on July 7, 2004, as the start of formal negotiations toward a trade agreement with that country; Paraguay and Uruguay have since ratified this member agreement in 2005 and 2006, respectively, and Argentina and Brazil are expected to complete the same process of ratification by 2007–2008. Sharon Lunsford See also: Bolivia; Chile; South Africa, History and Politics; Trade, Fair; World Trade Organization References Gudynas, Eduardo. “MERCOSUR and the FTAA: New Tensions and New Options.” Interhemispheric Resource Center, Global Policy Forum, November 11, 2003. Porrata-Doria, Jr., Rafael A. MERCOSUR: The Common Market of the Southern Cone. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005. Preferential Trade Agreement between MERCOSUR and the Republic of India. Ministry of Foreign Relations, Brazil. 2004. Preferential Trade Agreement between MERCOSUR and the Southern Africa Customs Union. Ministry of Foreign Relations, Brazil. 2004. Roett, Riordan, ed. MERCOSUR: Regional Integration, World Markets. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999.

MEXICO Mexico has a history of race and African peoples from Spanish exploration through the slave trade and the abolition of slavery to current cultural forms expressive of an African past. People of African descent have a rich heritage in Mexico in spite of the country’s emphasis on its indigenous and European pasts. The first Africans arrived there as acculturated servants and explorers www.abc-clio.com

during the conquest period of Spanish America’s history (1519–1540). The most notable were Estevanico, considered to be the first Spaniard to explore what is today the American Southwest, and Juan Garrido, a conquistador who accompanied Hernán Cortés’s expeditions to defeat the Aztec Empire. The existence of Africans in the region prior to European arrival is a source of controversy. Scholars have pointed to stone carvings and figures with so-called African features related to the Tezcatlipoca cult, but these assertions have been largely rejected by and large by the scholarly community. In the immediate aftermath of Mexico’s conquest, subsequent generations of Spanish settlers augmented their labor supply with a small but steady importation of African slaves; by 1570, however, the demand for slave labor increased dramatically. Disease decimated the region’s indigenous populations, and reformers, such as Bartólome de las Casas, argued that African slaves would help alleviate the harsh conditions of Spanish rule. As a result, the Spanish Crown sanctioned the importation of thousands of mostly male African slaves as the best alternative to the chronic shortage of labor in the mining, ranching, fishing, and plantation economies of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. In 1580, the entire colony had a population of over 30,000 African slaves, and by 1640, it had imported the largest number of slaves in Spanish America. By 1790, the total number had grown to more than 200,000, and most of these passed through the port city of Veracruz, which flourished as a slave trading center. As the number of slaves imported from Africa increased, so too did concerns among authorities that slave revolts could potentially disrupt the colonial framework. Indeed, slaves often demonstrated their

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capacity to resist by breaking tools, slowing down the output of their labor, or simply escaping. Moreover, the worst fears of Spanish colonists were realized when the numbers of both violent slave rebellions and maroon, or runaway, settlements increased during the eighteenth century. Amapa, Mandinga, and Yanga became critical refuges for escaped slaves. These developments, coupled with the fact that native populations had recovered, compelled the Spanish Crown to restrict the importation of African slaves to New Spain and order attacks on free settlements. Surviving accounts, such as the one by Juan Laurencio, a Jesuit priest accompanying Spanish soldiers, provide vivid recollections of the military campaigns against Yanga. Yet, runaway settlements often thrived in spite of hostile colonial actions. African slaves had developed a strong sense of racial identity and ability to reconstitute family and kinship ties. Located in the state of Veracruz, for example, Mandinga was founded by runaways and gradually evolved into a legal township during the nineteenth century. As the legal status of its residents changed and a degree of social and political stability was established, Mandinga attracted outsiders. Generalizing about the daily lives of Afro-Mexican slaves is difficult. The typical African slave had some experience with a wide range of life-altering phenomena such as revolts, suicides, violence, witchcraft, and slave communities. In addition, Spanish lawmakers tried to restrict the upward mobility of blacks by developing a sistema de castas, or caste system, a racial categorization scheme that ranked Africans at or near the bottom of the social ladder. This system meant that African slaves had few rights: they were not allowed to receive an education, marry, or possess weapons. Penalties www.abc-clio.com

for violating any of these laws were especially inhumane. Nevertheless, slaves pursued outlets of manumission provided by the vagaries of the colonial legal system. Early forms of manumission were outlined in the Siete Partidas, or royal codes that regulated how African slaves should be treated. Beyond these laws were various paths to freedom including manumission by masters, self-purchase, and race mixture. As in other parts of Spanish America, slave owners in New Spain could grant freedom to their slaves in wills or allow their slaves to earn a free wage in order to buy freedom. Still, the most common route to emancipation was through blood or marriage ties. Race mixture and acculturation was hastened by the limitations of marriage choices in so far as the number of male slaves greatly outnumbered female slaves by more than three to one. This had the effect of freeing them or their offspring. From the early 1700s, the percentage of the population who were considered “African” declined dramatically. The fact of race mixture is clear evidence that colonial authorities utterly failed to keep Africans and indigenous groups segregated. Representations of race mixture may be seen in various casta paintings that adorned elite houses in New Spain. Although the depictions of mixed race couples and their offspring were fictitious, they add rich historical detail about colonial notions of blackness, racial classification, and family life. People who had African blood and were denied opportunities for social advancement sought to improve their social standing by enlisting in colonial military units. The Spanish Empire welcomed this new source of recruits as it struggled to maintain its colonial defenses. Mulatto enlisted men enjoyed some benefits, including

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exemption from paying taxes; yet, they were denied others, including the benefits of the fuero militar, defined as special privileges granted to military personnel. Proposals to weaken or disband mixed-race units were met with resistance by Spanish officers. The conscription of black soldiers in Veracruz was part of a larger initiative by the Bourbon monarchs to reorganize Spain’s defenses in response to defeats in Cuba, the Philippines, and elsewhere in the empire between 1760 and 1810. However, when it came to promoting officers, the opportunities of light-skinned over darkerskinned blacks prevailed. During the wars of independence from Spain (1810–1821), Afro-Mexicans fought on both sides in various regional battles, especially in the Costa Chica on the western coast of Mexico. Fathers José María Morelos and Miguel Hidalgo, considered to be the founders of Mexico’s independence movement, encouraged Mexicans of all races and classes to participate in attacks against Spanish colonial garrisons and towns. A troop of mixed race Africans, the Batallón de los Morenos, helped to prolong Hidalgo’s movement before Hidalgo was captured by Spanish forces and executed. As the wars wore on, most Afro-Mexican communities strongly favored independence. This is probably because Mexican revolutionaries called for an end to a variety of colonial institutions, including racial classification systems and slavery. After this tumultuous period, Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s second president, successfully ended chattel slavery in 1829. Because of his accomplishments and his ability to rally nonwhites, Guerrero was also known as “El Negro Guerrero.” Among his accomplishments, Guerrero banned racial discrimination by law and eliminated race as a category in census www.abc-clio.com

counts. These measures have had the negative effect of limiting social scientists’ efforts to compile more accurate statistical profiles of Afro-Mexicans, including patterns of race mixture. Still, an African presence in Mexico during the nineteenth century may be seen in novels, short stories, and poems. José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El Periquillo sarniento is considered by many scholars as the first antislavery tract in the Americas. Fernández de Lizardi vividly tells the story about an educated Afro-Mexican who defends his race in a debate with a British official convinced that white Europeans are intellectually superior. The newly independent Mexican government formally abolished chattel slavery in 1829. Still, the new nation-state experienced problems with slave owners from the southern United States, who sought new ways to expand slavery. Constant political problems among Texas, the United States, and Mexico arose over the issue of fugitive slaves crossing into Mexico during the early nineteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, a border crisis erupted between the United States and Mexico when 200 Seminoles, most of whom were descendants of runaway African slaves, attempted to settle in Mexico. During the U.S. Civil War, some Confederate states attempted to relocate freed AfroAmerican communities to Mexico. Later in the nineteenth century, various colonization projects to resettle black Americans were expanded to include both Mexico and Central America, but all of these efforts failed. Contemporary estimates of the entire Afro-Mexican population range from as low as 0.5 percent to as high as 5 percent of Mexico’s more than 110 million inhabitants. Although Afro-Mexicans continue to live among people of other races, there is strong

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biological and physical evidence that African descendants exist in various parts of Mexico. This is why linguists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, biologists, artists, journalists, and literary critics continue to frequent small Afro-Mexican townships around Veracruz, the Costa Chica in western Mexico, Coahuila in the north along the United States-Mexico border, and the Yucatán Peninsula. Life within these areas is still difficult as villagers face poverty with little hope of improvement. Still, African cultural traits remain strong in local celebrations and festivals. More scholars are teaching, researching, and publishing on the Afro-Mexican experience than ever, and there appears to be no sign that their activities will slow down in the coming years. Jesse Hingson See also: Colonialism; Diaspora, Demography of; Mexico (Afro-Mexican Identity); Quilombo; Slave Revolts/Maronnage References Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo. “Mandinga: The Evolution of a Mexican Runaway Slave Community, 1735–1827.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977): 488–505. Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo. La población negra de México, 1519–1810: estudio etnohistórico. 3rd ed. Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana; Instituto Nacional Indigenista; Gobierno del Estado de Veracrúz; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990. Carroll, Patrick J. Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Gerhard, Peter. “A Black Conquistador in Mexico.” Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978): 451–59. Lewis, Laura. “Colonialism and Its Contradictions: Indians, Blacks and Social Power in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Mexico.” Journal of Historical Sociology 9 (1996): 410–31. Ngou-Mvé, Nicolás. “El cimarronaje como forma de expressión del Africa bantú en la

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América colonial: el ejemplo de Yanga en México.” América Negra 14 (1997): 27–51. Ortiz de Montellano, Bernard, Gabriel HaslipViera, and Warren Barbour. “They Were Not Here before Columbus: Afrocentric Hyperdiffusionism in the 1990s.” Ethnohistory 44 (1997): 199–234. Palmer, Colin. Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

MEXICO (AFRO-MEXICAN IDENTITY) Afro-Mexican identity is defined by the cultural retention and transformation of African identities and the experience of racial classification and race-mixing in Mexican society. The formation of AfroMexican identity since the sixteenth century until today is linked to miscegenation, social stratification and mobility, the degree of African cultural retention, and modern influences. As soon as large numbers of slaves arrived directly from Africa in the sixteenth century, their status and mobility were restricted by New Spain’s colonial regime. These lawmakers set up a ranking system, or sistema de castas, that determined legal, social, and economic rights for all races in the colony. Broadly speaking, Europeans were ranked the highest depending on wealth while indigenous peoples were ranked lower. Africans were considered the lowest. This scheme mostly failed to operate as Spaniards had intended because it did not take into account other factors that might enhance a person’s standing in the colonial world. Africans arriving on slave ships, for example, were immediately separated by how skilled they were: bozales, or those slaves described as non-Christian, non-Europeanized Africans, ranked lower

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while ladinos were considered more valuable because they knew European customs and languages. Moreover, the process of mestizaje, or race mixture, served to undermine New Spain’s racial classification system. As Spaniards made laws regulating community and sexual relations between Africans and other races, almost nothing could be done to prevent people of different races from interacting with one another. Also, miscegenation accelerated because the number of male slaves greatly outnumbered female slaves by more than three to one. At the least, this had the effect of freeing the offspring of mixed-race unions. Thus, from the early 1700s onward, the percentage of the population who were considered “African” declined dramatically, thereby increasing the number of freed people. From this evidence, one could argue that the colonial structure was based more upon class distinctions where greater socioeconomic mobility prevailed across racial lines. While racial stratification appeared weak, racial barriers remained. The presence of racial barriers was especially true for Afro-Mexicans who enlisted in colonial military units. Mulattos, for example, enjoyed some benefits, including not having to pay taxes, yet were denied others, including the fuero militar, defined as legal exemptions for military personnel. Lightskinned soldiers almost always won promotions over darker-skinned soldiers. Overall, Afro-Mexicans failed to achieve any kind of racial unity even in the face of a hostile European-dominated legal system. Eventually, the social structure of Mexican society shifted around the time of independence from inequality based on race to a new system founded upon class distinctions. After Mexicans achieved their www.abc-clio.com

independence from Spain, leaders sought to dismantle colonial laws, particularly racial categorization. In this effort, race was eliminated as a category in census counts. Today, the legacy of racism continues as Afro-Mexicans still live in impoverished conditions, concentrated mostly on the east and west coasts. Within these areas, runaway slave communities were formed at Yanga and Mandinga in relative isolation. People in those areas usually emphasize their African cultural traits, including music, dance, and religious practices, despite the fact that their heritage is more racially mixed. Festivals, such as the one celebrating Yanga, are held annually. In Cuajinicuilapa, a town near Mexico’s west coast, a museum dedicated to AfroMexican history and culture has been erected. Pride in their African heritage is homegrown, but an important factor in Afro-Mexican identity has been contact with outsiders who visit these villages wanting to see traces of African culture. Jesse Hingson

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See also: Mexico References Anderson, Rodney. “Race and Stratification: A Comparison of Working-Class Spaniards, Indians, and Castas in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1821.” Hispanic American Historical Review 68 (1988): 209–241. Bennett, Herman Lee. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Chance, John K., and William B. Taylor. “Estate and Class in a Colonial City: Oaxaca in 1792.” Contemporary Studies in Society and History 19 (1977): 454–487. McCaa, Robert, Stuart B. Schwartz, and Arturo Grubessich. “Race and Class in Colonial Latin America: A Critique.” Contemporary Studies in Society and History 21 (1979): 421–433.

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MICROFINANCE 755 Vinson, III, Ben. Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

MICROFINANCE The provision of financial services to lowincome people who are operating small businesses has become known in development literature as microfinance. Many of the current microfinance programs are patterned after indigenous associations in Latin America (CorpoSol in Colombia, Emprender in Argentina); Africa (Zambuko Trust in Zimbabwe, CVECA Pays Dogon in Mali); and Asia (Bank Rakyat in Indonesia, Self-Employed Women’s Association in India). Poor microentrepreneurs, especially women, have had limited access to financial services offered by commercial banks. Widespread recognition of this lower accessibility to formal credit has led to recent endeavors to target the poor through development programs that provide financial services. Microfinance services target poor people who operate at least one microenterprise. Poor is defined as living on less than $2 per day. Using this definition, poor people represent approximately 40 percent of subSaharan Africa population and 24 percent of Latin America and Caribbean population. Microenterprises (employing 1–5 people) are a vibrant component of developing country economies, providing a wide range of goods and services. Often these goods and services are provided in the informal economy that exists without formalized rules or regulations by market vendors, microbus and taxi drivers, small-shop owners, and small-scale artisans. The informal economy can represent as much as 50 percent of national economic activity and working hours www.abc-clio.com

in a developing country. The importance of microenterprises as a vital source of household income for the urban and rural poor is often masked because their economic contributions are not counted in national macroeconomic statistics. The need for microfinance programs that target the poor in Africa and Latin America is threefold: private sector financial institutions are unwilling or unable to provide financial services to the poor; microentrepreneurs (especially women) are underserved by financial services provided by commercial banks; and negative economic environments (high inflation, corruption, lack of formal jobs) in many developing countries make it difficult for microentrepreneurs to access financial services. The provision of financial services to poor people is costly and entails high levels of risk due to potential clients not having a financial history, not having formal collateral to secure a loan, and high transaction costs (by both the client and the financial institution) in deposit mobilization and loan allocation. Frequently, poor clients are interested in depositing numerous small sums outside regular banking hours in rural or semi-urban areas, and requesting small loans using no formal collateral. These types of transactions are expensive for commercial banks. Clients are often required to leave their business and travel great distances, conduct transactions in foreign languages and observe customs unfamiliar to them, and pay additional fees (referred to as speed money) to attempt to access financial services. These types of transactions are expensive for clients. There are two approaches to programs that provide financial services to the poor: institutionalist and welfarist. The institutionalists focus on creating sustainable microfinance programs as part of a larger system of financial deepening (i.e., increased

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accessibility to financial services by all economic sectors). In this approach, microfinance programs are just one layer in a multilayered financial system that includes informal, semiformal, and formal banking institutions. Proponents of this system include the World Bank, the Ohio State University Rural Finance Program, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The welfarist approach focuses on the need of microfinance programs to reach the poorest of the poor. They are less interested in sustainability issues and the financial deepening potential of microfinance programs. Proponents of the welfarist approach include the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA) programs in Latin America and Africa. Depending on which approach a microfinance program embraces could determine the clients it selects to participate in its program (e.g., poor vs. the poorest of the poor), the type of delivery system it utilizes (e.g., lending to groups vs. lending to individuals), and how it financially supports the services it provides (e.g., finance companies or community banks or donor-funded social service nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]). The institutionalist approach is often synonymous with the “best practices” phrase. This phrase refers to a constellation of recognized practices that the most successful microfinance programs employ worldwide. Best practices include formation of a credit group consisting of individual members, each of whom owns and operates an established microenterprise producing a weekly cash flow; group guarantee of small initial loans made to each member on a rotating basis; use of a market interest rate supporting program administrative costs; www.abc-clio.com

mandatory savings requirement; weekly mandatory group meeting for loan repayment and information dissemination; demonstrated high repayment rate; and the ability of the program to service significant numbers of individuals. Best practices are intended to substitute traditional loan collateral (e.g., property) with information on client creditworthiness (e.g., character references, business reputation, ability to save on regular basis), which reduces the risk of providing financial services to microentrepreneurs. They are also intended to reduce the costs of saving and borrowing (financial transaction costs) both from a client and an organization standpoint. As part of a strategy to alleviate bottlenecks to private sector development, donor agencies/institutions (e.g., World Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development) have provided financial and technical support to a number of organizations (e.g., Freedom from Hunger, FINCA, Grameen Bank) providing microfinance services to poor microentrepreneurs. These organizations vary in terms of target clientele, maximum loan size, program strategies, geographic coverage, size of loan portfolio, and financial security. Microfinance delivery programs have grown exponentially. In 1997 there were approximately 600 microfinance institutions serving 13.5 million clients. By 2002 there were more than 2,500 institutions reaching over 67 million clients. The matrix of credit sources for the poor in Latin America and Africa usually excludes formal financial institutions such as commercial banks. Semiformal nonbank financial institutions include credit unions, various nongovernmental organizations such as savings and loan companies, and programs such as FINCA and the Promotion of Rural Initiatives and Development Enterprises

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(PRIDE). These financial NGOs are frequently located in rural areas, small towns, or within urban markets. Often semiformal financial institutions offer financial services tailored to their low-income customer base. These services include photo-ID passbooks for illiterate customers, extended service hours for market women, collection personnel who circulate in the market for customers who cannot leave their businesses, acceptance of small savings deposits, and extending loans less than $100. Informal nonbanking financial sources include individuals and informal associations organized by ethnicity, kin, or neighborhood who collect savings and may extend small loans on a rotating basis. These informal financial sources are known in Latin America as rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), in Africa as Savings and Credit Associations (SCAs), or by various indigenous names (e.g., susu, esusu, katapila). Microfinance programs reach lowincome households in both rural and urban areas. They enable female microentrepreneurs, who access financial services, to develop financial management, decisionmaking, and leadership skills. Micro loans are used to expand the wealth base of households and enterprises. Additionally, microfinance programming results in clients trying new practices and informing others about such practices. While providing microfinance services alone is unlikely to raise clients out of poverty, it is recognized as one of the necessary development steps in alleviating poverty. Microfinance programs in Zimbabwe and Peru have enabled clients from poor households to better cope with negative economic environments and incrementally improve their living conditions. Participants have more income-earning opportunities and are better www.abc-clio.com

able to provide education expenditures to educate their children than nonparticipants. Since the mid-1980s, there have been successful examples of microfinance services replication in industrial countries. Accion International programs, begun in Latin America in 1961, are now established in Chicago, New York, and San Antonio in the United States. One of the limitations of microfinance delivery systems is their inability to service clients who have successfully borrowed smaller amounts from them and are now ready to “graduate” to larger loans on an individual contract basis. In Africa, this type of progressive lending involving larger business loans ($500 to $1,000) at competitive interest rates for longer periods of time (e.g., 18 months to 1 year) are difficult for many microfinance clients to access. A form of financial intermediation which integrates deposit mobilization and loan allocation services between informal and semiformal financial sources and formal financial institutions is one method of increasing access. In dealing with poor clients, financial NGOs could collect small deposits and disseminate smaller loans for commercial banks for a fee. One projected result of this integration would be the “graduation” of qualified microfinance clients and the microfinance programs themselves to formal sector banking. The clients would graduate by becoming customers of commercial banks, and the programs would graduate by becoming regulated financial institutions able to sustain themselves as commercial banks. Approximately 40 financial NGOs have converted to private commercial banks. Examples are more prevalent in Latin America (BancoSol in Bolivia and Mibanco in Peru) than Africa (K-Rep is only African example). Gayle A. Morris

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758 MIDDLE PASSAGE Otero, Maria, and Elisabeth Rhyne, eds. The New World of Microenterprise Finance: Building Healthy Financial Institutions for the Poor. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian, 1994. Prahalad, Coimbatore. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2005. Rodey, Barbara J. The Spiritual Dimensions of Microfinance: Towards a Just Civilization and Sustainable Economy. Paris: European Baha’I Business Forum, 1997. Schneider, Hartmut, ed. Microfinance for the Poor? Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1997. Sebstad, J., and G. Chen. “Overview of Studies on the Impact of Microenterprise Credit.” In Assessing the Impact of Microenterprise Services, edited by Chen, Martha A. Washington, DC: Management Systems International, 1996. Woller, G., C. Dunford, and W. Woodworth. “Where to Microfinance?” In Microcredit and Development Policy, edited by D. R. Snow, G. Woller, and T. F. Buss Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2001. Yaron, J. “What Makes Rural Finance Institutions Successful?” The World Bank Researcher Observer 9, no. 1 (1994): 49–70.

See also: Economic Community of West African States; International Development; International Monetary Fund; Trade, Fair; United States Agency for International Development; World Trade Organization References Adams, D. “Using Credit Unions as Conduits for Micro-enterprise Lending: Latin American Insights.” Poverty-Oriented Banking Working Paper No.12. Geneva: Enterprise and Cooperative Development Department, International Labor Office, 1995. Armendariz de Aghion, Beatriz, and Jonathan Morduch. The Economics of Microfinance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Aryeetey, E. “Informal Finance for Private Sector Development in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Journal of Microfinance. 7 (2005): 3–38. Barnes, C., G. Morris, and G. Gaile. “An Assessment of Microfinance Clients in Uganda.” In Microcredit Development Policy, edited by D. R. Snow, G. Woller, and T. F. Buss. Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2001. Daley-Harris, S. State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2003. Washington, DC: Microcredit Summit, 2003. Fernando, Nimal. Micro Success Story? Transformation of Non-governmental Organizations into Regulated Financial Institutions. Manila, Philippines: Asian Development Bank, 2004. Gonzalez-Vega, C. From Policies to Technologies to Organizations: The Evolution of the Ohio State University Vision of Rural Financial Markets. Paper presented at the conference Finance 2000. Financial Markets and Institutions in Developing Countries: Reassessing Perspectives, May 28–29, 1993, Washington, DC. Gonzalez-Vega, C. “The Challenge of Growth for Microfinance Organizations: The Case of Banco Solidario.” In Microfinance for the Poor? edited by H. Schneider. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1997. Morris, G., and C. Barnes. “Impact of Microcredit Programs on Low-Income Households in Peru and Zimbabwe.” Paper presented at Pennsylvania Economic Association. June 1–3, 2006.

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MIDDLE PASSAGE The term “middle passage” refers to the transatlantic voyage experienced by Africans who were being shipped from Africa to America as human cargo in the slave trade. It was given this name—middle passage—because the journey from Africa to America represented the middle leg of the three-step trading network set up by the Europeans. The trip started in Europe with the ships transporting a cargo of rum, brandy, weapons, metalware, and other goods to Africa. Once in Africa, the European goods were exchanged for slaves who would be then shipped to America. The increasingly agriculture-based American society was in

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need of cheap labor. The colonial populations were small and grew slowly, and there was, therefore, a shortage of field labor. In America, the enslaved Africans were exchanged for sugar, tobacco, and other products that would be taken on the return trip to Europe. Slaves thus played a central role in the European economy and to what was called the “triangular trade.” Forms of slavery had been in existence for a long time, but the scale of the Atlantic slave trade from its inception in the seventeenth century was something new in the seventeenth century. It was also distinguished by its severity and the decimation of the African population, as well as by the great distances that separated slaves from their homes, which increased their cultural alienation and legal vulnerability. The first European power to organize the Atlantic slave trade was the Portuguese empire in the sixteenth century. However, the English replaced them as the most powerful slave trading nation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is estimated that the British ships transported more people in their Atlantic voyages that any other European nation. African society was disrupted by transatlantic slavery since it created a radical break within African society. While Africans could be enslaved in different ways by African societies, the European economy altered the established practices in the exchange of slaves. First, most slaves were sold by African chiefs themselves to European traders in exchange for European goods. These slaves were usually debtors, people in debt, criminals, or captured enemies. The African chiefs participated actively in selling other Africans to Europeans, rather than retaining them for their own society, because

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the trade goods they received in return enhanced their prestige and brought them more followers. The other source of slaves was direct capture by Europeans, as described by the former slave Olaudah Equiano’s account of his experience as a child: “One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both” (Andrews, ed., 2000, p. 211). Once captured, traders chained the slaves together and forced them to march to seaports to wait for the ship that would carry them to America. Often for months at a time, the enslaved men and women were kept in dungeons—barracoons— distributed along the African coast. It is calculated that of the millions of African people sold into slavery, approximately half of them died before reaching the African coast. Traders branded slaves with hot irons as if they were cattle and restrained them with shackles. Some of these Africans had never seen white people, ships, or the ocean itself. The middle passage was psychically traumatic and the conditions atrocious. Male slaves were usually chained in pairs by the ankle and placed in the space provided for them below decks. Female slaves and children, usually fewer in number than African males, were left untied on the upper dock. According to historian Hugh Thomas, this segregation was intended to keep the women from being seduced by the men or to prevent women from inciting male slaves to rebellion. The slave merchants involved in the Atlantic trade wanted to optimize their use of deck space. They added broad shelves between each deck on which the

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enslaved men lay, thus nearly doubling the number of slaves who could be transported in a single shipment. A well-known representation of this is the plan of the English slave ship Brookes, with the slaves packed against each other and distributed all over the different levels of the ship. The space in slave ships was so crowded that the Africans could hardly move and had to sleep on top of each other. Sometimes there was neither adequate ventilation nor enough space to put buckets for the slaves’ body wastes. The heat and the stink were insufferable, the air totally unbreathable. If the weather was good, slaves were forced to ascend to the upper deck and “dance” to exercise and prevent muscular atrophy. The unhygienic conditions within the ships caused the spread of all types of illnesses, particularly smallpox, dysentery, the flux, scurvy, and dehydration. Most of these illnesses were caused by the lack of vitamins or adequate drinking water. In the late eighteenth century, English traders began to have their slaves inoculated against smallpox before carrying them on their ships. Besides illness, there were other factors that threatened the integrity of the ships’ human cargo. Suicide was common: some slaves preferred to die rather than cope with their present circumstances, endure what they were going through, or because they did not know what awaited them at the end of the journey. Many jumped overboard and drowned. Others refused to eat, but were force-fed with a speculum orum, an instrument designed to keep the slaves’ mouths open while food was forced down their throats. Many deaths were also caused by violence and rebellion. Slave uprisings took place from time to time and usually ended in bloodshed. The rebellions were brutally www.abc-clio.com

crushed and, once the crew regained control, the leaders immediately executed. Scholars estimate that, in total, around 11 million Africans were shipped to the Americas between 1450 and 1900 to become slaves. Laura Gimeno-Pahissa See also: Amistad Case, The; Atlantic World; Diaspora; Slavery (History) References Andrews, William L., ed. Slave Narratives. New York: Library of America, 2000. Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery. London: Verso, 1997. Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery. New York: Penguin, 1995. Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

MILITARY FORCES Colonial heritage shaped the formation and development of military forces in Latin America and Africa. Additionally, much of recent African and Latin American military history can be seen as a series of proxy battle grounds between powerful external political forces, including former imperial powers and the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War. As a consequence of political instability caused by military conflicts, many countries may be said to be in a state of continual revolution. From 1945 to 1992 in Latin America and from the end of World War II to the present in Africa, internal revolutions have periodically spilled over to neighboring countries when one side of the conflict retreats into another country or turns to another country for assistance. At present,

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Latin America is largely demilitarized, but African conflicts may be growing. As a result of the Panama Canal, world powers had a great deal of interest in Latin America and sought to gain better footholds on isthmian trade dealings. At the start of the twentieth century, the United States supervised the security of its investments by enacting legislation and agreements with regional governments with the clear goal of quelling revolutions and other disruptions that would affect their trade dealings. At this point, military forces in the region were comprised of professional armies loaded with weapons acquired through free trade or direct military assistance, most often from U.S. suppliers. Both Latin America and Africa contributed military forces in World War I and World War II. During the Cold War, Latin America and Africa also experienced numerous military operations. In particular, World War II heavily influenced Latin American and African military force development. Much of Africa was directly involved in World War II combat while Latin American military forces benefited from land lease programs and favorable trade terms with the United States. When World War II began, the U.S. military, under extensive land-lease programs, gave training and supplies to the military forces operated by recognized Latin American governments. Latin American militaries were provided with strategical training and developed a strong logistical infrastructure. During the Cold War, Latin American powers underwent a U.S.-backed stasis. Many weapons were transferred to guerillas, primarily because of U.S. and communist adversarial relations between the countries. The Latin American military alignment with the United States improved their www.abc-clio.com

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fighting forces. By simply extending the progress afforded by U.S. war dollars, nations modernized not only their military forces but provided a model to synthesize resources to fight other forces. The combination of updated training methods, experience, the synthesis of logistical models, and acrossthe-board skills improvement in language ability, industrial processes, and maintenance of complex weapons systems, such as aerial or naval craft, were great assets for Latin American military force development. Between World War II and the end of the Cold War, Latin American military forces were of two kinds: the official, recognized military forces which received aid from the United States; and the secondary, revolutionary forces that were formed due to internal conflict and were often aided by the Soviet Union and its allies. Revolutionary forces also found their funding through security contracts with drug producers and traffickers in the region, especially after the Cold War. Notably, their supply line is extremely well-organized and often follows the same channels as the traffic of illegal drugs. While military forces in Latin America are characterized by the dichotomy between official government defense forces and revolutionary forces, with sharp contrasts in organizational structure, logistics, and aid, African military forces offer a different picture. In sub-Saharan Africa, military conflicts take place primarily as a means to promote or settle a governmental system in a situation where none exists or there exists an openly corrupt and brutal regime based on military rule. Africa’s continual internal military struggles have resulted in more than ninety military coups since 1963. Following African decolonization in the 1960s, the United States, China, the

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Soviet Union, and Islamic nations funneled military aid to promote their political orientation within the region and to secure markets for trade and exploitation. As a source of great mineral wealth, and as a jumping-off point for the Indian Ocean, Africa is of great strategic value and is riddled with internal and external conflicts. Colonial and postcolonial economic interests, communism, Islam, tribal infighting, and various forms of neocolonialism all influenced the creation and purposes of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century African military groups. African military forces lack organized, well-supplied professional fighting regiments. Most military powers are formed from tribal or national conflicts, which consist of small arms and light artillery. In many cases, the army acts as the police, and vice versa. Soldiers serve for many reasons, but most often in order to provide a living for themselves. Except for those motivated by Islamic unity, the typical African soldier is not driven by deep ideological underpinnings and are, generally, soldiers of fortune, siding with whomever pays the most or with whom they believe is the likely winner of a conflict. African military forces rely almost exclusively on small arms. Few big-budget items like tanks or jet fighters exist. For example, in 1979, the only tanks found in independent sub-Saharan Africa were in the Ivory Coast (5 French), Guinea (12 Soviet), Ethiopia (50 U.S.), Somalia (150 Soviet), and Mali (10 Soviet). In sub-Saharan Africa, jet fighters could be found in Guinea (8 Soviet), Mali (6 Soviet), Nigeria (15 Soviet), Ethiopia (26 U.S./Great Britain), Somalia (18 Soviet), and Uganda (7 Soviet). Most African states lack technological, logistical, and financial abilities to www.abc-clio.com

maintain complex weapon systems. In many parts of Africa, the variation in terrain complicates large-scale operations. Therefore, most African armies are designed to perform mainly localized functions. Other military forces present in Africa include external peacekeeping forces and occasional mercenary armies. United Nations forces provide mediation, security, and pressure toward the cessation of hostilities. Private mercenary groups such as Executive Outcomes provide security to foreign companies and government leaders. While private mercenary groups are not widespread, their presence does significantly impact Africa’s geopolitical and commercial landscape. Latin American forces are typically defenders of established governing bodies and operate in a modern fashion, drawing upon the weapons and skills of larger international powers, such as the United States. Although most of the small arms used by African militaries come from outside powers, particularly from the era of the Cold War, African force structures and military operations are based more on survival and localized conflicts, rather than ideological conflicts. Latin America’s military experience is heavily influenced by a single large external power: the United States. In contrast, Africa’s many newly independent nations and their armed forces have a much more fractured and tumultuous relationship to external powers. Josiah Baker and Matthew Shannon

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See also: Arms Trafficking; Cold War; Colonial Armies in Africa; Decolonization, African; Neocolonialism; Peacekeeping and Military Interventions; World War I; World War II References Assensoh, A. B., and Yvette Alex-Assensoh. African Military History and Politics: Coups

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MILLER, SAMUEL T. 763 and Ideological Incursions, 1900–Present. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Brandt, Chris, and Clara Nieto. Masters of War. St. Paul, MN: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Hartlyn, Jonathan, Augusto Varas, and Lars Schoultz. The United States and Latin America in the 1990s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Howe, Herbert M. Ambiguous Order. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004. Marcella, Gabriel. Warriors in Peacetime. New York: Routledge, 1994. Pastor, Robert. Exiting the Whirlpool: U.S. Foreign Policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001. Rottman, Gordon, and Robert Pitta. South African Special Forces. Botley, Oxford: Osprey, 1993.

MILLER, SAMUEL T. (FL. LATENINETEENTH CENTURY) Samuel T. Miller was an African American teacher and missionary to Angola. Miller was born into slavery in Burkeville, Virginia, and grew up there before being emancipated at the end of the U.S. Civil War. Unfortunately, his birth date as well as his death date are unknown. After the war ended, Miller attended Hampton Institute in Virginia, training to become a teacher. In 1879, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a Congregational mission society based in Boston, decided to establish a mission in West Central Africa (Angola) and selected a three-man team comprised of two white ordained ministers and Miller. At the time of his selection, Miller was working as a teacher and serving as a local Baptist church leader in Virginia. From the ABCFM’s perspective, Miller was an extremely attractive candidate given his status as a freed slave and as an educated African American with teaching experience. As a result of the www.abc-clio.com

ABCFM’s selection and his willingness to comply with the request, Miller was to become the first African American missionary to serve in Angola. The team arrived in the colonial capital of Luanda in 1880, but it was not until the following year that the team was able to establish their mission at Bailundu, some 190 miles (306 kilometers) inland from Benguela, a major entrepôt on Angola’s southern coast. Miller immediately identified more closely with Africans than with his associates, fueling his colleagues’ racist attitudes. Undeterred, Miller wasted little time in establishing a school for local children. After a series of walking tours through nearby villages to recruit students, the school opened on January 1, 1882, and Miller was soon teaching six days a week, five hours a day. Miller labored tirelessly to learn Umbundu, the local language, and resisted students’ requests to learn Portuguese, insisting that classes be conducted in the vernacular. Miller was so committed to this approach that he produced one of the first Umbundu grammar books, which came to be used by both his students and later arriving missionaries. Again vexing his colleagues, Miller pedagogically instituted an industrial education strategy in which manual labor was employed in order “to uplift” the African students. In this sentiment, Miller appears to have been a product of his background, for Hampton—“the wellspring of industrial education”—was a center of the industrial school of thought. For Miller, the stress on labor and industries was part and parcel of the evangelization process, while for his associates it had no place in conversion endeavors. Due to differences with the regional king, Ekuikui, in 1884, the mission was forced to abandon its post and return to the

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coast. Upon reaching Benguela, Miller and a colleague opened a station while others appealed to American and Portuguese officials to use coercion to facilitate the mission’s return to the interior. After considerable Portuguese persuasion, Ekuikui apologized and invited the missionaries back, ensuring their safety and calling for their hasty return. However, at this point Miller opted to return to the United States, citing insurmountable differences with his colleagues. It is in letters that Miller sent to the board at the time of his departure in December 1884, and after his arrival in Boston in the New Year, that Miller first offers a glimpse into the hostile environment in which he had been serving. His candidness and condemnation in these letters exists in sharp contrast to his acquiescent and upbeat tone in letters from the first four years of his service. Once home, Miller petitioned the board to send him back to Angola to oversee his own mission station, explicitly expressing his unwillingness to work with his former colleagues. Upon notification of denial, Miller severed his ties with the board for good. By 1886, Samuel Miller was in charge of his own school of approximately 50 students near his place of upbringing in Burkeville, Virginia, and it is at this point that he disappears from the historical record. It was not until 1890 that another African American missionary, Susan Collins, would serve in Angola. Todd Cleveland See also: American Missionary Association References American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. “Letters from Missionaries to Africa, 1834–1919,” Vols. 5–9, 16–19, Western Africa (ABC 15.1) Unpublished Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, available on microform.

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American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Missionary Herald, 1880–1886. Vols. 76–82. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1880–1886. Jacobs, Sylvia M. “The Impact of Black American Missionaries in Africa.” Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, edited by Sylvia M. Jacobs. Greenwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. Williams, Walter L. Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877–1900. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

MOHAMMED, WARITH DEEN (1933–) Imam Warith Deen Mohammed, also known as W. D. Mohammed, is the current leader of Mosque Cares. The son of Elijah and Clara Muhammad, he was born October 30, 1933, in Hamtramck, Michigan. After the death of Elijah Muhammad in February 1975, W. D. Mohammed was unanimously chosen as the subsequent leader of the original Nation of Islam (NOI). Mohammed transformed the NOI, which basically was a proud black nationalist organization, into an Islamic organization following orthodox Islam’s ideals, beliefs, and practices. He introduced and taught the Qur’an as the guide for followers, along with the Five Principles of Islam and the Six Articles of Faith. Mohammed changed the group’s annual fast from the month of December to coincide with the universal fast in Ramadan (the ninth month of the Muslim calendar). For the first time, all other races and ethnic groups were allowed to enter NOI mosques (formerly called temples) and join the Nation of Islam as members. He abolished the titles and positions of minister, captain, and secretary. Ministers became imams and assumed the primary roles of leading the prayer and

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conducting other spiritual and ceremonial functions on behalf of the community. Mohammed also eliminated the central authority in Chicago and made each mosque autonomous and independent. In 1978, when the community was called the World Community of Al-Islam in the West, Minister Louis Farrakhan broke with W. D. Mohammed and left the organization along with some other members. They resurrected the Nation of Islam again in ideas, principles, and practice. Although Imam Mohammed officially resigned in September 2003, many still recognize him as their leader in the Islamic outreach organization he directs, The Mosque Cares, which recognizes the doctrine of orthodox Islam while affirming the social and cultural diversity of Islam’s practitioners. Besides his position with Mosque Cares, Mohammed is an international leader and a spokesman and member of several multireligious and peace-focused councils and organizations. In February 1992, he was the first Muslim to deliver an invocation at the opening session of the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C. In February 1992, he toured the Pentagon and addressed Muslims and chaplains in the U.S. military. In January 1993, he delivered an address before the Los Angeles-based World Affairs Council. On March 3, 1992, he delivered an address on the floor of the Georgia State Legislature, the first ever given by a Muslim. In September 1992, he was presented with Egypt’s highest religious award, the Gold Medal of Recognition. In January 1993, he participated in the inaugural Interfaith Prayer Service for President William Clinton. During Clinton’s second term, Mohammed served on the president’s Religious Advisory Council and attended breakfast sessions for religious leaders at the White House. In www.abc-clio.com

December 1994, he was awarded the Cup of Compassion from Hartford Seminary. In February 1995, he was invited by the religious community and Dallas city officials, along with Rev. Martin Luther King III and Rosa Parks, to officiate at the first “Acts of Kindness Week.” On March 6, 1995, Imam Mohammed delivered the keynote address at the Muslim-Jewish Convocation. In 1996 he met with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. He continues to encourage interfaith dialogue and tolerance, and speaks regularly at the annual convention of The Mosque Cares. Muhsin Shaheed See also: Islam, African American; Farrakhan, Louis; Nation of Islam References Clegg III, Claude A. An Original Man: The Life and Time of Elijah Muhammad. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America. Grand Rapids, MI: Africa World Press, 1961. Muhammad, Elijah. Message to the Blackman. Chicago: Muhammad Temple No. 2, 1965.

MONROE DOCTRINE The Monroe Doctrine was a U.S. policy on Latin America declaring that European powers that did not already have a presence in the Americas would not be allowed to colonize this region. The Monroe Doctrine, named for President James Monroe, was a response to the geopolitical issues brought about by the shared American continent. Following the War of 1812, there were still disputed land claims in the western North American continent and a power vacuum left throughout Latin America by the departure of Spain. Monroe and his cabinet were worried about the influence of European political

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U.S. Marine Corps patrol boats on the Ozoma River, Santo Domingo, ca. 1919. The United States maintained a military presence in the Dominican Republic from 1916 until 1924. (National Archives)

turmoil spreading to the Americas. The Napoleonic Wars had taken a significant toll on most of Western Europe and left the continent in shambles. Civil wars in Piedmont, Neopolitan, and Sicily (preunification Italy), as well as the Greek war for independence beginning in 1821, were violent affairs militarily and the cause of contentious debate throughout American and European politics. In late 1823, Great Britain and the United States discussed how to approach disputed territories and a new approach to Latin America. These negotiations first led to an agreement to state jointly that neither side would meddle with the affairs of Latin America. However, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, as well as others in Monroe’s cabinet, was worried that the Americans would lose face by partnering with Great Britain, their former colonizer. www.abc-clio.com

President Monroe agreed with Adams and in his December 1823 address to Congress, the president announced the United States policy toward Latin America. The United States, on its own, declared that European powers that did not already have a presence in the Americas would not be allowed to colonize or prospect. James Polk, elected president in 1844, campaigned on a promise to annex Texas from Mexico, attain most of what would become the American Southwest, and gain the Oregon Territory from the British. The term utilized during the Polk presidency by supporters of the annexation policy was Manifest Destiny; however, this policy was merely a morally charged extension of the Monroe Doctrine. Polk was successful in achieving all of his goals, going to war with Mexico to ensure the annexation of Texas and the American Southwest. He negotiated

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with the British to attain the Oregon Territory. However, there were plenty of critics of Manifest Destiny and the true purposes of annexation. The Monroe Doctrine encountered significant protest from abolitionists and small government proponents. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft were also responsible for differing interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine. Roosevelt, a leader in the SpanishAmerican War, felt that the United States had a responsibility to act as a guardian to Latin America and enumerated such responsibility in his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. William Howard Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy was an attempt to utilize America’s economic power as leverage in dealing with Latin American leaders. The Monroe Doctrine was utilized by Woodrow Wilson in sending troops to Haiti in 1915 and by the Republican presidencies in the 1920s to take actions in nations like Panama and Venezuela. President Franklin Roosevelt attempted to relinquish the United States of the responsibilities of guardian by enacting law to release the Philippines from U.S. control and promising no undue activity in Latin America. This noninvolvement, however, was temporary. The onset of World War II and the ideological conflicts of the Cold War caused Latin America to be a battleground between democratic and communist leaders. Nicholas Katers See also: Decolonization, African; Good Neighbor Policy; Neocolonialism References LaFeber, Walter. The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750. New York: Norton, 1989. Perkins, Dexter. A History of the Monroe Doctrine. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. Smith, Gaddis. The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

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MONTAIGNE, MICHEL DE (1533–1592) The French humanist and skeptic thinker Michel de Montaigne is best known for his Essais, first published in 1580. His work influenced how the Enlightenment would portray both Native Americans and Africans and presents a critical contemporary perspective on beliefs about primitiveness that are important to studies of human rights. Montaigne was born to a rich chevalier, Eyquem de Montaigne, and to Antoinette de Louppes, of Spanish Jew origin. Eyquem was a soldier in Italy during his youth, and there had met humanist thinkers who deeply influenced him, to the point that he planned his son’s education according to their humanist principles. The newborn baby was thus sent to live with a poor peasant family to get an early experience of the hardest life. When three years later he came back to Montaigne Château, strict orders were given to his tutor, the family, and the servants: the child had to be addressed only in Latin and never forced to learn, instead his natural curiosity was to be carefully stimulated. Montaigne later studied law in Toulouse and was a brilliant counsellor of the Parliament. He served at the court of Charles IX from 1561 to 1563. His marriage and the birth of his five daughters were no obstacle for his first and early retreat from public life. In 1571, Montaigne chose to isolate himself with a vast library in the tower of the château, where he was to write his famous Essais. He would leave his tower 10 years later to travel around Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. His Journal de voyage, in which the thinker records his experiences in the three countries, evidences Montaigne’s huge interest in the customs of the diverse peoples that he met. On his return, he was offered

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the post of mayor of Bordeaux. The experience, though, ended sourly for Montaigne when the citizens censured him for having taken refuge in his castle during the plague crisis in 1585. Weary and ill, Montaigne retired definitively to the château, where he died seven years later. The topics of the Essais, which deal with the most diverse aspects of the life of a Renaissance chevalier—education, family life, health, interests, and even clothes and food—served as an excuse for deeper reflection on essential themes. With the detachment of a modern anthropologist or ethnographer, Montaigne wrote about ethics, politics, religion, law, and the customs of both his compatriots and foreign peoples. Montaigne condemned openly the colonial project in America in “Des Coaches,” an essay in which he claimed that Europeans had destroyed earthly Paradise to get pepper and some pearls. Both in “Des Coaches” and in “Des Cannibales,” though not only in these two, Montaigne condenses his discursive approach to the otherness of the American peoples. The essay entitled “Des Cannibales” deals in particular with the Brazilian tribes that French explorers were encountering at that time. Like the vast majority of authors dealing with America, Montaigne obtained information from explorers’ accounts and chronicles, including those of Francisco Lopez de Gómara, Jean de Léry, André Thevet, and Girolamo Benzoni. He stands above other authors, however, because he personally met and interviewed, with the help of an interpreter, three Tupinamba Indians who had been brought to France in 1562. Montaigne’s essay on the Brazilian men is, according to Hayden White, a Renaissance version of Tacitus’s Germania, which had www.abc-clio.com

been written to contrast the virtue of the simple, noble life in the forests of the Germani to the dissolute and decadent way of living of the Romans. Through the comparison, thus, the virtually neutral depiction of a foreign nation becomes a denunciation of the vices of Tacitus’s society. Montaigne supports the recovery of the values of nature, as civilization has failed to eradicate violence and barbarism from European societies. Horrified by the bloody slaughter during the religious wars between Catholics and Huguenots, Montaigne, in his Essais, rejects the validity of the antithesis “natural vs. artificial,” or “savage vs. civilized,” in both sophisticated and “primitive” societies. The distinction between good and evil is equally unclear, and the concepts themselves—as in fact, culture and even knowledge—are relative to the highest degree. Roger Celestin points out that Montaigne somehow deconstructs the notion of a center of knowledge as he writes about the Tupinambas. Instead of incorporating them in the structures of knowledge of Montaigne’s sixteenth-century France, which would amount to digesting the Tupinambas, it would seem that Montaigne acknowledges that a cultural “other” only makes sense in an open process of negotiation with one’s self. “Des Cannibales” inspired Shakespeare’s Caliban character in The Tempest; the Essais were part of the dramatist’s known library. Virginia Fernández Canedo

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References Burke, Peter. Montaigne, translated by Vidal Peña. Madrid, Spain: Alianza Editorial, 1985. Celestin, Roger. “Montaigne and the Cannibals: Toward a Redefinition of Exoticism.” Cultural Anthropology 5, no. 3. (August, 1990): 292–313. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

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MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS, SLAVERY Since Henry Wyatt raised an arch to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 at the entrance to his home near Stroud in Gloucestershire, a handful of monuments and memorials concerning slavery and abolition have been erected in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Famous ones include the U.S. memorial to the Amistad rebellion, Africa Rising at the African Burial Ground in New York City, Caribbean monuments to the Maroons and slave uprisings, and slave forts in Africa, which were once transit points in the transatlantic slave trade. Several prominent memorials are in the United States. In New Haven, Connecticut, an impressive 14-foot bronze-relief statue sculpted by Ed Hamilton in 1992 memorializes the 1839 rebellion on the Amistad. The discovery in the early 1990s of the remains of an African burial ground in New York City led to the creation of the African Burial Ground as a major memorial site and a place for historical education about slavery. Barbara Chase-Riboud was commissioned to construct a monument. Called Africa Rising, it was installed on Lower Broadway in 1998. This magnificent 20-foot bronze statue with silver patina is topped out with a flowing African female figure. Chase-Riboud was spurred on by the success of this memorial and lobbied Congress for a permanent federal memorial specifically to commemorate the victims of the Middle Passage. However, her efforts and those of others have had little success. In 1999, the Homeward Bound Foundation did manage to have constructed a monument to the dead of the transatlantic slave trade, which was deposited on the ocean www.abc-clio.com

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bed 265 miles (427 kilometers) off New York facing Africa. In the Caribbean there has been relatively more remembrance activity. Especially prevalent are memorials to slave rebel leaders and Maroons, rather than to victims of the slave trade. In the British Caribbean, the most noteworthy monument is the Emancipation Statue in Barbados. Erected in 1985 and sculpted by Karl Broodhagen, it depicts a male slave figure breaking his chains. Many on the island relate the sculpture to the slave rebel Bussa, who led 400 rebels against the Crown in 1816. Later, a memorial to Nanny, leader of the rebels in the First Maroon War, was raised in National Heroes Park, Kingston, Jamaica. An interesting feature of the memorial to the Asante-descended warrior is that it reproduces the sound of the abeng, an instrument used by the fighters. Maroons also feature in many memorials in Dutch Suriname and Curaçao and French Martinique; they show the ubiquitous figure of the slave casting off his chains. The national Tula monument in Curaçao commemorates the slave rebellion of 1795. Sculpted by Nel Simon and erected in 1998, it shows three leaders of the rebellion using a hammer and an anvil to set themselves free. Much of the memorial activity in Africa is centered on the slave forts of the west coast in Senegal and Ghana. A slavery interpretation center/memorial on Goree Island off Senegal was planned with the help of the UNESCO Slave Routes Project, which also gave impetus to many other memorial activities throughout the Atlantic triangle. Smaller-scale memorials include works of art and statuary collected at the old slaving post of Albreda in the Gambia. Benin has been in the forefront of monumental activity, especially at Ouidah. In

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addition, Benin was presented with the Reconciliation Sculpture by the City of Liverpool in 2005. Around 13 feet (4 meters) high, the sculpture includes iconography from and information about the slave trade. Rochester, Virginia, will also receive a copy of the sculpture as atonement for Liverpool’s history of enslaving Africans and transporting them to the Americas. Alan Rice See also: Middle Passage; Museums and Transatlantic Slavery; Slave Forts References Oostindie, Gert, ed. Facing Up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2001. Rice, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum, 2003. Selz, Peter, and Anthony F. Janson. Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sculptor. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

MOODY, HAROLD (1882–1947) Harold Moody was a founder of the League of Coloured Peoples and an outspoken critic of colonialism. Moody was born in Kingston, Jamaica. His mother was the major influence on his early life. As a teenager Moody became a Christian, a faith that was to be the mainspring of all his subsequent activities. From 1904 to 1911 he studied medicine at King’s College, London, but after graduating he was refused hospital posts because of his color. He set up a private medical practice in south London and married a white English wife. For the rest of his life, Moody lived and worked in London, returning to Jamaica for only three brief visits. Harold Moody had little to do with politics between 1912 and 1929. He www.abc-clio.com

concentrated on raising his six children, building up a prosperous medical practice, preaching, and church work. However, he was all too aware of racial prejudice from his own experience and by intervening on behalf of black doctors and nurses denied entry to hospitals. Eventually Moody realized that the “color bar” in Britain was not going to be combated by preaching or persuasion but required more direct action. Also by the late 1920s he had become much more conscious of his African heritage and that confronting racism was a pan-African cause. In 1931 Moody established the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP), a multiracial organization led exclusively by black people. He regarded the LCP as primarily a Christian organization. Moody persistently lobbied for black civil rights, by letter and delegation, to urge change on private institutions and government. Moody’s nationwide preaching increasingly dealt with race. He believed that steady pressure, reasoned argument, and evidence of black responsibility would gradually end racial discrimination in Britain. His lack of radicalism and willingness to cooperate with the Colonial Office inevitably earned him the scorn of radical blacks. Moody’s close contact with leading West Indians and Africans, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935–1936, and the labor unrest in the West Indies all fueled his criticism of colonialism. Moody was not opposed to the British Empire; rather he demanded that it should be democratic and color-blind. However, by 1943–1944 he supported the League’s Colonial Charter for Coloured People, which demanded colonial self-government and economic development. Before World War II, Moody argued for a future pan-African meeting

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but in Africa. In 1944 he corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois about the 5th PanAfrican Congress that eventually met in Manchester, England, in 1945. Moody did not attend and the LCP had only a token presence, a serious miscalculation. Moody was suspicious that socialists might dominate the congress, and he also saw it repeating what the League had already agreed to in its 1944 charter. By 1946 Moody’s focus was on gaining support for a Colonial Cultural Centre in central London (also to be the headquarters of the LCP) where black and white people could meet each other. To raise money he visited New York and the West Indies in 1946–1947. Moody returned home in poor health and died within ten days. Moody was a large man and an impressive speaker with great energy and organizing skills. At his death it appeared little had been done to change racial attitudes in Britain. Nevertheless he had given voice to black demands for equal civil rights and helped prepare the way for changes in social attitudes as well as the law. He wrote a number of pamphlets but no major book. David Killingray See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; League of Coloured Peoples; Pan-Africanism References Killingray, David. “‘To Do Something for the Race’: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples.” West African Intellectuals, edited by Bill Schwarz. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003. Moody, Harold. Youth and Race. London: Young Christian Booklets No.5, Christian Endeavour Union, ca. 1938–1939. Moody, Harold. Christianity and Race Relations. London: League of Colored Peoples and Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1943.

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Moody, Harold. The Colour Bar. London: 1945. Moody, Harold. Freedom for All Men. London: 1945. Vaughan, David A. Negro Victory: The Life Story of Dr. Harold Moody. London: Independent Press, 1950.

MORANT BAY REBELLION The Morant Bay Rebellion of Jamaica that began on October 11, 1865, changed the political configuration of Jamaica, set off heated political debates in England and America, and created a historical event that continues to inform and inspire African— especially Caribbean—peoples today. By 1865, the apprenticeship system that followed the 1834 abolition of slavery in Jamaica had been over 28 years. During those nearly three decades, former slaves had largely left the sugar plantations to set up their own small-scale farming communities. Plantation owners suffered not only from the loss of their formerly cheap and abundant labor but also from reduced profits because the price Jamaicans received for sugar was no longer protected by the British. In addition, the American Civil War both disrupted the Jamaican economy and strengthened calls for justice and equal rights for all people. Frustrated plantation owners exacerbated worsening tensions in Jamaica by placing high tariffs on imported goods typically purchased by the ex-slave population; 1865 was also the second year of a drought. What ignited this situation into rebellion was escalating tensions surrounding a case of trespassing that, itself, was more about ongoing conflicts over rent and land ownership than the actual trespass. On October 11, 1865, approximately 500 black Jamaicans confronted a militia of some 30 men guarding the Morant Bay Courthouse

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(southeastern Jamaica). Women began pelting this militia with stones and bottles, and the militia responded with shooting, killing seven blacks. By the end of the day, the crowd had responded by killing 18 militiamen. In the following days, two planters were also killed. Similar to the Haitian Revolt (1792– 1804) under Toussaint Louverture, the Morant Bay Rebellion was preceded by the writing of letters and petitions to figures of colonial power. Paul Bogle, a Native Baptist church deacon and leader of the Morant Bay Rebellion, wrote to Edward John Eyre, governor of Jamaica, declaring that as loyal subjects of Queen Victoria, Jamaica’s ex-slave population deserved better treatment. And once the rebellion began, Bogle declared that the rebellion was not against the queen but against injustice. From documents, it is known that at least some African Jamaicans believed that the queen did not support the actions of those representing the Crown in Jamaica, and it was presumed that replacements sent out from England would support the goals of revolting Jamaicans. (Toussaint Louverture had professed a similar confidence toward France.) The response from Governor Eyre, however, was not justice but the killing of nearly 500 largely innocent people. Paul Bogle was among those killed. Particularly incendiary in Britain was the execution of Jamaican House of Assembly member George William Gordon despite the lack of any evidence linking him to the rebellion. Immediate results of the Morant Bay Rebellion included Governor Eyre’s removal from office and his return for trial in England. Pro- and anti-Eyre camps quickly formed primarily along the lines already drawn by the contentious Carlyle-Mill

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“Negro Question” debate that had begun when Thomas Carlyle published “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849), followed by John Stuart Mill’s response “The Negro Question” (1850), and then Carlyle’s revised essay “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” (1853). The pro-Eyre side included Charles Dickens and Alfred Tennyson. The anti-Eyre side included Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, and Charles Darwin. In general, the Morant Bay Rebellion confirmed already-held positions in the United States. As stated in the December 2, 1865, issue of Harper’s Weekly, those who supported slavery saw it as proof of “the inevitable consequences of emancipation and the conferring of civil rights upon men of colored blood,” while abolitionists and reconstructionists saw it as the inevitable results of “utter destitution” and “injudicious legislation.” Today the Morant Bay Rebellion and, especially, Paul Bogle remain symbols of resistance to the injustices of colonialism and neocolonialism as evidenced, for instance, in Bob Marley’s song “So Much Things to Say” (1977). Kevin M. Hickey

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See also: Apprenticeship (British Empire); Colonialism; Jamaica; Neocolonialism; Slave Revolts/Maronnage References Bakan, Abigail. Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica: The Politics of Rebellion. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. Heuman, Gad. The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. London: Macmillan, 1994. Robotham, Don. “The Notorious Riot”: The Socio-Economic and Political Bases of Paul Bogle’s Revolt. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1981.

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MOREJÓN, NANCY (1944–) Cuban poet Nancy Morejón has a deep understanding of the African dimension of Cuban history, society, and culture. The rhythm and the contents of her poetry incorporate the music and language of Afro-Cubans and reveal the everyday life of the Cuban people, particularly of the Afro-Hispanic woman. Her particular interest in the fusion of the Spanish and African cultures makes her a literary descendant of the renowned Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. Author Alice Walker finds it refreshing and almost unheard of to read the poems of a black woman who is at peace with her country. Born in 1944 in Havana, Cuba, Morejón is a poet, a scholar, a teacher, a theater critic, an editor, a dramatist, and a translator. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she opted to remain in Cuba where she has lived most of her life. The city of her birth is forever present in her poems. She still lives in the old neighborhood where she grew up and writes that she walks on Cuba’s sidewalk as a revolutionary and constantly affirms this identity of a black woman formed in the Revolution. Mutismos, her first book of poetry, was published in 1962. In the preface to a bilingual (SpanishEnglish) collection of Morejón’s poetry published in 1985 entitled Were the Island Sleeps Like a Wing, Miguel Barnet points out that Nicolás Guillén considered Morejón’s poetry to be as black as her skin. One of the poems in this collection, “Richard trajo su flauta,” celebrates the Afro-Cuban by evoking black independence heroes and African gods, and alluding to African-inspired music. In the section of this collection entitled “Mujer Negra” (Black Woman),

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Morejón focuses on slavery, poverty, and the affirmation of the Afro-Cuban since Castro’s revolution by emphasizing the point of view of the slave and of the black woman. The first poem, “Looking Within,” expresses in four simple lines how the suffering dates from the sixteenth century (date of the arrival of African slaves in Cuba) and how the nightingale has always sung this suffering. The second poem, “Elegua’s Eyes,” is in honor of the African orisha Eleggua, warrior, lord of the iron, who is represented in Afro-Cuban lore as a coconut with cowrie shells for eyes. The critic and translator Kathleen Weaver points out that the poem “Negro” (Black Man) is in honor of the dignity and suffering of millions. The poem begins by alluding to the black man’s hair and how some thought that it was the devil’s own hell, then to his smile, to his footprints, and finally to his bronze spirit. Finally, in “Mujer Negra,” the poem that gives the section its name, the black woman can still smell the foam of the sea that she was forced to cross but cannot remember the night or her ancestral language. Cuba is the land where the black woman, represented as a collective consciousness, suffered and where she stopped dreaming of the road to Guinea. Finally, she wonders if it was Guinea, or Benin, or Madagascar, or Cape Verde that marked her homeland. In 2002 Morejon published a bilingual edition of her selected poetry from 1954 to 2000. Beatriz Rivera-Barnes See also: Latin American Literature References Afro-Hispanic Review 15 (Spring 1996), Nancy Morejon, featured author. DeCosta-Willis, Miriam. Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejón. Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1999.

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774 MOROCCO Feracho, Lesley. “Arrivals and Farewells: The Dynamics of Cuban Homespace through African Mythology in Two Eleggua Poems by Nancy Morejón.” Hispania 83, no. 1 (March 2000): 51–57. Morejón, Nancy. Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing, translated by Kathleen Weaver. San Francisco: The Black Scholar Press, 1985. Morejón, Nancy. Mirar Adentro/Looking Within: Selected Poems, 1954–2000. Bilingual edition, African American Life Series, edited by Juana Maria Cordones Cook. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002.

MOROCCO Located on the northwest coast of Africa, with a long Atlantic seaboard, the Kingdom of Morocco has had extensive links with the Americas. The Norwegian sailor Thor Heyerdahl suggested that it was possible that, in ancient times, men could have sailed from Morocco to the Americas, putting the idea to the test with his Ra Expeditions when, in 1969–1970, Ra I and later Ra II sailed from Morocco for the West Indies, reaching Barbados on the second attempt. Whether or not such travels actually took place in the ancient world, the longstanding presence of Americans in Morocco’s main port, Tangier, reflects the historical and modern connections between Morocco and the United States. Morocco has a population of approximately 31.6 million. During the medieval and early modern period, Morocco managed to preserve much of her independence, although the Portuguese, Spanish, and briefly the British occupied several ports. In 1777 the sultan of Morocco made moves to recognize the United States, and six years later when the U.S. brig The Betsy was captured by Moroccans and taken to Tangier to force the issue, arrangements for full diplomatic www.abc-clio.com

relations resulted with Morocco becoming the first country to recognize the new United States of America after the War of Independence (a few countries recognized the United States during the war). Thomas Barclay became the first U.S. consul in Tangier, and in 1820 the U.S. consulate there became the first property abroad purchased by the U.S. government. There were some early American visitors, not least Benjamin Rose, who as “Robert Adams” became famous for having visited the city of Timbuktu in Mali. An African American born in Hudson, New York, Rose was traveling on the ship Charles when it was attacked by Moors. He became a slave of the Arabs for three years until he managed to escape to Mogador (modernday Essaouira) from where he was able to make his way, after many more difficulties, to London. There also were early connections between Morocco and Argentina. In the early 1790s, José de San Martín, later the independence hero of many countries in South America, served in the Spanish Army in modern-day Morocco and Algeria and was involved in the attack on Oran in Algeria in 1791. San Martín died in France but was subsequently buried in Buenos Aires. Moroccans also had connections with Buenos Aires. Charles William Simpson, born in Tangier in 1822, moved to Buenos Aires in 1851 or 1852, where he was registered with the British consul as a “businessman.” He was secretary to the British Hospital in that city and died on March 12, 1856. He was buried in the Victoria (Protestant) Cemetery in Buenos Aires, and when it was cleared, his gravestone was saved and taken to the British Cemetery at Chacarita where it survives. Morocco still maintains an embassy in Argentina.

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As Morocco prospered during the late nineteenth century, many Europeans but also a few people from the United States and Brazil moved to the country; their interests were represented by consuls in Tangier. The number of Americans in Morocco was never high, but their profile was out of proportion to their numbers. The United States often sent in warships to protect even the smallest of U.S. interests. For example, Ion Perdicaris, a millionaire who had become fascinated by Morocco, was to cause a great deal of trouble in 1904 when he and his stepson, Cromwell Varley, were abducted from their estate near Tangier and held for ransom. After U.S. warships intervened, the two were released. The United States supported maintaining Moroccan sovereignty when the issue was raised at the Conference of Madrid in 1880, but was outvoted by the European powers. The American community grew in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in Tangier, an “international city” where many Americans settled to enjoy a relatively freewheeling existence without having to worry about many laws or taxes. U.S. citizens also had extraterritorial rights, meaning that the United States claimed jurisdiction over its citizens abroad. There was even an American school in the city, although most of the children attending were not Americans. Most people still identify wartime Morocco with the film Casablanca (1942). Humphrey Bogart played the fictional Rick Blaine, who runs Rick’s Bar in the Atlantic port of Casablanca, through which many people are trying to escape to Lisbon and then to America, and employs a black musician Sam (played by Dooley Wilson). The film ends with premonitions of Operation Torch (November 1942). This Allied offensive, www.abc-clio.com

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carried out by thousands of U.S. and Canadian soldiers, and a number of Britons, of whom there were more than 480 casualties, captured Morocco from Vichy France, of whom there were more than 1,346 casualties. Eight Canadian airmen are buried at Casablanca (four having previously been buried at Tetuan) and two more at Ceuta, formerly a Moroccan port, but occupied by Portugal and then Spain since 1415. In 2004, former U.S. diplomat Sally Kriger opened Rick’s Café in Casablanca modeled after the one in the film. After World War II, Tangier regained its international status with some American writers moving to the city, and others to Casablanca on the Atlantic coast. Paul Bowles, the New York-born novelist and translator, moved to Tangier in the late 1940s with his wife, and the two rapidly became central figures in the Tangier artistic society that emerged. After independence in 1956, a large number of the expatriates in Tangier left. There are many American graves in the cemetery at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, and the cemetery and other sites in Tangier are regularly visited by thousands of American tourists who visit Tangier and other cities in Morocco each year. Ahmed Laraki, the Moroccan prime minister from 1969 until 1971, had previously been ambassador to Washington, D.C., as was Ahmed Osman, who was prime minister from 1972 until 1979. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Morocco tried to introduce tougher security legislation modeled on George W. Bush’s Patriot Act; however, this legislation did not pass until after the May 16, 2003, terrorist attacks in Morocco, in which members of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization Salafia Jihadia committed a series of suicide bombings targeting

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Spanish- and Jewish-owned hotels and restaurants, as well as attempts to bomb a Jewish cemetery and the Belgian consulate. In 1980, there were 9,896 Morocco-born people resident in the United States. Ten years later the figure was 15,541, and by 2000 it had reached 38,000. Smaller numbers of Moroccans live in Canada and South America. Justin Corfield See also: Africa, North References Green, Michelle. The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier. London: Bloomsbury Press, 1992. Landau, Rom. Portrait of Tangier. London: Robert Hale, 1952. Park, Thomas K., and Boum, Aomar. Historical Dictionary of Morocco. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006. Parsons, F. V. The Origins of the Morocco Question. London: Duckworth, 1976. Perdicaris, Ion. “The Land of the Extreme West, and the Story of My Captivity.” National Geographic Magazine (March 1906): 117–157. Price, Willard. “Americans on the Barbary Coast.” National Geographic Magazine 84, no. 1 (July 1943): 879. Woolman, David. “Did Theodore Roosevelt Overreact When an American Was Kidnapped in Morocco? Were Seven Warships Really Necessary?” Military History (October 1997): 16, 79.

MORRIS, MERVYN (1937–) Born in 1937 in Jamaica, Mervyn Morris is a poet, scholar, literary and cultural critic, and editor of numerous collections of West Indian literature and criticism. A graduate of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Morris also attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship in the early 1960s.

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Morris retired from teaching at UWI in 2002. He still lives in Jamaica. In 1964 Morris became an early advocate for oral literature and the orality of Jamaican poet Louise Bennett’s work. In his essay in the Jamaica Gleaner, “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously,” Morris argues that creole is a valid Jamaican language and Bennett’s work represents well this cultural heritage; he thus avoids the “mental slavery” of viewing Jamaican creole as something uncouth or “less than” Standard English. Morris has since edited numerous collections of Bennett’s poetry. He is also an acknowledged mentor to successful Jamaican poets, such as Mutabaruka and Mikey Smith. Morris’s poetry is widely praised. His collections include The Pond (1973), Shadowboxing (1979), Examination Centre (1992), and On Holy Week (1993). The majority of his poetry is concise, restrained to one or two pages. He gained acclaim for the poem “The Day My Father Died,” which gave him the label “personal poet” (as opposed to the more political Caribbean poets of the late 1960s and early 1970s of the Caribbean Artists Movement, such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite and John La Rose). Yet his poetry addresses many personal, social, political, national, and international issues. For example, “Case History, Jamaica” narrates the life of “X,” a representative nameless Jamaican, who illustrates the cultural consequences of a heritage of slavery and colonialism. In 1993 and 1994, Morris served as the director of the Poetry Workshop at the University of Miami’s Summer Institute for Caribbean Creative Writing. For his work as a poet, scholar, and leader in the community, he has received various honors, including the Silver Musgrave Award (1977), the Institute of

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Jamaica’s Centenary Medal (1979), and the Una Marson Award for Literature (1997). Is English We Speaking (1999) is a collection of Morris’s critical articles that focuses on the usage of oral and scribal creativity and the variations of Standard English and creole. Subjects of his essays range from Louise Bennett’s poetry to the defining points of “dub poetry,” to broad explorations of various Caribbean authors’ works, including Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, Mutabaruka, Trevor Rhone, Mikey Smith, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Sam Selvon. His article in Disappointed Guests: Essays by African, Asian, and West Indian Students (1965) is a critical and earnest response to his education and living environment while at Oxford University. In Making West Indian Literature (2005), Morris explores the creative variations of West Indian authors’ works. Morris also is the editor or coeditor of the following collections: Voiceprint: An Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean (1989); The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories (1990); and Progressions: West Indian Literature in the 1970s (1991). He continues to publish poetry in esteemed journals such as Calalloo. David W. Hart See also: Bennett, Louise; Caribbean Literature; Creole/Criollo; Johnson, Linton Kwesi; McKay, Claude; Mutabaruka; Smith, Mikey; Walcott, Derek References Collier, Gordon. Us/Them: Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post-colonial Literary Cultures. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1992 Dance, Daryl Cumber. Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Morris, Mervyn, Brown, Stewart, and Rohlehr, Gordon, eds. Voiceprint: An Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean. Essex, UK: Longman, 1989.

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MORRISON,TONI (1931–) Toni Morrison is an African American novelist, essayist, educator, and a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents were George and Ramah (Willis) Wofford. Morrison was the second of four children (two girls and two boys). She encountered many obstacles growing up, but her parents expected much of her anyway. She married Harold Morrison, an architect, in 1958 and had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. She and her husband divorced in 1964, and from that time on she was solely responsible for the upbringing of her sons. Morrison received a B.A. from Howard University in 1953; it was during this period of her life that she changed her name to Toni. She earned an M.A. in English from Cornell University in 1955. After a brief stint (1957–1964) at Random House as an editor, she taught at numerous colleges and universities and eventually accepted a faculty position at Princeton University, where she has been since 1989. Morrison never intended to write professionally, but she has been publishing novels, plays, nonfiction, and song lyrics since 1969. Among her novels are The Bluest Eye (1969), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), and Love (2003). A film version of Beloved was released in 1998. In addition, Morrison has written a play, Dreaming Emmett, that was first produced in Albany, New York, in 1986. With her son Slade Morrison, she has written the following books for children: The Big Box (1991), The Book of Mean People (2002), The Book of Mean

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One of the most significant U.S. authors of the twentieth century, Toni Morrison’s novels and critical writings have brought an African American feminist voice into the center of American literature. In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, a recognition of her international influence. (Getty Images)

People Journal (2002), The Lion or the Mouse? (2003), The Ant or the Grasshopper? (2003), and The Poppy or the Snake? (2004). Her nonfiction pieces include Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and the text of her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, The Dancing Mind (1996). Transatlantic themes are common in Morrison’s novels. In Beloved, for example, the narrator moves back and forth across the Atlantic, offering perspectives of African life both pre- and postslavery. An African www.abc-clio.com

American folktale focusing upon slaves with the ability to fly and who can return to Africa if they desire provides the foundation for Song of Solomon. Paradise brings together the Americas and Africa via Afro-Brazilian religious beliefs, Roman Catholicism, and African American folk Christianity that influence a principle character. Morrison’s work also frequently reflects African American experiences in both the northern and southern United States and the roles history and cultural roots play in the lives of African Americans.

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Among the many awards and honors that Morrison has received are a National Book Award nomination in 1975 for Sula, the National Book Critics Circle Award and American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon, a National Book Award nomination, National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1987 for Beloved, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She was the first African American laureate. Morrison continues to write today. Ann Pelelo See also: Flying Africans References Bloom, Harold., ed. Toni Morrison. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 1990. Foreman, P. G. “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Gray, P. “Paradise Found.” Time (January 19, 1998): 63–68. Harding, Wendy, and Jacky Martin. A World of Difference: An Inter-cultural Study of Toni Morrison’s Novels. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Kramer, Barbara. Toni Morrison, Nobel PrizeWinning Author. Springfield, NJ: Enslow, 1996. Middleton, David L., ed. Toni Morrison’s Fiction. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. Morrison, Toni. The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993. New York: Knopf, 1993. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993. Morrison, Toni. The Dancing Mind: Speech upon Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. New York: Knopf, 1997. Taylor-Guthrie, Danille., ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. “Toni Morrison.” Vol. 27, Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series, edited by H. May, et al. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1989.

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MOVIMENTO NEGRO UNIFICADO Originally the Movimento Negro Unificado Contra a Discriminação Racial (Unified Black Movement Against Racial Discrimination), the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) was formed to address civil rights and the right to freedom of expression. Because of its history, continuous activity, and present relevance, the MNU is the most important black organization in Brazil, being the heir of the Frente Negra (Black Front, 1931–1937) and central to the overall history of the Brazilian Black Movement—a movement that today comprises more than 5,000 groups of all sorts. The MNU was founded on June 18, 1978, in São Paulo at the culmination of a rally protesting the death under torture of black worker Robson Silveira da Luz at the police headquarters of Guaianases, a district in São Paulo; the expulsion of four black athletes of the Tietê sport club; and the killing of black worker Nilton Lourenço by a policeman. At that time Brazil was still ruled by a military dictatorship that curtailed civil rights and freedom of expression, which partially explains the radical origins of the MNU, born as it was in a twofold struggle against political and racial oppression. Unlike other black movements, which favored a sheer cultural agenda, the MNU engaged from its inception in concrete social activism. This meant that its members had to fight on two fronts, both against an unjust regime and against other oppositional groups that failed to give the racial question its due importance. Torture, for instance, was viewed by MNU members not only in the scope of the military regime but also in the broader context of Brazil’s colonial past and the violence inflicted upon slaves.

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From the very beginning, the MNU was inserted in an international network of black militancy, which is still at work today. C. L. R. James’s collaboration with Leon Trotsky was a key source of inspiration for some of MNU’s founding members, who became voices heard in intercontinental meetings. And MNU activists, influenced by trends of black thought, have contributed to overseas debate about Brazil’s sui generis kind of racism, a hegemonic belief that color is not a hindrance to social and cultural interaction. Right after its founding, the MNU started to foster so-called Centros de Luta (Fighting Centers), regional groups supposed to act locally. They were first organized in big urban centers as Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Belo Horizonte, but soon expanded to others cities as well. Despite its aim to promote the debate on racial issues in Brazil, the MNU has been criticized for its intellectualist, middle-class nature because it has had little or no penetration in poor neighborhoods, or favelas (jerry-built shacks on the outskirts of big cities), or in the interior of the country. On the other hand, the movement has managed to be remarkably consistent and coherent in its views and opinions during its existence. Among MNU activists are some of the most important Brazilian black thinkers and academics, such as Clovis Moura, Abdias do Nascimento, Milton Barbosa, and Hamilton Cardoso. After the gradual reestablishment of democracy in Brazil in the late 1980s, the MNU moved to a more institutionalized political practice, fighting for policies of affirmative action at schools and universities, compensation for Afro-Brazilians, acknowledgment of their importance for the country, and land rights for quilombo-descending populations. The MNU remains an imporwww.abc-clio.com

tant agent in Brazilian civil society and a fundamental organization in the struggle against racial inequality. Fabio Durao See also: Brazil; Brazilian Culture; Quilombo References Covin, D. “Afrocentricity in O Movimento Negro Unificado.” Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 2 (1990): 126–146. Hanchard, Michael George. Orpheus and Power: The “Movimento Negro” of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil 1945–1988. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Marx, Anthony W. Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

MOZAMBIQUE Located on Africa’s east coast, Mozambique has a population of roughly 19,500,000. Portuguese explorers first occupied the land that is now known as Mozambique in the 1490s. Initial contacts were made with Arab trading settlements that had existed in coastal areas for centuries. Portuguese traders soon established forts and trading posts at these settlements, making them important ports in Portugal’s eastward expansion. In Mozambique, the Portuguese initially maintained a limited presence, relative to its more prized colonies in Brazil and Angola. Investment in Mozambique was severely limited as the Portuguese government chose to focus attention and resources on the more lucrative colonization of Brazil. This period established lasting cultural connections between Mozambique and the Americas. Among these influences is the growth and use by Mozambique’s many small-scale farmers of crops, such as maize, that are native to the Americas.

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In the early years of colonialism, Mozambique was used by the Portuguese primarily as a source of gold and, more significantly, of slaves. Often, the final destination of slaves from Mozambique was the quickly growing plantations of Portugal’s primary colony, Brazil. Mozambique’s slave trade continued past the early nineteenthcentury abolition of slavery in Portugal’s other major African colony, Angola. The slave trade from Mozambique, while reduced in numbers, continued as that colony’s slave exports were simply redirected toward the networks of the Indian Ocean. Thus slaves from Mozambique were forced into the unacknowledged slavery of “contract labor” systems in French sugar-planting colonies or the slave markets of eastern Africa. This shift in Mozambique’s slave trade from an Atlantic to an eastern orientation would continue until the last decades of the 1800s. The use of slaves from Mozambique as contract labor on French plantations lasted until the practice was abolished by a decree from Napoleon III in 1864. Portuguese colonialism paid little attention to economic development in Mozambique. The horrible treatment of Africans, including forced contract labor, spurred struggles against the colonial powers. In 1962 the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) brought together several anticolonial movements. FRELIMO initiated a campaign of armed resistance against Portuguese colonial rule in 1964, a struggle that continued until Mozambique gained independence following the overthrow of the Slazar regime in Portugal in 1975. Following independence, the FRELIMO regime established itself as a single-party government allied to the Soviet-led socialist bloc, which included Cuba. The nominally www.abc-clio.com

Marxist FRELIMO government provided support to liberation movements in neighboring South Africa (African National Congress) and Zimbabwe (ZANU). At the same time, the apartheid governments in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) funded and armed a right wing rebel movement, the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO), which ignited a civil war that lasted for almost two decades. The civil war claimed over a million lives and made almost two million refugees seek asylum outside the country. In the first decade of independence, Mozambique, like its former colonial cousin Angola, became deeply embroiled in Cold War struggles. Like Angola, Mozambique faced destabilization efforts launched by the apartheid regime in South Africa. While Mozambique did not face the same threats of formal military invasion that Angola suffered, the South African regime provided financial and military support for the reactionary rebel forces of RENAMO in its lengthy campaign against the government. Mozambique also faced threats from the Ian Smith government in Rhodesia, which attempted to topple Mozambique’s government following its decision to support UN sanctions against Smith’s racist government. Since the defeat of Smith’s government and the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980, Mozambique has developed friendly, if at times strained, relations with the country. Diplomatic relations between Mozambique and South Africa were only initiated with the Nkomati Accord of 1984. This process left South African support for RENAMO intact, however. The process of developing friendly ties between the two countries could only begin in earnest with the fall of the apartheid

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regime. Full diplomatic relations with South Africa were only established in 1993. In the years immediately following independence, Mozambique relied largely on socialist bloc countries, including Cuba, for political, economic, military, and social support. However, Mozambique never enjoyed the same level of military or civil support that characterized Angola’s relationship with Cuba, for example. The relationship with the socialist bloc began to change with Mozambique’s involvement with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund beginning in 1984. This change initiated a dual shift as Western aid came to replace Soviet assistance and as the conditions placed on financial aid, such as the privatization of social programs and institutions and restrictions on spending, compelled Mozambique’s governments to reorganize on a neoliberal capitalist basis. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the break became complete. Mozambique’s primary sources of support outside of Africa now include Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, and The Netherlands. Thus, Mozambique’s international focus has further moved toward Europe and the East rather than the Americas. In recent years Mozambique has developed strong and friendly relations with its neighbors, most notably, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, and Tanzania. As well, the country retains close relations with Angola and other Lusophone countries, including Brazil. Jeff Shantz See also: Cold War; Portuguese Empire References Chabal, Patrick, David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest et al. A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

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Newitt, Malyn. A History of Mozambique. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995

MULLEN, HARRYETTE (1953–) Harryette Mullen is a contemporary African American female poet and educator. Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama, raised in the Texas border town of Fort Worth, and educated at the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she took her PhD. Since earning her doctorate, she has taught creative writing and African American literature at Cornell University and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She has produced six volumes of poetry—Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PerM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), Blues Baby: Early Poems and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002) (a finalist for both the National Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry)—as well as the scholarly study Freeing the Soul: Race, Subjectivity, and Difference in Slave Narratives (1999). African and African American poetry, folklore, slave narratives, feminism—each is a scholarly concern for Mullen and all invariably inform her creative work, which remains a highly allusive affair. A typical Mullen poem playfully manipulates advertising jingles, slang, black vernacular, diasporic idioms, pigeon, blues lyrics, nursery rhymes, and any number of other discourses in an attempt to deconstruct the essentially oral African American literary tradition propounded by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and to refashion it into a multivoiced, participatory, intertextual poetics. Taking inspiration from the dictionary word game S⫹7, a mathematical composition technique of

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the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), as well as the all manner of constraint-based wordplay—acrostics, anagrams, homophones, puns, oronyms, palindromes— Mullen’s work is decidedly experimental. Never merely exuberant for its own sake, Mullen’s language teases out perceived social, cultural, and political divides and in doing so, celebrates the inherent mongrel character that is contemporary American culture. Her intertextual parodying reimagines the African American’s relation to Anglophone writing. To this end, Mullen has garnered wide praise, receiving, among other accolades, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Morgan Lucas Schuldt References Bedient, Calvin. “The Solo Mysterioso Blues: An Interview with Harryette Mullen.” Callaloo 19, no. 3 (1996): 651–659. Frost, Elisabeth A. “‘Ruses of the Lunatic Muse’: Harryette Mullen and Lyric Hybridity.” Women’s Studies 27 (1998): 465–481. Frost, Elisabeth A. “An Interview with Harryette Mullen.” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 3 (2000): 396–421. Huehls, Mitchum. “Spun Puns (and Anagrams): Exchange Economies, Subjectivity and History in Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge.” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 1 (2003): 19–46. Mullen, Harryette. Trimmings. Providence, RI: Tender Buttons, 1991. Mullen, Harryette. S*Perm*K*T. Philadelphia, PA: Singing Horse Press, 1992. Mullen, Harryette. Muse & Drudge. Philadelphia, PA: Singing Horse Press, 1995. Mullen, Harryette. Freeing the Soul: Race, Subjectivity, and Difference in Slave Narratives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Mullen, Harryette. Blues Baby. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Mullen, Harryette. Sleeping With the Dictionary. Berkeley. University of California Press, 2002.

MUSEUMS AND TRANSATLANTIC SLAVERY The museum’s practice of collecting and exhibiting African and African American cultural objects and practices, as well as the cultural practice of slavery and the slave trade, reveals the contentious issues surrounding historical engagement with, and acknowledgment of, the slave past. Since the 1990s a number of museums across the world have begun to explore the subject of transatlantic slavery and the slave trade as part of a trend to engage in meaningful debates on difficult subjects that had traditionally been marginalized. In the past, museums have avoided controversy and either ignored issues related to slavery or have only dealt with aspects that are comfortable. For instance, in many museum structures, African artifacts are included within natural history collections in an anthropological and ethnological context. While there have been many good and interesting displays, such an approach does not allow for proper integration within wider historical themes or develop the interaction between Africans, Europeans, and white Americans when exploring such issues as slavery or colonization. Similarly, the history of black people within the Diaspora has rarely been considered worthy of notice, just as the contributions of most working people are ignored. Probably the earliest museum to approach the subject of slavery was Wilberforce House in Hull, England, the family home of William Wilberforce,

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which opened to the public in 1906. At that time and for many years afterward, the principal focus was on Wilberforce’s personality and the displays related to him and his abolition campaigns. A few artifacts, such as whips and shackles, were included. Some of the earliest developments in terms of slavery were related to the interpretation of historic sites. Although black people constituted about half the population of Virginia’s capital, Williamsburg, in the eighteenth century, visitors to Colonial Williamsburg saw no black faces and almost no reference to black workers until 1975. Gradually black interpreters and a wide range of programming addressing these topics were introduced. A major development was the reconstruction of the slave quarters on the nearby plantation at Carter’s Grove, which opened to the public in 1989. Here visitors see not only the physical conditions of the enslaved but face up to uncomfortable issues, including slavery, racism, and discrimination. The wider museum world began to explore some of the issues surrounding slavery during the 1980s and early 1990s. New displays were installed in Wilberforce House in 1986, but these were limited in interpretation and execution and had little impact. Temporary exhibitions on the local black population in Britain were held in Liverpool, Nottingham, and London, and in 1992 the Trophies of Empire series of exhibitions in Liverpool, Bristol, and Hull explored the legacies of Britain’s colonial past with particular reference to slavery. A major exhibition on the French slave trade opened in Nantes under the title Les Anneaux de la Mémoire in 1992. At about the same time, a number of exhibitions were developed in museums in the United States. Among the most comprehensive was www.abc-clio.com

A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln organized by the Chicago Historical Society in 1990. This exhibit placed the issue of slavery at the heart of the display. In 1991 Richmond’s Museum of the Confederacy addressed related issues in its exhibit Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South. This exhibit later toured and a smaller version was incorporated into the museum’s permanent displays. The traveling exhibit A Slave Ship Speaks was based on the artifacts that have been recovered from the wreck of the slave ship Henrietta Marie. However, the first major museum display to examine the transatlantic slave trade and its associated slavery was the Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity Gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool. This three-year project began in 1991 with the support of the Peter Moores Foundation, a private charitable organization, and culminated with the opening of the gallery in October 1994. This groundbreaking initiative, which has attracted international attention, is based on extensive academic and community research and consultation. Other permanent exhibits on the British slave trade and slavery have opened since then. A temporary exhibition on Bristol’s slave trade in 1999 was later incorporated into the city’s Maritime and Industrial Museum as a result of public demand pending the realization of plans for a new Museum of Bristol. In the same year, the National Maritime Museum’s Trade and Empire Gallery included a significant section on black seafarers and on the slave trade. The Empire and Commonwealth Museum, which opened in Bristol in 2002, also addresses the subject in a frank and open manner.

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These projects have not been completed without comment and controversy. The Liverpool development involved a prolonged discussion with the black community, locally and farther afield, over wide-ranging issues of ownership, project structure, interpretation, and content. The Trade and Empire Gallery was subject to a sustained campaign in parts of the British press outraged that the museum should be raising issues that questioned the traditional view of the Empire. Inevitably some museums are reluctant to deal with the subject and this reluctance has also extended to funders. With a few notable exceptions, the major developments have been undertaken by public institutions with financial support from public bodies. Certainly there has been little commercial sponsorship. In the United States there are few major museums that have substantial displays devoted to transatlantic slavery. The most extensive development is the Museum of African-American History in Detroit, which includes a 70-foot replica of a slave ship and cast figures representing slaves. This display has proved to be controversial because the casts were taken from local schoolchildren whom critics argue are too healthy and well nourished to represent the enslaved. Few attempts have been made to examine the trade itself and show visitors the origins of the African American population. The traveling exhibition Captive Passage, originated by the Mariners’ Museum and developed from the Liverpool gallery, was the first significant examination of the trade. In many museums and historic sites the subject matter is largely ignored. A 2002 survey of nearly 200 plantation museums and sites in the American South www.abc-clio.com

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concluded that slavery was inadequately presented. In the vast majority of cases, the subject was ignored or trivialized. Plantations were seen in terms of their owners, the interior decoration, and the often luxurious contents with no reference to the people whose labor produced the lifestyle—the black laborers and servants. Only black-run sites and a handful of white-organized sites treat the experience of slavery with any measure of competence. Many of the museums that do attempt to treat the subject in a direct, frank, and holistic manner are to be found in West Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. However, they are rarely able to present displays to the standards found in museums in Europe and North America because of the lack of resources, facilities, and investment. In West Africa, the main such displays are found in buildings associated with the trade itself. The historical museum in Ghana is housed in the former Cape Coast Castle and the former fort at Elmina is also maintained as an historic site. In Senegal, there are displays in the former Old Fort and Maison des Esclaves on the island of Goree. Limited support has been given by international organizations such as UNESCO and by some European and American museums. Similarly, in the Caribbean there are few major museums and few displays on slavery and its impact. Probably the most substantial display is found in the Kura Hulanda Museum in Curaçao, which has been privately funded. Under the title the African Holocaust, this display examines the trade from a mainly non-European perspective and places it against displays of African artifacts and replicas. There are plans for museum displays in a number of countries, including Barbados, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, and the potential of many

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historic sites across the region is being examined. There is no doubt that the issue of slavery presents difficulties for museums. Some of these are structural ones: who does it? who pays for it? where do you do it? who organizes and controls the process? Some are emotional ones: slavery is not an ordinary subject and with its adjunct racism, it is still potent, controversial, and raw. But the challenges go wider. In practical terms there are other difficulties. Lack or imbalance of collections is one. Many European museums have larger and more comprehensive African collections than their counterparts in Africa, but they often have very little relating to their own black communities. There are interpretative problems. For instance, many African artifacts have traditionally been seen from a European perspective; the information recorded is often poor, inaccurate, and partial. There are few images and few representations of Africans, and frequently the Africans are depicted in subservient or debased positions relative to European images. For example, most displays show European material produced for the antislavery campaigns, which often silences an African perspective on the experience of slavery while empowering and elevating European agency. So museums have to be careful how they use the so-called material evidence and to think carefully about the messages that they promote. Furthermore, the need for cooperation between museums and other agencies across the Diaspora is vital to ensure that resources are shared more equally. Anthony Tibbles See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Colonialism; Slave Narratives; Slavery (History); United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; Wilberforce, William

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References Eichstedt, Jennifer L., and Stephen Small. Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. Tibbles, Anthony. Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity. London: HMSO, 1994.

MUSIC, AFRICAN African music contains vast musical forms—not just drumming—extensive variation, and demonstrates dynamic cultural exchanges within Africa and between African and African American musical forms. It is sometimes thought that before colonizers came, Africa was totally isolated from the rest of the world. Yet, in precolonial times, Africa had trade connections with countries of the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Southeast Asia, as well as China and India. Indigenous Africans have long encountered people and music of other societies within Africa itself, in the East Horn, the Sudanic belt of West Africa, eastern areas of the continent, and on the island of Madagascar. During the Islamic period of African history, which began in 741 CE, Islamic and Arabic culture were widely disseminated on the continent. People in many of these Islamized areas continue to perform music today that has recognizable Arabic traits. In North Africa the music is heavily Arabic. Since Arabic music belongs to the Oriental family of modal music and is markedly different from the indigenous African music that preceded it, the two families cannot be treated effectively as one branch of the same musicology. And yet, in spite of these disparities, North African music is still unequivocally “African music,” whether it “sounds African” or not.

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The same is true of certain kinds of Western music that have influenced indigenous African music, particularly in southern portions of Africa where there has been a European settler population plus a core of Western-oriented African people. And the long history of intercontinental communication across the Atlantic Ocean between Africans and their descendants in the New World has resulted in hybridized popular music and dance forms that continue to prosper in Africa and beyond. Varied as the preceding kinds of music are, however, their existence on African soil means that they too qualify as “African music.” In the early decades of the twentieth century, when pioneer musicologists in Africa and the West first began serious research into sub-Saharan African music, they noticed a cluster of musical characteristics that seemed to be continent-wide and to have remained intact despite centuries of countless African catastrophes. Even a hundred years later, these characteristic traits are still alive and well in Africa, sometimes unchanged, sometimes diluted, refined, or otherwise modified, but always recognizable for their uniqueness as compared with other world music. Language in Africa has had a strong connection to music. In fact, no serious study of sub-Saharan music should overlook the fact that Africa is the most multilingual continent in the world. Estimates indicate more than 2,000 distinct languages and as many as 8,000 dialects are spoken. However, the majority of these languages are tone languages, which explains the inextricable unity of language and music in Africa. In tone languages, the highness or lowness of the syllables in words contributes to meaning. The same word of only two syllables can mean as many as four different www.abc-clio.com

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things, depending upon selection of highor low-pitched syllables. Africans learning these languages as children can soon distinguish subtle differences in intonation, and the melodic tones contribute to aspects of music as well. Africans have put their unique tonal languages into practical use through a number of speech surrogate musical instruments that can “speak” words of praise (or condemnation); chronicle history; recite poetry, proverbs, and epics; warn of danger; and more. Most commonly these remarkable instruments are drums with membranes or made of wood or metal, but xylophones, trumpets, bells, and other instruments capable of at least two pitches are also used. Another distinctive characteristic of African traditional music is its extreme importance to society as a whole. Music is everywhere in Africa and has multifarious uses. There are specific songs for everything imaginable: for rowing upstream, and for rowing downstream; for educational purposes; to accompany cooperative labor; of political commentary; essential to rites of passage; of worship; for celebrating the loss of a child’s first tooth; for chiding a child for bed-wetting; and for a beautiful cow. The Zulus have a praise song to honor a valiant (if defeated) enemy, and in Ghana there is a special song for hanging. At gatherings, which most often occur out-of-doors, it is often difficult to differentiate African performers from the audience, since both are closely interwoven. The audience is apt to sing along, clap, pop fingers, or dance enthusiastically, making everyone present at a performance an active participant. In short, African music is communal. “Moving to music” is an essential concomitant of African music, observable not

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only everywhere in Africa, but highly visible in distant locations when people of the African Diaspora assemble for worship, or just to share their energizing music. African music is spectacularly kinesthetic, and appears to incite some kind of physical response—usually dancing. Not only are music and dance inseparable in Africa so are the arts in general treated as total art. Often in festivals or other events that include music, there is also dancing, poetry, costumes, pageantry, roleplaying, storytelling, and imaginative visual effects. If opera is defined as “sung drama,” Nigerians were staging genuine operas long before having contact with the West. All universal categories of musical instruments, grouped according to how they produce sound, are found in abundant variety in Africa: membranophones (vibrating skin), chordophones (vibrating strings), aerophones (vibrating air), and idiophones (the vibration of the instrument itself ). Some of these instruments that were originally indigenous to Africa, such as the mbira (hand piano), kora, and banjo, besides any number of percussion instruments, are fast spreading to other parts of the world. Africa, in turn, has enthusiastically embraced Western electronic instruments, guitars in particular. In fact, there are parts of Africa where there are no drums whatsoever, but Africa is home to endless varieties of idiophones that vibrate when they are struck, scraped, stamped, or shaken. When sub-Saharan Africa is considered as a whole, the most universal percussion instruments—ones always available—are clapping hands. Although all world music consists of the same elements, namely rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, form, and timbre, the nature of these elements and their uses www.abc-clio.com

differ widely from culture to culture. In Africa, rhythm takes precedence over all the other elements. African rhythm is so unique, so unimaginably complex, yet so compelling, that this factor alone must account for the popularity and global influence of Africa on popular music, folk music, and myriad dance forms. Nowhere else in the world is rhythm as rousing and sophisticatedly complex as in Africa. A single rhythm is almost nonexistent, as was observed by early scholar A. M. Jones. All over Africa, he said, there are always two simultaneous rhythms going on, or even three, four, or five rhythms occurring at the same time. Initially, when musicologists tried to understand and analyze the baffling intricacies of African rhythm, they unsuccessfully applied concepts of Western music theory. They had been trained to read printed music that represents sound by notes, measures, bar lines, staves, key signatures, time signatures, dots, rests, clefs, and additional dynamic markings. Because of time signatures, Western music tends to have regularly recurring accents. The positive side of this means that performers can play together in a coordinated manner, but the downside is that if accents are followed too religiously, music can end up sounding unduly rigid. In the West, time is divided into rhythmic units (notes) that have constant ratios and are simple fractions of each other. In other words, two quarter notes always last as long as one half note; and a sixteenth note always lasts as long as half an eighth note. Although this system, known as “divisive rhythm,” does not cover every situation, it has proved to be fairly adequate when Western music is concerned. In Africa, however, there is no written body of music theory. Music traditions are

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passed along orally for generations. Furthermore, additive rhythms dominate most African music, meaning that time is divided into units (beats or pulses) that are added together, rather than divided. The crucial words, additive and divisive, pinpoint a fundamental and important distinction between African and Western rhythms. However, the polyrhythmic texture of African music is of even greater significance. In West Africa, for example, there are “time lines,” frequently consisting of 12 pulses (or beats) that are added as units and repeated as cycles throughout a given work. Usually a double bell with two pitches reiterates the time line, but this is often reinforced by a large rattle. Together these instruments maintain the underlying pattern of the time line. A very common example from Ghana is 2⫹2⫹1⫹2⫹2⫹2⫹1. Note that this does not suggest any of the stressed beats implicit in Western time signatures. Although it is difficult for Westerners to comprehend how extremely complex polyrhythms can be regulated by a time line, African musicians use them almost like a metronome might serve a Western musician, the exception being, however, that a metronome regulates practice, whereas a time line is an essential part of performed African music. Once the time line has been established by the double bell, the other musicians enter at their own pace and commence their individual rhythmic patterns. An uninformed Western-trained conductor, however, might try in vain to get the assembled musicians to start on a downbeat. (There are no downbeats in indigenous African music.) Once launched, intricately interwoven polyrhythms continue in a collective performance that often continues for a sustained period of time. www.abc-clio.com

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Africans also show a marked interest in that element of music known as timbre. Any number of vocal sounds, in addition to musical tones, are cherished and exploited, including yodeling, grunting, hissing, ululating, falsetto, growling, clicking, and a thick quality sometimes referred to as “threadiness.” In instrumental music as well, an additional noise factor is frequently added in the form of small attached, or enclosed, seeds or small stones or bits of metal that hum, rattle, buzz, or even blur the main tone. For Africans, noise embellishing a tone is as much appreciated as a tone. Although African music uses melody in the many songs that are part of African culture, melody, in general, plays a subordinate role to rhythm. However, short melodies, blended with the characteristic vocal “call-and-response” form, are everywhere in Africa, as well as in far distant parts of the world where there has been an African presence or secondary influence. There are myriad variations of call-andresponse (antiphony) used for instrumental as well as vocal music, but the song archetype involves a lead singer whose initial phrase is answered immediately by a chorus. Back and forth the pattern continues throughout an entire work, often with the leader improvising or overlapping his/her call phrase before the ending of the choral phrase—an “Africanism” that results in dense and fascinatingly interwoven sounds that some scholars see as symbolizing the community and closeness of African society. Americans are indebted to people of African descent for creating the music forms that give this country its very identity, notably spirituals, ragtime, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, hip-hop, rap, and gospel. Myriad original dance forms are also associated

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with the music forms. The same phenomenon continues in the Caribbean, South America, and elsewhere on the planet. Such a triumphing of the arts, despite severe adversity, testifies to the enormous power of culture to survive and affirm itself. In this case, individual genius and imaginative use of African-derived polyrhythms, syncopation, call-and-response, and unusual timbres have made it all possible. In fact, at this very moment in time, young people the world over are listening to, dancing to, or performing popular music whose relentless and ubiquitous accents on the second and fourth beats continue to speak in a subversive African voice. In a strange way that never could have been imagined or consciously maneuvered, African people have managed to “colonize” the world from within, via their extraordinary, life-affirming music and dance. Carol Lems-Dworkin See also: Africa, Precolonial; Calypso; Cuban Music, African Influence in; Cuban Ritual Music, African Influence in; Guinea Dance; Hip-Hop; Jazz and the Blues; Nigerian Traditional Dances References Bebey, Francis. African Music: A People’s Art, translated from French by Josephine Bennett. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1975. Joffe, David. http://africanlanguages.com/ (accessed June 30, 2005). Jones, A. M. Studies in African Music. 2 vols. 1959. Reprint, London: Oxford, 1971. Lems-Dworkin, Carol. Africa in Scott Joplin’s Music. Evanston, IL: Carol Lems-Dworkin, 1991. Lems-Dworkin, Carol. African Music: A PanAfrican Annotated Bibliography. Evanston, IL: Carol Lems-Dworkin, 1991. Nketia, J. H. Kwabena. The Music of Africa. New York: Norton, 1974. Roberts, John Storm. Black Music of Two Worlds. New York: Original Music, 1982. Waterman, Richard Alan A. “African Influence on the Music of the Americas.” In International Congress of Africanists, 29th,

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New York, 1949. Acculturation in the Americas: Proceedings and Selected Papers, edited by Sol Tax. 1952. Reprint, New York: Cooper Square, 1967.

MUSIC, AFRICAN POPULAR Contemporary African popular music has many elements contributing to its evolution and development, the most significant being the rich eclectic cultural diversity of the continent’s inhabitants and the influence of foreign cultures. American music styles such as rumba, jazz, blues, funk, reggae, soul, and rock have been the most influential. Just as Africa impacted the music of the New World in the aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade, the Americas have reciprocated by strongly influencing the music of Africa. Music styles, musical thought, and musical technology from North America, Brazil, and the Caribbean have had a great impact on African popular music. This impact is due, in strong part, to the ways in which Africans can easily relate to the historical experience of blacks throughout the Americas. Furthermore, African musicians often see in the aesthetics of their American counterparts outstanding models to emulate. Popular music is an expressive practice and performance in African daily life. This reservoir of African cultural values is a portrait of local realities, the motor of society, and the soul of the people. Apart from entertainment and identity formation, popular music has become a tool against socioeconomic and political injustices in contemporary African societies. It portrays social problems and offers possible solutions through lyrics that focus on such issues as politics, economy, health, literacy, working conditions, nutrition, urbanization, and agriculture. Most importantly, popular

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music expresses people’s hope and desire for change. While most musicians use local themes and rhythms, improved communication and transportation have led to influences across continents and cultures. The product of this process in Africa is a popular music that combines local and foreign rhythms and instruments, which has led to renewed creativity and a wider audience, while retaining an African flavor. African musicians, aware that their music draws strength from syncretism and enticed by the prospect of international sales, are very receptive to foreign rhythms, particularly American styles. There has been a fusion of African local music styles and American music traditions such as rumba, jazz, gospel, funk, reggae, and rock. These American influences have been enhanced by electronic media such as radio, television, the Internet, and satellite broadcasts. Many factors contribute to American influences on popular music in Africa. Most notable are the long-standing transatlantic connections that have kept Africans in the Diaspora connected. Black influence from the Americas started with the policy of returning freed slaves from the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean to Africa in the early nineteenth century. These returnees brought with them dance music styles originally from Africa but adapted to the New World, and then fed back into the mainstream of African music. African American and Caribbean sailors who visited African ports—Monrovia, Freetown, Cape Coast, Accra, Lagos, and Cape Town, in the mid-nineteenth century introduced calypso, meringue, ragtime, and minstrelsy to the continent. Caribbean regimental bands stationed in West African forts, American warships refueling along www.abc-clio.com

African coasts during the American Civil War in 1862, and the influx of American troops during World War II complemented this early American influence. In most cases, there was a small contingent of African Americans on board who served as cleaners and stewards and also provided musical entertainment for the crew. In addition, as African native churches began to separate from those of the white missionaries and take on an independent existence, special styles of music were developed. One source for these was the American Negro spiritual which became an inspiration for Africans early in the twentieth century. With increasing urbanization, new music styles that combined African and American elements emerged in Accra (Ghana), Lagos (Nigeria), Nairobi (Kenya), Dar-es-Salam (Tanzania), Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), and the black townships of South Africa. These were cities that provided leadership during the 1950s and 1960s and brought about social, economic, and political change in Africa. These new forms include West African highlife, which had Caribbean traits, Congolese popular music, which reflected Latin American influences, and Southern African sabasaba and kwela, both of which drew on American swing and jive music. In the 1970s and 1980s, many African artists and musicians migrated to Europe and the Americas to pursue professional careers. Many traveled to the United States to study at various institutions, including the Manhattan School of Music in New York. In the process, they were influenced by American sounds and new recording technologies that had emerged rapidly since the 1950s. These artists subsequently reinvented African music.

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Similarly, visits and tours by African American artists, such as jazz musician Louis Armstrong in 1956 and 1962, jazz saxophonist Paul Winter, trombonist Trummy Young, and clarinetist Edmund Hall, among others, were a source of inspiration. Those visits afforded African musicians firsthand experience with American artists. In the postwar years, highlife and calypso transformed the musical scene in English-speaking Africa. In the 1970s, American soul and rock music spread in West Africa where it was adapted to local realities to produce highlife. Highlife music is the Ghanaian and Nigerian ballroom music. Its instrumentation consists of Western instruments, such as saxophones, trumpets, trombones, flutes, and electric guitars, combined with a rhythmic ensemble of African drums, bells, xylophones, mbiras (thumb-pianos), flutes, and sometimes rattles, which back up the melody instruments. In order to produce rhythms that fit more easily into a Western musical scheme, many highlife bands have come to use Latin American rhythms. Among the early pioneers of Ghanaian concert parties and highlife are King Bruce and his Black Beat, E. T. Mensah and his Ramblers dance band, Roy Chicago, Ashanti Brothers, Nana Ampadu, City Boys, and Hi-Life International. Trumpeter Victor Olaiya and guitarist Bobby Benson led highlife music in Nigeria in the 1960s. Besides bringing calypso to West Africa, in 1948 Benson also formed a band called Bobby Benson Jam Session Orchestra, which played pop, swing, ragtime, jazz, and later highlife music. Other influential Nigerian highlife bands include Rex Lawson’s Mayors Dance Band, Osita Osadere’s Soundmakers International, Oriental Brothers International www.abc-clio.com

Band, Orlando Owoh’s Omimah Band, Oliver de Coque’s Expo ’76 Ogene Super Sounds. Ebenezer Obey modernized juju, the African equivalent of American folkrock, derived from the samba and introduced to Nigeria by the descendants of freed Brazilian slaves, by drawing on highlife. “King” Sunny Ade, a key figure in juju music, emphasized the techniques of Jamaican dub and sonic details. Indicating their American connections, highlife bands often take their names from American models; for example, the Ramblers, the Comets, the Stargazers of Kumasi, the Black Beats, the Modern King Stars, and the Ambassador Springboks. Many use the big-band styles of jazz and Western pop that were prominent in the 1940s. Highlife was later influenced by American jazz, rock, reggae, and hip-hop. It absorbed many elements of jazz, especially in ordinary orchestras of wind and string instruments. It also had many aspects of Afro-calypso and reggae taken from guitar and Caribbean inspiration. The introduction of soul and reggae in the late 1960s and 1970s ushered in a very creative era in African popular music, bringing about Afro-rock, Afro-reggae, and Afro-hip-hop. The black American soul message “Black and Proud” was taken up by a generation of Africans listening to American soul music, spirituals, and jazz. Soul stimulated a new crop of creative musicians, including Nigerian Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Ghanaian Osibisa, and Cameroonian Manu Dibango. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was deeply impressed by American artists, which led him to use jazz as a steppingstone to African music, and subsequently used African music to play jazz. In 1968, he coined a new style of music, Afro-beat, by combining James Brown’s funk music,

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highlife, and jazz with Nigerian beat. The Black Power Movement influenced him during a ten-month promotion tour in the United States. His intricate music, which might be called Afro-jazz, blends African rhythms and jazz horn lines with sociopolitical lyrics that defend the rights of the common people. Manu Dibango, Africa’s best-known jazz saxophonist and heir to jazz and rhythm and blues, became famous as a result of his legendary jazzy sound Soul Makossa (1972). This album was followed by African Soul, a mixture of jazz, rumba, and Latino rhythm. He fused African rhythms and melodies with reggae, notably on Gone Clear (1979) with American artists Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar, and funk on Waka Juju (1982). Dibango also popularized makossa, which combines Western and African instruments and confronts sociopolitical issues. In 1983, he recorded Electric Africa, an extraordinary mixture of jazz, rap, and traditional music, with help from jazz musicians Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrel, and Herbie Hancock. Rumba, originating from Latin America, surfaced in the Congo Basin area in the 1940s and 1950s. Its spread was made possible by the prevailing cosmopolitanism and a relatively booming economy. It was immediately embraced to enrich the existing musical heritage with numerous variations ranging from rumba-sukumu at the beginning of World War II to rumba-kara, rumbaboucher, rumba-sukusu, and rumba kiri-kiri or soukous, which is one the most popular music and dance styles today in Africa. A decade later, the region was invaded by American rock and Cuban salsa. The Cuban rumba fused with African rhythms to produce the first distinct syncretic dance style in Francophone Africa, Congo music. www.abc-clio.com

Congo music later went electric and incorporated a brass front line, creating the popular Congo jazz style. The most prominent Congo jazz groups are Joseph “Grand Kalle” Kabasselleh’s African Jazz, Jean Serge Essous’s O.K.Jazz, Orchestre Bella Bella, and “Franco’s” (François Luambo Makiadi) T.P.O.K.Jazz. In addition, Tabu Ley Rochereau’s African Fiesta played Latin rhythms on the drums of rock music and Papa Wemba’s Viva La Musica was inspired by Puerto Rican star Ray Barreto Otis Redding’s sweet soul. As rumba penetrated some places, ragtime was shifting into Dixieland jazz in other areas. Many local Dixie bands were formed in South Africa, like the Dark Town Strutters and the Big Four of Johannesburg. Ragtime became part of the black urban marabi music of the 1920s and 1930s. In the black urban centers where different tribes met with former slaves from the Americas, the marabi dance style evolved. It was originally a humble form of music, but it became similar to the jazz music played by swing bands in the United States when the relatively wealthy and free blacks of Sophiatown adopted it. Much of South African music of the 1950s was born at the crossroads of American jazz, African American choral styles, and African folk music. For example, vocalist Miriam Makeba and her husband trumpeter Hugh Masekela recorded in a pop-jazz style. Meringue became the national music of Sierra Leone, where it is called maringa. In Ghana, Dixieland became part of the repertoire of 1920s bands such as the Jazz Kings of Accra. In the 1960s another imported dance style became popular in Africa: the popular music explosion among urban youth ignited by rock and roll and the twist, both originating from black Americans. The decade

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witnessed the formation of many African popular bands, such as the Avengers of Ghana, the Heartbeats of Sierra Leone, and the Cyclops of Nigeria, with their own unique styles. In 1979, an American production outfit invited Congolese musicologist Ray Lema to work in the United States, where he learned studio sound-recording technique. In 1983, Lema released KinshasaWashington DC–Paris, an album that sums up his career and reflects a mixture of influences: rumba, rock, funk, reggae, jazz, tradition, and modernity. Zouk, invented by the group Kassav, fused Caribbean musical influences with funk and rock to produce an unusual, rhythmic cocktail, and brought it to Africa. The group’s first tour of a dozen African countries was a huge success, and many African artists sought to emulate the band. There were numerous guest performers on Apollo 95 (400 percent Zoblazo) by Ivorian Frederic Desire Ehui (Meiway), including Jacob Desvarieux of Kassav from Martinique. Ehui’s Extratrerrestre features Cuban musicians playing the brass and cord section, spiced with Latino touches. This development was no doubt a reflection of the growing recognition for Caribbean culture. Many African artists have undertaken pilgrimages to Jamaica, home of many excellent recording studios. For example, Côte d’Ivoire’s Alpha Blondy, known as an African Rasta who creates Jah-centered anthems, made a pilgrimage in 1983 to Tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, where he recorded the Jerusalem album with the Wailers. He became the first African star of reggae with Jah Glory (1983). Ivorian Tiken Jah Fakoly, who has established himself as one of the leading artists of the new reggae scene in Côte d’Ivoire, had a series of concerts in 1999 in New York and Philadelphia www.abc-clio.com

with a Jamaican backing band. Tiken’s Cours d’Histoire and Françafrique (2000) were mixed in the legendary Tuff Gong studios in Jamaica and fused reggae beat with hardhitting lyrics. African music experienced a boom in the 1980s as it absorbed elements of rock and pop music. This absorption led to experimentation with various aesthetic innovations in which musicians took advantage of Western studio techniques while remaining faithful to their African roots by performing traditional instruments. Malian musicians Toumani Diabate and Ali Farka Toure played African versions of the blues, while Issa Bagayogo updated the traditions of Mali to the age of electronic dance music in the 1990s. Ethiopian Aster Aweke adapted her extraordinary voice to a repertoire of soul-jazz-rock. Salif Keïta’s repertoire includes Afro-Cuban numbers, Mandingo blues-rock fusion as well as songs with jazz orientation salsa and zouk. Senegalese Youssou N’Dour founded mbalax (Cuban music performed with Western aesthetics and supplemented with African polyrhythms) as a major form of dance music, just as Senegal’s Orchestra Baobab successfully mixed Cuban music and African music on Pirate’s Choice (1982). Benin’s Angélique Kidjo does a mixture of Afro-punk, reggae, samba, salsa, jazz, rumba, zouk, and makossa. Sudanese singer-songwriter Rasha invented a mishmash of jazz, pop, reggae, and American dance music in Sudaniyat (1997). Moroccan Maleem Mahmoud Ghania collaborated with jazz giant Pharoah Sanders on Trance of Seven Colors (1994), while Hassan Hakmoun created fusion tracks of trancey gnawa, rock, and American dance music on Trance (1993). Benin’s Gangbé Brass Band explores the rich Voodoo culture and ancient

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songs of their country, which are combined with jazz melodies to produce a powerful contemporary sound. Hip-hop, too, has had a tremendous influence on African popular music. This urban American form has been absorbed and transformed by African youth, and led to the birth of an African rap. Notably, few African artists adopt the sexist language and violent imagery favored by some American rappers. The end result is a sound that is distinctly hip-hop with an African flavor. Original hip-hop has emerged in Nigeria, South Africa, Cameroon, Senegal, Tanzania, Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, Angola, Congo, and Mali. Hip-hop groups often rhyme in Wolof, Malinke, Dioula, Baoule, French, English, Fon and Yoruba, and Jamaican patois; they sing in both R&B and jail styles, which are fused with the tones of the kora and ngoni harp-lutes and balafon xylophone. Senegal’s Positive Black Soul updated a classic Orchestre Baobab rumba with skittering beats, reggae-inflected flows, and spicy Manding-style guitar sound on Boul Ma Mine. Similarly, South African rappers have a style known as kwaito: a thumping hybrid that draws from hiphop, house music, and dance hall reggae, alongside a mixture of local traditions, including Zulu praise poetry. They rap in a Soweto-bred form of slang called tsotsi taal, which draws from Zulu, Afrikaans, English, and other languages. Many rap groups have emerged, including 1549, Parlement, Supreme Posse, M.A.M., Negromuffin, and R.A.S. Many artists note that they are influenced by the music of Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, MC Solaar, Youssou N’Dour, and Alpha Blondy. Starting at the end of the 1990s, a modern dazzling rap based on the multitude of Benin’s traditional rhythms and melodies www.abc-clio.com

was created. Benin’s most popular rappers, Sakpata Boys, have incorporated chants, dances, and practices of the Voodoo religion into their performance. H2O Assouka’s production is a combination of local instruments and rhythms, interwoven with smooth rap. Ardiess started out in 1997 as a purely modern rap group, basing their music on American rap heard on the radio and seen on television, but it later added some traditional instruments, rhythms, and melodies. Many groups have adopted American names: DaBrains in Senegal; Da Fugitivz in Gambia; Big Daddy Kane, K-Solo, Biz Markie, Gangstarr, Alasko Deejay, and Ras Goody Brown Côte d’Ivoire, and Big Melody, Dave II, Fuzajay, Magic, L’archange, Melcky, S II B, R. Man, and Surah in Benin. In 1999, confirming hip-hop’s transatlantic and disaporic nature, the Pan African Hip-Hop Festival was held in Cotonou, Benin, and these connections and collaborations continue to 2007. Philip A. Ojo References Barber, Karin, ed. Readings in African Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Collins, Edmund John. “Jazz Feedback to Africa.” American Music 5, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 176–193. Kerr, David. “Theatre and Social Issues in Malawi: Performers, Audiences, Aesthetics.” In The Performance Arts in Africa: A Reader, edited by Frances Harding. London: Routledge, 2002. Nettl, Bruno. “The Western Impact on World Music: Africa and the American Indians.” In Contemporary Music and Music Cultures, edited by Charles Hamm, Bruno Nettl, and Ronald Byrnside. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Ojo, Philip. “Social Criticism in the Lyrics of Alpha Blondy’s Elohim.” Unpublished paper. Spring 2006.

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796 MUTABARUKA Tenaille, Frank. Music Is the Weapon of the Future: Fifty Years of African Popular Music, translated by Stephen Toussaint and Hope Sandrine. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002. Young, Richard A. Music, Popular Culture, Identities. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

MUTABARUKA (1952–) Mutabaruka (Rwandan for “one who is always victorious”) is one of the “new wave” of poets that emerged during the Jamaican social turmoil of the early 1970s. Born Allan Hope in Kingston, Jamaica, he changed his name in his twenties to reflect his affiliation as a Rastafarian and to cast off the shackles of his Anglophone name. Mutabaruka’s poetry was first published by Swing magazine in 1971. His thoughts about Black Power and the Back to Africa movement are paramount themes in his early poetry, and uplifting messages to the African Diaspora pervade his poetry and music to this day. He has published numerous reggae CDs and poetry books, and he has a successful radio show in Jamaica where he reasons with his audience about wide-ranging cultural concerns. His early poetry is infused with popular culture and social concerns. “Nursery Rhyme Lament” (1973) is a humorous revision of traditional Western children’s tales—such

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as Jack and Jill and Humpty Dumpty— that appeals to the Jamaican community’s social concerns. “dis poem” (1992) is one of Mutabaruka’s crowd pleasers that asserts a complex Jamaican identity that refuses the audience’s attempts to simplify it. The poem further slyly infuses the audience into the poem. To read the poem, or to hear it performed, is to be a willing participant in its themes, thoughts, and accusations. The success of “dis poem” is indicated further by its inclusion in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (1996). Mutabaruka has traveled the world performing his poetry, usually in full Jamaican folk regalia. He performed “dis poem” on stage in New York City for the “Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry” show, which aired on HBO in 2003. In early 2005, he republished First Poems as a dual collection with Next Poems. David W. Hart

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See also: Black Power Movement; Caribbean Literature; Jamaica; Johnson, Linton Kwesi; Morris, Mervyn; Reggae; Smith, Mikey References Mutabaruka. Mutabaruka: First Poems. Kingston, Jamaica: Paul Issa Publications, 1980. Mutabaruka. “dis poem.” In The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, edited by Alison Donnell and Sara Lawson Welsh. London: Routledge, 1996. “Mutabaruka.” www.mutabaruka.com (accessed May 9, 2005).

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Britain and the Americas, by Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson France and the Americas, by Bill Marshall, assisted by Cristina Johnston Germany and the Americas, by Thomas Adam Iberia and the Americas, by J. Michael Francis Ireland and the Americas, by James P. Byrne, Philip Coleman, and Jason King

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Africa and the Americas Culture, Politics, and History A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia VOLUME III EDITED BY

Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette Melissa Fullmer Editorial Assistant

Transatlantic Relations Series Will Kaufman, Series Editor

Santa Barbara, California Denver, Colorado Oxford, England

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Copyright © 2008 by ABC-CLIO, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Africa and the Americas : culture, politics, and history : a multidisciplinary encyclopedia / edited by Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette. p. cm. — (Translatlantic relations series) 3 v. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-85109-441-7 (hard copy : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-85109-446-2 (ebook : alk. paper) 1. America—Relations— Africa—Encyclopedias. 2. Africa—Relations—America—Encyclopedias. DT31.A43 2008 303.48'2706—dc22 2007035154 12

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CONTENTS Series Editor’s Preface, xiii Editor’s Preface, xv Topic Finder, xxi Chronology of Africa and the Americas, xxix Introductory Essays, 1 Demography, Diaspora, and International Relations, 3 Culture and Religion, 11 Economics and Trade, 19 Arts, Literature, and Sport, 29 American Revolution, 96 Amistad Case, The, 99 Ananse, 100 Ancestor Worship, 102 Angola, 104 Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela, 106 Annan, Kofi, 107 Anthropology, 108 Antigua and Barbuda, 111 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 112 Apprenticeship (British Empire), 113 Architecture, 116 Architecture, Plantation, 118 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 122 Arms Trafficking, 124 Art, African, 126 Atlantic World, 132 Attucks, Crispus, 137 Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de, 137 Aviation, 139

Abolitionism, 39 Abolitionism, British, 43 Achebe, Chinua, 46 Africa, North, 48 Africa, Precolonial, 50 Africa, West, 57 African Institution, The, 64 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 65 African Squadrons, 68 African Union, 69 Afrocentrism, 71 Afrofuturism, 72 Agriculture, 73 Agriculture, Sustainable, 77 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 79 Akan, 81 Akram, Wali, 82 Algeria, 82 ‘Ali Pasha, Muhammad, 83 Ali, Muhammad, 84 Ali, Noble Drew, 86 America, Central, 87 American Colonization Society, 93 American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, 95 American Missionary Association, 96

Bahamas, 141 Bakhita, Josephine, Saint, 144 Baraka, Amiri, 146 Barbados, 149 v

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vi CONTENTS Barnet, Miguel, 150 Barotseland, 151 Bauzá, Mario, 152 BBC Caribbean Service and Caribbean Voices, 153 Benin, Republic of, 155 Bennett, Louise, 157 Berlin West Africa Conference, 157 Bermuda, 159 Beyala, Calixthe, 160 Biafra, 161 Biotechnology, 162 Birchtown (Birch Town), 165 Black Arts Movement, 165 Black Athena, 167 Black Classical Singers, 169 Black Panther Party, 171 Black Power Movement, 175 Black Star Line, 177 Blucke or Bleucke or Bluck, Stephen, 177 Blyden, Edward Wilmot, 179 Boatbuilding, 181 Bolivia, 182 Brand, Dionne, 185 Brathwaite, Kamau, 186 Brazil, 188 Brazilian Carnival, 191 Brazilian Culture, 193 Brindis de Salas, Virginia, 195 Britain: People of African Origin and Descent, 196 British Empire, 200 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 205 Brouwer, Leo, 206 Brown, William, 207 Brussels Act, 208 Bunche, Ralph, 209 Burial Ground (New York City), African, 210 Burial, African Practices in the Americas, 211 Burkina Faso, 214 Burundi, 216 Cabral, Amilcar, 219 Cabral, Cristina Rodríguez, 220 Calabar, 221 Calypso, 223 Cameroon, 225 Canada (Africadian Culture), 228 Candomblé, 231 Cape Coast Castle, 231 www.abc-clio.com

Cape Verde, 233 Caribbean Artists Movement, 234 Caribbean Community and Common Market, 235 Caribbean Literature, 237 Carnival, Latin American, 241 Carver, George Washington, 242 Casas, Bartolomé De Las, 243 Castas Paintings, 244 Castro Ruz, Fidel, 246 Catholicism, 249 Ceddo, 251 Central African Republic, 251 Central Intelligence Agency, 253 Césaire, Aimé, 255 Chad, 257 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 258 Chikaba (Venerable Therese Juliana of Saint Dominic), 259 Chile, 261 Christianity (African American), 262 Christophe, Henri, 263 Cities, 264 Civil Rights Movement, 267 Civil War, American, 272 Clemente Walker, Roberto, 274 Cliff, Michelle, 276 Code Noir, 277 Coetzee, John Maxwell, 279 Coffee, 282 Cold War, 282 Colombia, 286 Colonial Armies in Africa, 290 Colonialism, 293 Colored Farmers National Alliance, 300 Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 300 Columbian Exchange, 301 Columbus, Christopher, 303 Comoros, 304 Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, 305 Condé, Maryse, 306 Congo (Brazzaville), 308 Congo (Kinshasa), Democratic Republic of the, 309 Congolese Independence, 312 Côte d’Ivoire, 313 Creole Revolt, 314 Creole/Criollo, 315 Crisis, The, 316 Cruz, Celia, 317

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CONTENTS Cuba, 318 Cuban Music, African Influence in, 321 Cuban Ritual Music, African Influence in, 325 Cudjoe, 328 Cuffe, Captain Paul, 329 Cush Kingdom, 330 Dabydeen, David, 331 Dadié, Bernard Binlin, 332 D’Aguiar, Fred, 333 Dan Fodio, Uthman, 334 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 335 Danish Empire, 336 Danticat, Edwidge, 338 Dash, Julie, 340 Debt Cancellation, 340 Decolonization, African, 343 Delany, Martin Robinson, 345 Democracy, African, 347 Democracy, Latin American, 351 Denver African Expedition, 356 Dessalines, Jean Jacques, 357 Diamonds, 358 Diaspora, 360 Diaspora, Demography of, 362 Dinka, 366 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 366 Djebar, Assia, 368 Djibouti, 370 Doe, Samuel K., 371 Dominican Republic, The, 372 Dongala, Emmanuel Boundzeki, 375 Douglass, Frederick, 376 Drama, African American, 378 Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), 381 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 382 Dutch Empire, 385 Dutty, Boukman, 390 Duvalier, François, 391 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 393 EBONY, 395 Ecology, 397 Economic Community of West African States, 400 Ecuador, 401 Efik, 403 Egypt, 404 Egypt, American Mercenaries in, 409 Egyptian Soldiers in Mexico, 410 www.abc-clio.com

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Ekwensi, Cyprian Odiatu Duaka, 411 Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 412 Emancipation Proclamation, 413 Emecheta, Buchi, 414 English, African American Vernacular, 415 Enlightenment Philosophy, 416 Environmentalism, 419 Equatorial Guinea, 421 Equiano, Olaudah, 423 Eritrea, 424 Ethiopia, 427 Ethnicity, 430 Evolution, Human, 434 Exodus, 436 Exploration and Explorers, Africa, 439 Falasha (Beta Israel), 443 Fanon, Frantz, 444 Farrakhan, Louis, 446 Fauset, Jessie, 447 Fédeon Rebellion, 448 Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, African, 449 Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic, 453 Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, U.S., 457 Fetu of Cape Coast, 465 Film (Africa), 466 Film (Atlantic), 468 Film (Caribbean), 470 Film (Latin America), 472 Film (North America), 475 Film (South America), 477 Five Percent Nation, 479 Flying Africans, 479 Folklore, African, 482 French Empire, 485 Fugitive Slave Law, 490 Fulani, 492 Gabon, Republic of, 493 Gabriel, 495 Gambia, The, 497 Garvey, Amy Jacques, 499 Garvey, Marcus, 500 Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 502 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Movements, Africa and African Diasporic, 503

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viii CONTENTS Genocide, 510 Georgia’s Sea Islands, 515 Ghana, 516 Ghana Empire, 522 Gilroy, Beryl Agatha, 523 Glissant, Edouard, 525 Globalization, 526 Good Neighbor Policy, 528 Goyemide, Etienne, 529 Green Revolution, 530 Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw, 532 Guillén, Nicolás, 532 Guinea, 533 Guinea Dance, 535 Guinea-Bissau, 540 Gullah, 542 Guyana, 543

Jamaica, Women’s Role in, 641 James, Cyril Lionel Robert, 645 Jazz and the Blues, 646 Jazz, African, 651 Johnson, Charles R., 652 Johnson, James Weldon, 653 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 655 Jones, Claudia, 657 Journal of Negro History, 658 Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sor, 659 Judaism, 660 Juneteenth, 663 Kanem-Bornu Empire, 665 Kaunda, Kenneth, 665 Kente Cloth, 666 Kenya, 667 Khoisan, 668 Kincaid, Jamaica, 669 King Jr., Martin Luther, 671 Kongo, 673 Kru Sailors, 674

Hair, 545 Haiti, 546 Haley, Alex, 548 Hansberry, Lorraine, 549 Harlem Renaissance, 552 Hausa (People), 554 Head, Bessie, 555 Health, Public, 556 Hip-Hop, 563 Hip-Hop, Cuban, 567 Hip-Hop, Women in, 568 Hughes, Langston, 572 Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Prevention, 573 Human Rights, 582 Humanitarian Assistance, 588 Hurston, Zora Neale, 593 Hutu, 595 Igbo, 597 Ike, Vincent Chukwuemeka, 598 Imbuga, Francis D., 599 Immigration, United States, 601 Imperial Germany, Black Entertainers in, 610 Industrialization, 613 Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, 618 International Development, 624 International Monetary Fund, 625 Ironworking, 627 Islam, African American, 628 Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 637 Jamaica, 638 www.abc-clio.com

Laing, Kojo, 677 Latin American Literature, 678 League of Coloured Peoples, 682 League of Nations, 683 Lesotho, 685 Lewis, Mary Edmonia, 686 Liberation Theology, 687 Liberia, 692 Libya, 695 Literature, African, 695 Literature, African American, 698 Locke, Alain LeRoy, 703 Long Island: African Americans and Native Peoples, 704 Lopes, Henri, 706 Lorde, Audre, 708 Lost Boys of Sudan, 709 Louverture, Toussaint Bréda, 710 Lumumba, Patrice, 713 Mad Mullah, 717 Madagascar, 717 Madhi, 719 Malawi, 719 Malcolm X, 721 Male Revolt, 723 Mali, 724 Mandela, Nelson, 726

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CONTENTS Manzano, Juan Francisco, 727 Marley, Robert Nesta, 729 Marrant, John, 731 Marshall, Paule, 732 Marson, Una, 735 Martí, José, 736 Masai, 737 Mauritania, 739 Mauritius, 740 Mays, Willie Howard, 741 McKay, Claude, 743 Médecins Sans Frontières, 745 Mercantilism, 746 MERCOSUR, 748 Mexico, 750 Mexico (Afro-Mexican Identity), 753 Microfinance, 755 Middle Passage, 758 Military Forces, 760 Miller, Samuel T., 763 Mohammad, Warith Deen, 764 Monroe Doctrine, 765 Montaigne, Michel de, 767 Monuments and Memorials, Slavery, 769 Moody, Harold, 770 Morant Bay Rebellion, 771 Morejón, Nancy, 773 Morocco, 774 Morris, Mervyn, 776 Morrison, Toni, 777 Movimento Negro Unificado, 779 Mozambique, 780 Mullen, Harryette, 782 Museums and Transatlantic Slavery, 783 Music, African, 786 Music, African Popular, 790 Mutabaruka, 796 N’Krumah, Kwame, 797 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad, 798 Namibia, 799 Nanny, 802 Nation of Islam, 803 Ndebele, 807 Négritude, 809 Negro Leagues, 811 Neocolonialism, 813 Netherlands Antilles, 815 Niagara Movement, 818 Nicaragua, 818 Niger, 822 www.abc-clio.com

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Nigeria, 822 Nigeria, Drama in, 826 Nigerian Traditional Dances, 828 Noirisme, 830 Non-Aligned Movement, 832 Notting Hill Carnival in London, 834 Nova Scotia, African American Diaspora in, 836 Nova Scotia, Black Refugees in, 837 Nwapa, Flora, 838 Obeah, 841 O’Farrill, Arturo “Chico”, 842 Ogun, 843 Oil, 844 Okigbo, Christopher, 845 Okri, Ben, 847 Organization of American States, 848 Orisha, 850 Oroonoko, 852 Ousmane, Sembene, 852 Pageant, The African American, 855 Paige, Leroy Robert, 858 Palm Oil, 859 Pan-African Conference, 861 Pan-Africanism, 862 Paraguay, 865 Peace Corps, 868 Peacekeeping and Military Interventions, 870 Pentecostalism, 875 Péralte, Charlemagne Masséna, 877 Peru, 879 Pétion, Alexandre Sabès, 881 Philip, Marlene Nourbese, 882 Phillips, Caryl, 883 Plantations and Plantation Systems, 884 Popular Music, American Influences on African, 887 Portuguese Empire, 894 Postcolonial Studies, 895 Pre-Columbian America, 898 Price-Mars, Jean, 902 Prince, Mary, 904 Puerto Rico, 906 Qaddafi, Muammar al-, 909 Quakers, 910 Quaque, Philip, 912 Quilombo, 913 ABC-CLIO

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x CONTENTS Race, History of, 915 Radio Martí, 918 Rastafari, 918 Reggae, 921 Reggae, African, 922 Religion (Africa), 924 Religion in Africa and the Americas, Demography of, 929 Reparations (Slavery and Colonialism), 932 Reproductive Health and Family Planning in Africa, U.S. Influence on, 938 Restavek, 946 Rice in the African Diaspora, 947 Robinson, Jack Roosevelt, 952 Rosas de Oquendo, Mateo, 954 Royal African Company, 955 Rwanda, 956

Socialism, 1011 Sokoto Caliphate, 1015 Somalia, 1016 Songhay (Medieval Empire), 1017 Soukous, 1020 Soulouque, Faustin, 1021 South Africa, History and Politics, 1023 Soyinka, Wole, 1026 Spanish Empire, 1027 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1032 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1033 Sudan (Darfur Region), 1034 Sundiata, 1036 Sundiata Keita and Sundiata Epic, 1037 Suriname, 1038 Swaziland, 1039

Sadat, Muhammad Anwar el-, 959 Sailors, 961 Saint Kitts and Nevis, 963 Saint Kitts and Nevis Revolt, 966 Sambo’s Grave, 967 Sanchez, Sonia, 968 Santos Arrascaeta, Beatriz, 968 São Tomé e Príncipe, 970 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 971 Schomburg, Arthur Alfonso, 972 Selassie I, Haile, 973 Selvon, Samuel Dickson, 974 Senegal, 975 Senghor, Leopold Sedar, 979 Seychelles, 980 Shabazz, Betty, 981 Shakur, Assatta, 983 Shakur, Tupac Amaru, 983 Shange, Ntozake, 984 Sharpeville Massacre, 987 Sierra Leone, 988 Sierra Leone Company, 990 Sisulu, Walter, 991 Slave Forts, 992 Slave Narratives, 994 Slave Revolts/Maronnage, 997 Slavery (Economics), 1000 Slavery (History), 1004 Smalls, Robert, 1007 Smith, Mikey, 1008 Smithsonian African Art Museum, 1009 Soccer, 1010

Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 1041 Tanzania, 1042 Taylor, Charles, 1043 Tchicaya U Tam’si, 1044 Technology Transfers, 1046 Television in Africa, American Influence on, 1049 Terrorism, 1052 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 1058 Titanic, 1059 Togo, 1060 Toomer, Jean, 1061 Trade, Fair, 1062 Trade Zones, African, 1065 Transculturation, 1066 Travel Writing, 1068 Trinidad and Tobago, 1070 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, 1072 Truth, Sojourner, 1075 Tubman, Harriet, 1076 Tunisia, 1077 Turner, Nat, 1078 Tuskegee Airmen, 1079 Tuskegee Institute, 1080 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, 1080 Tutsi, 1081 Tutu, Desmond, 1082

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CONTENTS United States Colored Troops, 1094 Universal Negro Improvement Association, The, 1095 Uruguay, 1096 Urbanization, 1100 United States Agency for International Development, 1105 Vesey, Denmark, 1107 Voice of America, 1109 Voodoo, 1109 Walcott, Derek, 1113 Walker, Alice, 1114 Warner-Vieyra, Myriam, 1114 Washington, Booker T., 1115 Wedderburn, Robert, 1117 Weimar Republic, Black Entertainers in the, 1118 West Indies Federation, 1121 West, Cornel, 1123

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Wheatley, Phillis, 1124 Wideman, John Edgar, 1126 Wilberforce, William, 1127 Williams, Francis, 1129 Williams, Henry Sylvester, 1130 Williams, James, 1132 Williams, John A., 1134 Wolof, 1136 World Antislavery Conventions, 1840, 1843, 1137 World Bank, 1139 World Health Organization, 1141 World Trade Organization, 1142 World War I, 1143 World War II, 1146 Wright, Richard, 1150 Yoruba, 1155 Zambia, 1157 Zimbabwe, 1158

Index, 1163 About the Editors, 1215

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N N’KRUMAH, KWAME (1909–1972) Dynamic and charismatic, N’Krumah led the Gold Coast colony to independence, became the first president of Ghana, and fostered the Pan-African movement. Born Francis Nwiakofie Nkrumah and educated in Catholic mission schools, he trained as a teacher near Accra. He spent 1935 to 1945 in the United States continuing his education at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania. He studied economics, sociology, and philosophy. It was in the United States where N’Krumah was introduced to the writings of Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. N’Krumah traveled to Britain in 1945 to pursue doctoral studies in philosophy and law, became a political activist in the African student movement, and took the name Kwame. N’Krumah returned to the Gold Coast colony in 1947 and was appointed secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention. However, he felt the group’s leadership was not moving quickly enough to dismantle colonial control of the colony. Considered a radical nationalist, N’Krumah had already begun developing an African form of socialism, which drew heavily on precolonial traditional communal values. In 1949

N’Krumah established the Convention People’s Party (CPP), the first real popular political party in Africa, to push for independence. Under N’Krumah’s leadership, the CPP organized a general strike and boycott to pressure colonial authorities in the Gold Coast colony. As a result, N’Krumah was jailed for sedition. N’Krumah continued to be a popular political figure, though, and in 1951 he and the CPP won the first Gold Coast general election. In March 1957 the Gold Coast colony was granted independence and became Ghana. Under N’Krumah’s leadership Ghana became the inspiration for independence movements across the continent. N’Krumah dedicated himself to African independence from all forms of foreign domination and was fundamental in the establishment of the Pan-African movement. As president, N’Krumah ultimately implemented an authoritarian oneparty state and his own personality cult. Economic pressures and political discontent resulted in his overthrow by a policearmy coup d’état in 1966. N’Krumah went into exile and died of cancer in 1972. Despite the ignominious end of his presidential career, N’Krumah is remembered as a powerful symbolic figure in African

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decolonization and a passionate advocate for African unity who dedicated much of his life to Pan-Africanism. Heather Thiessen-Reily See also: Decolonization, African; Ghana; Pan-Africanism References Birmingham, David. Kwame N’Krumah: Father of African Nationalism. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1998. N’Krumah, Kwame. Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame N’Krumah. London: International Publishing, 1989. Obeng, Samuel. Selected Speeches of Kwame N’Krumah. Ghana: Afram Press, 1997.

NAIPAUL,VIDIADHAR SURAJPRASAD (1932–) Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is a Trinidadian-born novelist and travel writer who addresses African, Caribbean, and British themes in his works. He is a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Naipaul, of East Indian heritage, was born in Chaguamas, Trinidad, on August 17, 1932, to Seepersad Naipaul and Dropatie Capildeo. He left the Caribbean on an academic scholarship and obtained his B.A. from Oxford in 1953. While studying in England, Naipaul met fellow black West Indian writers, including George Lamming. They formed a part of the Caribbean migratory writers traveling overseas. Naipaul’s early texts, The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959), and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), take place in Trinidad and examine West Indian social and political issues. Many of these issues are influenced by the strong connection of the West Indies to Africa, such as the role of the matriarchal family and significance of community. After examining life in Trinidad, Naipaul broadened the geographical scope www.abc-clio.com

in his next texts. He uses his migration from Trinidad to England as the basis of the novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987). In addition, Naipaul examines the effects of colonialism and nationalism in what he considers the “third world societies” of Trinidad, British Guiana, Surinam, Jamaica, and Martinique in The Middle Passage (1962). Naipaul’s other travel writings explore the history of colonialism and postcolonialism in Indian society in An Area of Darkness (1964) and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) and the negative effects of religion in the Muslim countries of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia in Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998). Naipaul garnered the prestigious Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel, In a Free State (published that same year). Critics praised his depiction of postcolonial Africa’s fall to violence and chaos after the end of European control. Naipaul also illustrates Africa in his novel A Bend in the River (1979) and “Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro” in Finding the Center (1984). Both texts describe politics in Africa and draw from Naipaul’s observations of when he traveled to Africa. Naipaul’s other series of writings are mostly autobiographical. In A Turn in the South (1989), Naipaul retells his experience of traveling through the southern United States and notes the similarities of the American South to Trinidad. His memoir Reading and Writing (2000) details his process of becoming a writer in London and his father’s influence on his career choice. Naipaul’s relationship with his father is also expressed in Between Father and Son (2000). In 2001, Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for literature. Many critics hailed him as the top novelist from the Anglophone

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Caribbean and commended his range of texts, from fiction to travelogues. After receiving the Nobel Prize, Naipaul wrote the novel Half a Life (2001) and its sequel, Magic Seeds (2004). Like Naipaul, the novels’ main character travels to India, England, and Africa and notes the historic consequences of colonialism. Naipaul lives in England with his second wife, Nadira Khannum Alvi. Dorsía Smith See also: Caribbean Literature; Colonialism; Postcolonial Studies; Travel Writing References Hayward, Helen. The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Khan, Akhtar Jamal. V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Study. New Delhi, India: Creative Books, 1998. King, Bruce Alvin. V. S. Naipaul. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Kumar, Amitava. The Humour & the Pity: Essays on V.S. Naipaul. New Delhi: Buffalo Books, 2002.

NAMIBIA The republic of Namibia is a large country in southwestern Africa covering an area of 318,321 square miles (824,116 square kilometers). The country borders South Africa to the south, Botswana to the east, and Zambia and Angola to the north. To the west, arid land separates most of the mainland from a long Atlantic Ocean coastline of approximately 975 miles (1,570 kilometers). Its history as an independent nation is linked to global intervention and United Nations efforts to curb South African domination. With a population of approximately 1.83 million (2001 census), Namibia has one of the lowest population densities of any country in the world (2.1 persons per square kilometer). Although urban areas have been growing since www.abc-clio.com

independence, 67 percent of the population still lives in the rural areas, mostly in the north. Namibia has a large number of youth, with 40 percent of the population less than 15 years of age. Nonetheless, the population composition is changing significantly, with growth slowing as a result of lower fertility and life expectancy due to AIDS. Namibia became the official and internationally recognized name of the country only after achieving independence on March 21, 1990. Formerly known by its colonial name, South-West Africa, the current name was adopted by the liberation movement and dominant political party, the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), in the early 1960s and by the United Nations in 1968. Bordered by the Namib Desert to the west and the Kalahari Desert to the east, the landscape is for the most part flat and dry. Groundwater from aquifers provide muchneeded water in a country where high temperatures cause rainwater to evaporate fast. Over 50,000 boreholes have been drilled to supply water for field irrigation as well as livestock and human use throughout the country. The Okavango, the Zambezi, and the Kwando, the largest of Namibia’s perennial rivers, flow from Angola and Zambia, shaping distinctive landscapes in the northern regions. As a result of heavy rainfall in their catchment areas, seasonal flooding occurs in the Caprivi plains, where many people grow crops. Farther west, in the country’s most densely populated north-central regions, heavy rains allow for agriculture, fishing, and cattle to thrive in the Cuvelai areas. This drainage system consisting of shallow reservoirs, or oshanas, that periodically fill with water has attracted settlers for centuries.

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Namibia’s economy depends primarily on the use of natural resources for farming, mining, fishing, and tourism. Livestock and crop farming is an important activity for many Namibians in the freehold, government, and northern communal areas. Deposits of diamonds, uranium, copper, gold, zinc, and lead are exploited and exported overseas, making the country’s income largely dependent on the general state and trends of the global economy. Thanks to the rich Benguela Current, flowing northward and distributing rich nutrients along the coast, a prosperous fishing industry generates employment and income, mainly through processing and exports. Rich geological formations, abundant wildlife, and pristine skies make Namibia attractive to tourists and scientists alike. Painted rocks representing wildlife and hunting and gathering populations from circa 27000 BCE have been found in Namibia. Although human migration to and across this land goes back hundreds of thousands of years, most of the current population descends from groups that arrived in Namibia in the last 600 years. Cultural diversity reflects in more than a dozen languages spoken in the country and different identities, histories, and traditional organizations. Although probably not the original inhabitants, the oldest groups still living in Namibia are the San. Later on, the Nama and the Damaras arrived. The Owambo, currently the largest ethnic group in the country, did not enter Namibia probably until the fifteenth century. In 1486 Diego Cão from Portugal arrived at Cape Cross. This event marked the beginning of a European presence in search of land, wealth, and souls to Christianize. However, it was not until the www.abc-clio.com

early nineteenth century that several missionary groups followed the path set by the London Missionary Society, establishing themselves in the country. Their presence and interaction with the autochthonous population caused significant social, economic, and cultural changes. The British first established a station in Walvis Bay to buy cattle from the local population, mainly to supply St. Helena during Napoleon’s exile. Later on, as the guano trade grew and more British nationals invested in the area, Britain declared it to be its territory. The Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty (1890), signed by Britain and Germany, established boundaries with British South Africa and Bechuanaland and transferred the island of Zanzibar to British hands in exchange for the Caprivi Strip, giving Germany access to the Zambezi River. The German rule (1884–1914) over South-West Africa (except Walvis Bay, which remained under British control) soon encountered active resistance. The resistance struggle by the Ovaherero and the Nama culminated in what historians consider to be the first genocide of the twentieth century. Between 1904 and 1907, 65,000 Ovaherero, more than 10,000 Namas, and an unknown number of San were massacred by order of the commander of the German imperial forces in the country, General Lothar von Trotha. Many were killed by shooting or died from starvation, disease, and overwork in the desert or in labor camps. During World War I, South African troops fought and settled in South-West Africa. The Peace Treaty of Versailles (1919) transferred the full administration and legislation of former German Southwest Africa to South Africa, which administered it as a League of Nations mandate territory. After

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World War II and the League supersession by the United Nations, South Africa repeatedly opposed requests to place the territory under UN trusteeship, administering it as one of its provinces instead. In the 1960s, when many African countries were gaining independence, and the SWAPO started mobilizing guerrilla military resistance against South Africa to pressure it to grant independence to Namibia, the UN General Assembly revoked South Africa’s mandate. However, South Africa would continue to administer Namibia for three more decades—and SWAPO would continue to lead the struggle for independence from bases in Zambia, southern Angola (since its independence in 1975), and several industrialized countries. In spite of international condemnation and growing internal resistance by churches, students, and other associations, the South African government extended to SouthWest Africa its own system of apartheid: the policy of ethnic and spatial separation. The recommendations of the Odendaal Commission Report (1964) reflected a clear opposition to policies of social, political, and economic integration and equality. Under the policy of “Native reserves” and the creation of ethnic “homelands,” South Africa secured a supply of cheap labor and better controlled the land and its population. Seven homelands were created in 1968, namely, Ovamboland (renamed Owambo in 1972), Okavangoland (renamed Kavango in 1972), Damaraland, Hereroland, Kaokoland, Namaland, and Eastern Caprivi. The policy of ethnic fragmentation forced the relocation of urban blacks into “locations” on the periphery of white towns. In addition, it systematically used ethnicity as the criterion for the unilateral distribution of goods, services, land, www.abc-clio.com

and rights, facilitated control, and reinforced relationships of subordination at all levels. SWAPO’s armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) started operating from the Caprivi Strip in 1971–1972, at the same time that black contract workers went on strike for the abolition of the contract labor system, freedom of movement and employment, increased wages, and permission to reside with their families in the urban areas. While these events opened the way for strengthened links between churches, organized labor, and the liberation movement, repression also followed. Nonetheless, in response to UN pressures, the South African government granted self-government to the “Native Nations” and established an advisory council for South-West Africa in 1973. This body, comprising the different ethnic leaders in Namibia, turned two years later into the Turnhalle Constitutional Conference, which was central in the political process to independence. In 1978, the diplomatic efforts of Canada, France, West Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States (known as the Western Contact Group) led to the presentation of Security Council Resolution 435 proposing what was known as the UN Plan. The Plan called for democratic elections in Namibia under UN supervision and the cessation of all military activities by all parties. Shortly after, however, in line with the Reagan Administration’s “Constructive Engagement” policy for southern Africa, South Africa refused to implement UN Security Council Resolution 435 until Cuban troops withdrew from Angola, and the latter’s ruling part, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), withheld its support to

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SWAPO. During this time, South Africa sent more troops to Angola, intensifying its support for the National Union for Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). A decade of intense negotiations between all stakeholders followed under the leadership of the UN secretary general’s special representative, Martti Ahtisaari. It was not until the first group of Cuban troops left Angola in early 1989 that South Africa officially began administering the territory’s transition to independence. During this period, amnesty was granted to political prisoners, South African troops were withdrawn, discriminatory legislation was repealed, and the return of more than 40,000 refugees was coordinated with assistance of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Many of the current political leaders returned from exile holding degrees from renowned universities in Europe and the Americas. “Free and fair” elections gave power to SWAPO in November 1989. The Constitutional Principles developed in 1982 served as a framework for a new constitution (1990) establishing three independent branches of government, a multiparty system, and a bill of rights. On March 1, 1994, Walvis Bay and 12 offshore islands were transferred to Namibia from South Africa. Sam Nujoma, the first president of Namibia, was later reelected for two more terms. He was replaced as president by Hifikepunye Pohamba, the SWAPO official candidate in the elections of November 2004. The many Cuban doctors and agriculture technicians, as well as Peace Corps volunteers, working in the country, and numerous development efforts funded through bilateral agreements and the UN Global Fund to fight AIDS, are a clear www.abc-clio.com

reminder of the support Namibia received to achieve its independence. Monica Ruiz-Casares See also: Colonialism; Decolonization, African; Diamonds; Peace Corps References Diener, Ingolf, and Olivier Graefe, eds. Contemporary Namibia: The First Landmarks of a Post-Apartheid Society. Windhoek, Namibia: Gamsberg Macmillan, 2001. Dierks, Klaus. Chronology of Namibian History: From Pre-historical Times to Independent Namibia. 2nd ed. Windhoek, Namibia: Namibia Scientific Society, 2002. Du Pisani, André. “State and Society under South African Rule.” In State, Society and Democracy: A Reader in Namibian Politics. Edited by Christiaan Keulder. Windhoek, Namibia: Gamsberg Macmillan, 2000. Maho, J. F. Few People, Many Tongues: The Languages of Namibia. Windhoek, Namibia: Gamsberg Macmillan, 1998. Thornberry, Cedric. A Nation Is Born: The Inside Story of Namibia’s Independence. Windhoek, Namibia: Gamsberg Macmillan, 2004.

NANNY (CA. 1700–1740) During the eighteenth century, Nanny of the Maroons was an important leader of the Maroons in their rebellion against British occupation. Also known as Granny Nanny, today she stands out as the only recognized female Jamaican national hero. During the days of Spanish settlement on the island of Jamaica, Africans went into the mountains and created communities in an attempt to escape their enslavement. These runaways were called Maroons, a term derived from the Spanish word cimarrón, which means “wild” or “untamed.” Maroon communities became larger as more and more slaves were brought to the island. Maroons played an important role in

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combating the institution of slavery; they would periodically come down from the mountains, taking back with them fellow Africans as well as supplies of food. They engaged in combat with Spanish settlers, and later with the British, and as legend has established, they were successful in defeating and keeping these settlers at bay. Maroons also played an important role in maintaining the cultural heritage of the displaced African community, preserving traditions, customs, and ideals that they brought with them from Africa. Although there are many legends surrounding Nanny, she is often described as an Asante warrior. Despite her small stature, she took on a leadership role both within the Maroon military as well as in the Maroon village communities. Her military prowess played an important role in helping to develop the legend of Nanny; she was recognized for her strong military techniques that often created havoc and catastrophe for British forces. Nanny is remembered in both legend and documents that call attention to her supernatural skill, a characteristic that links her to obeah. Nanny’s greatest strength was her ability to organize the Eastern Maroons and to effectively keep at bay the British attempting to overpower their mountain community. Documentation from British accounts of the First Maroon War (1720–1738) suggests that the British troops were often flabbergasted by the abilities of the Maroons under Nanny’s leadership. As a leader in her village community, Nanny played an important role in maintaining the connection between the Jamaican diasporic community and its African heritage. She passed down legends from Africa to the community and ensured that the community maintained the customs and www.abc-clio.com

traditions that they had brought with them from Africa. In Jamaica today, Nanny of the Maroons remains a symbol of unity and strength and she continues to be an inspiration to her people. Although legends suggest that Nanny was one of many women who took on leadership roles among the Maroons, Nanny is most remembered because of her insistence, sometimes in opposition to other Maroon leaders, that the Maroons must struggle to maintain their independence and never submit to subjugation. J. A. Brown-Rose See also: Jamaica; Jamaica, Women’s Role in; Obeah; Slave Revolts/Maronnage References Gottlieb, Karla. The Mother of Us All. Lawrenceville, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000. Hart, Richard. Slaves Who Abolished Slavery: Blacks in Rebellion. Jamaica, West Indies: University of West Indies Press, 2002. Price, Richard. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Sharpe, Jenny. Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

NATION OF ISLAM The Nation of Islam (NOI) is an Islamic movement founded in 1930s America by Wallace Fard, a white man. The original name of the movement is the Lost Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness. Wallace Fard’s origin is controversial because he claimed to have been born in different countries, and little is actually known about him. Around 1930, Fard appeared in Paradise Valley, a black neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan. He invited people to

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The Nation of Islam was led in its early years by Elijah Muhammad. (Library of Congress)

Islam and told them that their original religion was not Christianity but Islam. Within a short time, he won a few followers. He claimed that their origin was Asiatic, that white men were descendants of Yacub, and that blacks were superior to whites, whom Fard called devils because of their historic enslavement and mistreatment of black people. Fard preached for four years and laid the foundation of the NOI, established training schools for the girls, launched the Fruit of Islam, a guard for protecting the leaders of the NOI, and established the University of Islam. He then disappeared in 1934. Little is known about what happened to him after 1934 or how or where he died. However, before his disappearance, he had chosen one of his able followers, Elijah www.abc-clio.com

Poole, to lead the movement. Fard might have disappeared when he could no longer control or manage the movement. A contributing factor may have been that all his members were black people in whom he had instilled a hate for white people and he was a white person. His disappearance gave ample chance to Elijah Poole to restructure the Nation of Islam, which became one of the largest black nationalist movements in the United States. Elijah Poole was born in Sandersville, Georgia, in October 1897. He worked several jobs before moving to Detroit in 1919, where he worked at the Chevrolet auto plant for six years. He was introduced to Islam through Wallace Fard. He admired Wallace Fard’s explicit discussion of the psychological damage that slavery had done

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to black Americans. Fard appointed Poole his minister in 1933. Poole changed his surname to Muhammad and requested that black converts change their surnames to X to eradicate their slave names. He had considerable success in converting blacks into Islam. Muhammad became leader of the Nation of Islam in 1934 when Wallace Fard disappeared. He opened temples in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. Muhammad also moved to Chicago and restructured the NOI as a separatist nationalist black movement. Muhammad helped black Americans under the umbrella of the Nation of Islam to understand who they were and how white men had murdered, brutalized, and enslaved them. He gave blacks new identities and encouraged them to be selfdisciplined and economically independent. In his outlines of the goals of the NOI, he declared that what the NOI wanted for black Americans in general were freedom, equal opportunity, an end to police brutality and mob attacks against blacks, equal education, and equal justice under the law. He discouraged his followers from using drugs, consuming alcohol, eating pork, or borrowing on credit. Muhammad was jailed from 1942 to 1946 for draft evasion. He continued to lead his followers from prison through his wife and his ministers and found the prison fertile soil for recruiting new members into the NOI. After his release, he devoted his attention to the economic development of the NOI. He purchased 140 acres of farmland in Michigan and invested greatly in farm products to boost the economic condition of his followers. A few years later, the NOI established groceries, clothing stores, restaurants, trucking companies, schools, bakeries, and banks. Muhammad provided www.abc-clio.com

jobs for his followers and taught them, as the backbone of the African American community, to be independent and respectful of their families. The success of Elijah Muhammad can be attributed to many factors. First, he emphasized economic self-sufficiency. He believed that any group that relies on others financially will never attain prosperity. Second, despite continued police hostility and brutality against black people, he did not preach the overthrow of the government or violence. Third, he did not shun Western and modern technology as did his mentor, Fard. Rather, the NOI under Elijah Muhammad invested in radio, publications, farms, and businesses. Muhammad embraced the mass media in order to promote the NOI. Even those people who did not agree with him were sympathetic to his sincere attempts to assist and protect black people. Muhammad believed strongly that for blacks to succeed in America they must have total economic independence. He encouraged education, hard work, frugality, and the avoidance of drugs. Despite these great accomplishments as a separatist nationalist black movement, the NOI as an Islamic movement had flaws. The NOI taught the supremacy of blacks over whites, when Islam preaches equality of all humans before God. The NOI also taught that Wallace Fard was God incarnated; this claim contradicts the Islamic declaration of faith, which asserts that only Allah is God. When Elijah Muhammad died, his son Imam Warith Deen Mohammed (also known as Wallace Dean Mohammed) became the leader of the NOI. He struggled to move the NOI from its racist and separatist ideologies into mainstream Islam, which recognizes all races as human and

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equal before God. He revived the NOI and redesigned its policies and doctrines to represent both Wallace Fard and Elijah Muhammad as people. He changed the temples into mosques, dissolved the Fruit of Islam, did away with the mythology of Yacub, allowed white and immigrant Muslims to join the NOI, and decentralized the hierarchical structure of the NOI by allowing each local imam to be responsible for running the affairs of the Muslims in his locale. Some older members of the NOI resented those changes and thus left the movement. But Mohammed fervently continued his revival, which won him recognition in the Muslim mainstream in the United States. Mohammed officially resigned from the leadership of the NOI in November 2003, but he continues to serve the organization. One of the African American Muslim pioneers, who served the NOI until shortly before his death, was Malcolm X. Born in Nebraska as Malcolm Little, he dropped out of school at an early age because of discrimination. He went to prison for burglary and converted to the Nation of Islam while he was incarcerated. He became an influential member of the Nation of Islam after his release from prison. Elijah Muhammad admired him for his eloquence and charisma as a speaker, and promoted him to the highest level of authority in the NOI and appointed him his spokesperson on several occasions. Malcolm opened many temples for the NOI across the United States and won many African American youths to Islam. Malcolm fought against racism, yet followed Muhammad’s teaching that white people were devils for enslaving blacks and maltreating them. One of Malcolm X’s greatest contributions to the NOI was his founding of the www.abc-clio.com

publication Muhammad Speaks, a newspaper that featured articles concerning the doctrines of the NOI, its beliefs, its political stance, its activities, and messages from Elijah Muhammad. The newspaper had a circulation of more than 600,000 at its peak. Its publication helped to provide jobs and training to thousands of NOI members. Disagreements between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X led to the latter’s excommunication for 90 days due to comments Malcolm made about the assassination of President John Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Malcolm X broke away from Muhammad and established his own movement, the Muslim Mosque, in New York in 1964. The same year he made the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. Learning from his experience at Mecca about Islamic brotherhood changed Malcolm’s life. Enlightened with new spiritual insights, he became a reformed person with a different outlook. He retracted all his derogative comments about white people, he reverted to orthodox Islam, and adopted a new name, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbaz. Malcolm X continued to fight for the rights of the blacks and of oppressed people until he was assassinated in February 1965. Today, the leader of the Nation of Islam is Minister Louis Farrakhan, a devout follower of Elijah Muhammad. He was born in New York in 1933, where he attended junior college and became a singer. Malcolm X brought Farrakhan into Islam and Elijah Muhammad trained him. When Malcolm X died, Farrakhan headed New York’s temple of the NOI. When Muhammad died in 1975, Farrakhan accepted Imam Mohammed’s leadership for some time, but broke away from him in 1978, unhappy with the drastic changes

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that Mohammed was making. Farrakhan restored the NOI into the model created by Elijah Muhammad, thus establishing a formal split between the ideology of Warith Deen Mohammed (orthodox Islam) and that of the NOI. He changed his title from imam to minister and reiterated the racial ideology of the early days of the NOI. For a time, he held that Wallace Fard was God and that Elijah Muhammad was a prophet. He has now reverted to more orthodox Islamic beliefs and encourages his followers to do the same. Farrakhan has contributed to the defense of equal rights for blacks and has inducted a female Muslim, Mrs. Ava Muhammad, into the ministerial position in the NOI. She is the first Muslim female to hold such a position in America. Farrakhan also launched the Million Man March in 1995 in an attempt to unite black Americans, regardless of their faiths and disagreements. Many observers have expected a clash between the followers of Farrakhan and Imam Mohammed but it has not happened because of their common background and the fact that both leaders are working for Islam and the advancement of black people to achieve economic and spiritual development. The Nation of Islam has become a social movement that cares for the progress of black people, especially young African Americans. The NOI has launched many social programs and brought greater national awareness to the problems and challenges faced by blacks. The success of the NOI can be attributed to its strong belief in Islam, its doctrines, and the roles of its charismatic leaders in changing the social, economic, political, and spiritual standing of its members. Yushau Sodiq www.abc-clio.com

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References Evanzz, Karl. The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad. New York: Pantheon, 1999. Farrakhan, Louis. A Torchlight for America. Chicago: FCN Publishing, 1993. Lee, Martha F. The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994. Marsh, Clifton E. From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Transition from Separatism to Islam 1930–1980. Metunchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1984. McCloud, Aminah Beverly. African American Islam. New York: Routledge, 1995. Turner, Richard Brent. Islam in the African American Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

NDEBELE Ndebele are a people of South Africa defined by their language and their cultural and political contributions to South Africa before and during apartheid. The name Ndebele is best explained by pointing out that the term ndebele is really a category word used by Sotho-speakers to define Nguni-speakers in general (usually in the Sotho form matebele). The Ndebele peoples of South Africa probably came by the name because their language is one of the Nguni languages spoken by peoples living near the South African coast. In the 1800s, when the Ndebele migrated inland into the eastern part of Mpumalanga Province (traditionally Sothospeaking territory) the surrounding Sotho noted their different language and customs. They referred to these foreigners as matebele or “strangers from the east.” Gradually the Sotho term matebele changed into ndebele, the Nguni form of the term.

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Thus there are several South African and Zimbabwean groups called Ndebele, but they are different societies with different histories. They differentiate themselves by adding an important chief ’s name, such as Ndzundza (the largest group) or Manala, or a geographical location, such as Transvaal (a former province in South Africa). In Zimbabwe they are called Mzilikazi Ndebele after their famous chief who led them there. The Ndzundza Ndebele of South Africa had been a significant force before their tragic 1883 war with the Boers when the white farmers laid siege to their rocky fortress for nine months to win their rich land. When starved out of their retreat, the chief was first sentenced to death but later life imprisonment, along with many council members. Each victorious Boer fighter was given five families of the vanquished Ndzundza to use as tenant farmers to work for five years on their scattered white farms with very little, if any, pay. The Manala Ndebele, not involved in the war, found their way to Wallmansthall Mission, not far from Pretoria, and have a calmer history than the Ndzundza. The Mzilikazi Ndebele, passing through the former Transvaal Province from the coast, had fierce encounters with the Ndzundza as they traveled into Zimbabwe, where eventually they settled. The Ndzundza Ndebele felt a strong need to distinguish themselves from other Ndebele because the war’s aftermath left them scattered far and wide throughout the Transvaal Province. For years they tried to gather at different farms, but the government feared if they grouped together they would again become a danger. The Ndzundza became world-famous because of their unique and colorful wall www.abc-clio.com

art (beginning around 1945) identifying their mud homesteads. The women created this distinctive identity marker annually, composing striking geometric designs that resembled the elaborate beadwork on their traditional dress. Over the years, the handsome decorations, originally done in earth colors and washing bluing, gradually changed into more durable acrylic-painted designs, if the owner could afford it. Visiting tourists who wanted a portable artifact reminding them of the Ndzundza colorfully decorated homesteads purchased beaded art forms, such as dolls and toy animals. But sadly, the wall art almost disappeared as the apartheid government relocated the Ndebele into a desolate homeland at end of the 1970s. Both of the South African Ndebele groups, and other Africans, were deeply affected by South Africa’s apartheid system. Apartheid (which means “apartness” or “separate” in the Afrikaans and Dutch languages) was a scheme of the National Party government that came into power in 1948. It was used to justify a system that determined where people lived, went to school, and worked and insured that white people stayed at the top and Africans remained at the bottom economically, socially, and politically. Apartheid was official until the 1994 elections replaced the National Party with the African National Congress and a multinational government headed by Nelson Mandela. The 1980s stand out among those 46 difficult years of enforced apartheid. The decade was extremely violent, with hundreds of people jailed, tortured, and killed. The Ndebele were one of the African groups that suffered the most because of their fierce resistance to forced relocation into one of the ten

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government-organized homelands, Kwa Ndebele, and so-called independence. Kwa Ndebele administration was headed by a group of African businessmen who were appointed by the South African government. The Kwa Ndebele leadership manipulated lesser chiefs and headmen to go along with the homeland independence proposition, which would enrich them but deprive all inhabitants of their South African citizenship. However, the paramount chief David Mahlangu, members of the royal family of the Ndebele, and a majority of Africans successfully battled this disaster at a great loss of lives, with the dedicated help of elders and youths from both inside and outside the territory. Their success, and the resistance of other Africans, plus the extreme economic and political disarray within the entire country by 1981, became one of the final blows dismantling the apartheid government. Elizabeth Ann Schneider See also: Africa, Precolonial; South Africa, History and Politics; Zimbabwe

Sédar Senghor, the Martinican Aimé Césaire, and the Guyanese Léon GontranDamas. The term refers to the ideology of cultural affirmation, celebration, and revitalization that emerged from the exchange of ideas between African and Caribbean intellectuals who were searching for a cure to the acculturation that European colonization had created in the lives of people of African descent. Many blacks of Africa and the Caribbean, who were at home or abroad, felt exiled in their own homelands. They felt that they had succumbed to the power of Western civilization that had separated them from their original African selves. In order to resist this feeling of separation from Africa, Césaire, Senghor, GontranDamas and their followers wrote books of poetry in which they reclaimed their African past. In Return to My Native Land, Césaire cast out the mirage of the Western civilization that had separated him from blacks of other continents. In Return, Césaire states: my race pitted with macula my race ripe grapes for drunken feet my queen of spittles and of lepers my queen of whips and of scrofulas.

References Clark, Nancy L., and William H. Worger. South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. London: Pearson Education, 2004. McCaul, Colleen. Satellite in Revolt. Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1987. Schneider, Elizabeth Ann. “Ndebele Mural Art.” Los Angeles: African Arts 18 (1985): 60–67. Schneider, Elizabeth Ann. Ndebele. New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 1997.

NÉGRITUDE The concept of négritude identifies a literary and cultural movement that was founded in the 1930s in Paris by three major black poets: the Senegalese Léopold www.abc-clio.com

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This passage reflects the strong influence that the difficult historical conditions of blacks in the Americas had on Césaire’s poetry. Césaire’s representation of his race as the people that have been “pitted with macula,” forced to grind grapes with their “drunken feet,” spat on, infected, and whipped helps him suggest the atrocious experiences of the Africans who had been enslaved in the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. The passage anticipates Césaire’s denunciation, in his later works, of how the economic development in the West was partially built on the tortured

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and murdered bodies and souls of the enslaved Africans and their descendants. One of the challenges of scholars of négritude is to explore the complexity, mutability, and radicalism of the movement without portraying its ideologies as black cultural fundamentalism and mysticism or as inferiority complex. In The Historian in Tropical Africa: Studies Presented and Discussed at the Fourth International African Seminar at the University of Dakar Senegal 1961 (1964), Jan Vansina decried how négritude has been inappropriately interpreted as a myth in which the writers had a common goal of stressing the specificity and particularity of black culture, history, and social and cultural inventions. This interpretation of the goals of the négritude movement fails to point out the idea of multiculturalism and connections between races and civilizations that its proponents defended in their works. Négritude has both internal and external values. On the one hand, it is spiritualist and existential; on the other, it is a practical assessment of black people’s connections to politics, culture, class, and humanity. One of the most celebrated studies of négritude is Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Orphée Noir” (Black Orpheus) in which the French existentialist philosopher praised the movement for being the literary expression of the soul and being of black people. Although he perceived négritude as a search for the collective soul of black folk, Sartre did not see the movement as a return to unchanging traditions, a myth, or a racially exclusive philosophy. Instead, he saw négritude as a progress toward equality and universalism, and a continuous journey without end. Sartre’s interpretation of négritude anticipated the blend of African and Western values that Senghor used to www.abc-clio.com

create a perfect synthesis in his négritude. The fusion of values in Senghor’s négritude is noticeable in the introduction of Ce Que Je Crois: Négritude, Francité et Civilisation de l’Universel (1989), where Senghor clearly states: “I believe, above all, in NegroAfrican culture, that is to say, in Négritude and in its expression in poetry and arts . . . I also believe in francophony, and, more exactly, in francité that is integrated in Latin culture and in the Civilization of the Universal, where Négritude has begun to play a very important part.” Senghor’s négritude embraced the fusion of modern African and Western cultures. By learning to better appreciate Senghor’s hybrid vision of his own culture and place in history, scholars can arrive at a better understanding of the complex history of négritude from the native Africans’ point of views. The négritude movement was a multifaceted literary movement that aimed at improving the conditions of people of African descent. As one of the most voiced poets of the movement, Césaire gave négritude a concrete historical background by using his poetry to represent the traumatic effects of slavery on the enslaved Africans and their descendants. Working with Césaire, Senghor and the other contributors of the movement, such as GontranDamas and Sartre, suggested the humanism of the movement, which was visible in its acceptance and blending of all races and civilizations for the good of mankind. Babacar M’Baye

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See also: Afrocentrism; Atlantic World; Blyden, Edward Wilmot; Caribbean Literature; Diaspora, Demography of; Noirisme References Berrian, Albert H., and Richard A. Long, eds. Négritude: Essays and Studies. Hampton, VA: Hampton Institute Press, 1967.

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NEGRO LEAGUES Cartey, Wilfred. “Introduction.” In Negritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean. Edited by Norman R. Shapiro. New York: October House, 1970. Irele, Abiola. “Aime Cesaire: An Approach to his Poetry.” In Introduction to African Literature: An Anthology of Critical African and Afro-American Literature and Oral Tradition. Edited by Ulli Beier. London: Longmans, 1967. Jackson, Irene Dobbs. “Négritude: A Study in Outline.” In Négritude: Essays and Studies. Edited by Albert H. Berrian and Richard A. Long. Hampton, VA: Hampton Institute Press, 1967. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Orphée Noir.” In Senghor, Léopold Sédar, Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Ce Que Je Crois: Négritude, Francité et Civilisation de l’Universel. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1989. Vansina, Jan; R. Mauny, and L. V. Thomas, eds. The Historian in Tropical Africa: Studies Presented and Discussed at the Fourth International African Seminar at the University of Dakar Senegal 1961. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

NEGRO LEAGUES The Negro leagues, as they were commonly called, featured outstanding African American baseball players throughout approximately the first half of the twentieth century. The Negro leagues attracted large crowds to their games as baseball became an important part of black culture and, during the 1930s and 1940s, the largest black-owned industry in the country. The desire for the same opportunity to achieve fame and fortune that white players enjoyed led eventually to integration of the major leagues in 1947. Once the major leagues were open to African American players, the Negro leagues went into a sharp decline as the best black players, given a choice, trained their sights on the www.abc-clio.com

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majors. By the end of the 1960 season, the final Negro league had died. The Negro leagues grew out of a longstanding passion for baseball on the part of African Americans that originated during slavery, when slaves played versions of the game with a ball made from a piece of cloth wrapped around boiled chicken feathers. From the beginning, baseball had been largely, though not entirely, segregated. The first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869, excluded blacks, as did the first professional league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, created in 1871. Despite their exclusion from much of white baseball, at least a few African Americans played on predominantly white teams in the National Association of Base Ball Players, an association of amateur teams that was formed in 1858, even while all-black teams were developing in the 1860s. An occasional African American made it into white professional baseball, such as Bud Fowler, born, ironically, in Cooperstown, New York, site of the future National Baseball Hall of Fame. The most notable exception to the all-white rule was Moses Fleetwood Walker, a gifted athlete who caught in 1884 for Toledo of the American Base Ball Association, at the time a major league. Even the minimal integration that had occurred came to an end in 1887 when Cap Anson, the player-manager for the Chicago White Stockings, refused to compete against Newark of the International League, for whom Walker was playing. Newark benched Walker rather than lose the revenue from the game. By 1889, the last few African American players in organized ball were gone, and a gentlemen’s agreement to exclude blacks would

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remain in force until the signing of Jackie Robinson. The result of this exclusion was not the end of African American interest in baseball but rather formation of all-black teams and leagues. A leading Negro league pioneer was Rube Foster, a great pitcher who received his nickname form outpitching the ace of the Philadelphia Athletics, Rube Waddell. Foster, the manager as well as a player for the Chicago Leland Giants, led his team in 1909 into the Park Owners Association, so named because teams were required to own their own ballparks. The following year, Foster formed his own team, the Chicago American Giants, which remained the most powerful team in the association and continued its dominance during the early years of the Negro National League, which was formed in 1920. Foster was the primary architect of the National League and served as its first president. In 1923 a new league, the Eastern Colored League, was formed, permitting Negro League World Series play from 1924 through 1927. The new league disbanded in 1928, and the National League, hit hard by the Depression, folded in 1931. Negro league veteran Cum Posey organized the East-West League in 1932, and in the same year the Negro Southern League was declared a major league, but neither effort survived beyond that year. Gus Greenlee led formation of a new Negro National League in 1933, and this league caught on. In the same year, the East-West All-Star Game was inaugurated and proved a huge attraction, even outdrawing the white All-Star contest by more than 15,000 spectators in 1944. The Negro American League was added in 1937, permitting restoration of a Negro www.abc-clio.com

League World Series. The Negro leagues during these years enjoyed tremendous success, featuring players the equal of any in the white major leagues and becoming the largest black-owned business in the United States. Baseball became, as poet James Weldon Johnson said, part of the black cultural expression. Black America took special delight in seeing Negro league teams defeat teams of white major leaguers in exhibition contests. John Holway’s research indicates that Negro league teams won a large majority of those contests. Certain Negro league teams proved especially successful. The Homestead Grays (1912–1950) won the National League pennant every year from 1937 to 1945 and again in 1948, along with the World Series in 1943–1944 and 1948. Cum Posey began as a Homestead player in the Grays’ inaugural season and eventually became the team’s owner. Catcher and legendary slugger Josh Gibson and first baseman Buck Leonard were among the top players on the team. After the National Baseball Hall of Fame started inducting stars of the Negro leagues, both men were enshrined, appropriately in the same year, 1972. The Kansas City Monarchs (1920– 1950) also featured many stars, none bigger than pitcher Satchel Paige, and won pennants steadily throughout its history. The Pittsburgh Crawfords, owned by Gus Greenlee, had a shorter life (1931–1938), but the mid-1930s team, featuring Paige, Gibson, and center fielder Cool Papa Bell, is often considered the greatest Negro league team of all time. The Newark Eagles (1936–1948), born as a fusion of two teams, the Brooklyn Eagles and Newark Dodgers, was owned by Abe and Effa Manley. Effa, reared in an African

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American home, actually was white but deliberately passed herself off throughout her life as a light-complexioned black woman. She was an astute businesswoman whose team won the Negro League World Series in 1946. Two of her top players were pitcher Leon Day and outfielder Larry Doby. By 1946, however, the writing was on the wall for Negro league baseball. Jackie Robinson had been signed by the Dodgers and was playing for their top minor league team. The following year, Robinson integrated the National League, and later in the year Larry Doby did the same for the American League. The Negro National League survived only one year after Robinson’s breakthrough. The Negro American League realigned itself into two divisions and continued functioning through the 1960 season. Top African American players, though, aspired to the now integrated major leagues, and the quality of Negro league baseball declined in the 1950s. The end of Negro league baseball signaled great new opportunities for African American players, but opportunities for black owners, executives, and field managers remain limited even into the twenty-first century. Edward J. Rielly See also: Mays, Willie Howard; Robinson, Jack Roosevelt References Dixon, Phil. Negro Baseball Leagues. Mattituck, NY: Amereon House, 1992. Gilbert, Tom. Baseball and the Color Line. New York: Franklin Watts, 1995. Holway, John B. Blackball Stars: Negro League Pioneers. Westport, CT: Meckler, 1988. Peterson, Robert. Only the Ball Was White. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984. Riley, James A. The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994.

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NEOCOLONIALISM Neocolonialism is a term used to describe the continued existence of colonial relationships in today’s world. In discourses that are critical of global economic, political, and cultural restructuring of the contemporary world, it is held that colonialism is not a matter of the past but rather it continues in new forms. The term began to be used in reference to African countries following their decolonization after World War II. The term was first used by Kwame N’Krumah, Ghana’s first postindependence leader, in the 1960s. N’Krumah and other voices critical of international relationships after decolonization have drawn attention to a new type of colonialism in which ex-colonizers as well as some other industrialized, developed First World countries exploit ex-colonies and other nonindustrialized, developing, less developed, and underdeveloped third world countries, this time by economic and cultural influence rather than by direct political control as in the old form of colonialism. Although neocolonialism largely indicates a new world order since World War II, it is argued that neocolonial practices first began in Latin America well before the mid-twentieth century. Latin American colonies such as Greater Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Cuba gained their independence from the dominant colonial authority in the region, Spain, throughout the nineteenth century. Yet, especially the United States, which itself fought an independence war against the British Empire only a couple of decades earlier than some Latin American independence struggles, gained economic and thereby political control over many economically weak and needy Latin American countries in the

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nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Therefore, the argument goes that in the years following World War II, the United States was much better prepared than other developed countries in the world to implement neocolonial policies. According to critics of neocolonialism, the major actors in neocolonial world order are multinational corporations (MNCs), multinational enterprises (MNEs), transnational corporations (TNCs), international organizations that supply foreign aid to needy countries, the local entrepreneurial middle class, as well as local leaders who are friendly to foreign investors. TNCs are very large companies whose offices, factories, and branch plants are located in different developing countries around the world. Their headquarters, however, are in the metropolises of developed countries such as the United Kingdom, United States, and Japan. The opponents of these huge companies hold that although they bring jobs to the region in which they are established, TNCs exploit the raw materials and cheap labor force in that region, and they also destroy the environment. Some TNCs are much richer than many third world countries, and their wealth entails political power over the poor country. They may force a country to change the laws they find inconvenient instead of conforming to the laws. Therefore, TNCs are attacked because they threaten the independence of local governments, and it is held that TNCs merely have replaced the colonial armies of the old colonial period. Some argue that in the twenty-first century, TNCs, rather than nation-states, are the dominant political and economic forces. Others draw attention to the contribution of TNCs to the economy of their home countries as a result of which the First World nations do not www.abc-clio.com

only maintain but also strengthen their power over the rest of the world. The international rules of trade are defined by the World Trade Organization (WTO), a transnational organization whose ultimate aim is to abolish international trade barriers such as customs duties and trade taxes. Free trade and exportoriented growth are encouraged by organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), too. The critics of these organizations argue that the loans given by the IMF and WB to needy countries aim to make the latter more and more dependent on the former rather than improve the poor country’s economy. The foreign aid supplied by the IMF and WB requires that the recipient country participate in the Structural Adjustment Plans designed by these organizations. Adjustment Plans aim to integrate developing countries into the capitalist economic system; therefore, they impose privatization and export-oriented production on the developing country as major goals to achieve. According to the opponents of the Adjustment Plans, the decrease in state help, especially for health and education, and a production policy indifferent to a country’s own needs undermine that country’s self-sufficiency and political autonomy. Furthermore, it is argued that the high interest rates of the loans given by the IMF and WB enslave the debtor in that many third world countries today have to pay back much more to these organizations than the amount of money they received from them. The critics of neocolonialism also pinpoint cultural colonization of the third world, mainly via media and education. They argue that media companies in developing countries promote consumerism and

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Western lifestyles so that they can be assimilated easily into the new world order. As for education, they hold that Eurocentric design of the curricula and course books as well as the promotion of trade-oriented schools in developing countries perpetuate neocolonialism. Especially since the 1990s, the critics of neocolonialism all around the world have come together in global solidarity to raise their voices, particularly against the WTO. The riots in Seattle in 1999, those in Bangkok, Washington, D.C., Prague, Davos, Salzburg, Seoul, Melbourne, and Bologna in 2000, and in Montreal, Naples, and Genoa in 2001 are all indicative of the worldwide opposition to what is seen as the neocolonial world order. Elif Oztabak-Avci See also: Colonialism; International Monetary Fund; N’Krumah, Kwame; Postcolonial Studies; World Bank; World Trade Organization References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. New York: Routledge, 1998. French, Laurence, and Magdaleno Manzanárez. NAFTA & Neocolonialism: Comparative Criminal, Human & Social Justice. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. Gladwin, Thomas. Slaves of the White Myth: The Psychology of Neocolonialism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980. Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965. Peters, Rebecca Todd. In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization. New York: Continuum, 2004.

NETHERLANDS ANTILLES The Netherlands Antilles consist of six islands in the Caribbean. St. Martin (which is partly Dutch and partly French), St. Eustatius, and Saba are in the Leeward www.abc-clio.com

Islands, while Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba are in the Windward Islands (Lesser Antilles) and are situated some 559 miles (900 kilometers) from the Leeward Islands close to the mainland of Venezuela. The islands today have an autonomous position within the kingdom of the Netherlands, which is made up of the three countries: Aruba, the Netherlands Antilles, and the Netherlands. From 1568 to 1648 the Dutch were at war with Spain. In 1580 Spain conquered Portugal and expelled Dutch traders from the country. This expulsion meant that the Dutch had to find an alternative for the Portuguese salt that was used in the herring industry. They decided the Caribbean was a good alternative. At the end of the sixteenth and in the first decades of the seventeenth centuries private Dutch merchants and privateers were active in the Caribbean. The Dutch government supported the foundation of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) in 1621 to regulate the trade to Africa and America. However, the main aim of this company was to extend the war against Spain. After the company occupied a part of northern Brazil (1624–1654), slave trading became a major factor in WIC’s history. Seeking strongholds in the Caribbean in the struggle against Spain, the WIC conquered the island of Curaçao in 1634. The neighboring islands of Aruba and Bonaire followed. In the Leeward Islands, St. Martin, St. Eustaius, and Saba also became Dutch colonies. In 1648 St. Martin was divided between the Netherlands and France. During the Brazilian experience, the Dutch conquered the Portuguese slave center Elmina on the West African coast in 1637, which accelerated the nascent Dutch slave trade. From Elmina many Dutch slave

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ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil, Surinam, Curaçao, and St. Eustatius. Elmina was one of the more than 20 Dutch trading posts in West Africa in the seventeenth century. Curaçao and St. Eustatius were crucial staple markets for the Dutch slave trade from Africa. Dutch slave exports from Africa from 1620 to 1803 totaled approximately 550,000, or 5 percent of the whole transatlantic black Diaspora. Some 64 percent of these slaves were men. Most slaves came from the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, and the Loango-Angola region. The Dutch West Indian islands were not really suitable for large-scale plantation production. The WIC saw more possibilities selling slaves from Curaçao and St. Eustatius to the Spanish and English colonies in the Caribbean. About 92,000 slaves were transported to Curaçao and 29,000 to St. Eustatius from where they were sold to the Caribbean region. Compared with most of the sugarproducing Caribbean colonies, the percentage of slaves in the Netherlands Antilles population was low and the ratio of whites to slaves atypical. In 1789 the Dutch Leeward Islands had about 4,256 whites, 785 free nonwhites, and 9,400 slaves. The slaves formed 65 percent of the total population and the ratio of whites to slaves was 1 to 2.2. On Curaçao the numbers in 1789 were 3,564 whites, 4,560 free nonwhites, and 12,864 slaves. The slaves made up 61.3 percent of the population and the ratio of whites to slaves was 1 to 3.6. This meant that many slave owners were in direct and personal contact with their slaves. On the largest island, Curaçao, more than 60 percent of the slave owners possessed less than five slaves in the period 1735–1863. In 1764 this island counted 534 owners and 5,534 slaves, but only five masters had www.abc-clio.com

more than 100 slaves. Compared with Surinam, the slave population in the Netherlands Antilles saw a continuous natural increase in the nineteenth century. This increase is in sharp contrast with the large plantation societies in the Caribbean. The reasons for this increase were the labor conditions, the nature of slavery, and a higher level of fertility of the female slaves. A proof of these favorable factors are figures from a reliable 1845 source that reports that 70 percent of slave children on Curaçao reached the age of 12, while in Surinam only 50 percent survived to this age. The plantations on the Netherlands Antilles did not produce for a world market and that made a big difference in the conditions and treatment of slaves. Dutch travelers of the time reported that slaves of Curaçao were afraid to be sent to Surinam where slaves were treated far worse. Although the slave situation on these islands was atypical compared to the sugar plantation societies in the West Indies, the social stratification was almost the same. The white elite was formed by protestant Dutchmen and Sephardic Jews on Curaçao and by British and Dutch settlers in the Dutch Leeward colonies. Most of them were civil servants, military men, merchants, and planters. Free nonwhites and blacks were important for the economy. In 1789 they formed 20 percent of the Curaçao population and in 1863 it was 50 percent. They worked on the land, in the harbors, or were artisans or sailors. At the bottom of the social ladder were slaves. They produced corn and sorghum for their masters and the black community, took care of the cattle, did the hard work in the salt pans of Bonaire and St. Martin, and served their masters in crafts and in their homes. On St. Martin

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and St. Eustatius slaves also were active on the small sugar plantations. In 1863 slavery in the Dutch colonies was abolished. In a process of adaptation, mingling, and integration, slaves developed local forms of music, traditions, cooking, stories, and a sort of common African language, guené, that long existed as an underground slave language on Curaçao. This process of creolization was not identical in the six islands because the demographic, social, and economic context was different. The Lesser Antilles had more commercial contacts with Spanish-speaking colonies and these small societies were influenced by Spanish, Dutch, and African cultural trends. On Aruba, where slavery was not as important as on Curaçao, African influences were not really significant. Latin and Indian features dominate on this island. The African beat and rhythm in dances like tambú and tumba in the Lesser Antilles and the belief in evil ghosts, or zumbis and eszé (related to Haitian Voodoo), show up a more sustained African connection. In the context of this slave society and in communication with the whites, a new language, Papiamentu, started to develop on Curaçao in the seventeenth century. In this language the Nanzi stories of the spider as a trickster figure were recounted and adjusted to the local situation. The Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church was not really interested in baptizing the slaves. The administration tolerated that preachers of other religions did the religious teaching of the slaves. This practice was even stimulated in the nineteenth century. On Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, many slaves became Roman Catholics, and on the Leeward Islands, Methodists, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics. The white elite considered these inferior slave religions. On the Leeward Islands, many British settlers www.abc-clio.com

influenced the culture and language of the Dutch colonies. In the nineteenth century, Caribbean English became the common language of society. In culture and religion, the Dutch Leeward Islands show many similarities with the surrounding Englishspeaking West Indies. In the Netherlands Antilles there were three substantial slave uprisings. In 1750 and 1795 slaves of some plantations rebelled on Curaçao. The 1750 uprising lasted only one day, although 59 slaves and one white overseer were killed by the rebels. The 1795 revolt began August 17 and was more serious. More than 2,000 slaves took part in the rebellion under the leadership of a slave named Tula. After two weeks of negotiations and battles, Dutch soldiers assisted by civilians and groups of free coloreds and blacks defeated the rebellious slaves. After both revolts the punishments for the slave leaders were harsh and cruel. In 1848 the 1,100 slaves of St. Eustaius demanded their freedom. The leaders of the uprising referred to the abolition of slavery in the British and French colonies. After some skirmishes the slaves returned to the plantations. Although their revolts were not as large as those in Haiti or Jamaica, the slaves of the Netherlands Antilles were not always compliant. The many laws to control and regulate the behavior of slaves had to be officially announced periodically to remind the white settlers of the black threat. Regulations to prevent slaves from fleeing to foreign colonies were especially strict. Nevertheless, hundreds of slaves fled from the Lesser Antilles to Venezuela. In 1760, 400 exslaves from these islands lived in a city quarter of Coro, Venezuela, where Papiamentu was the language commonly used. Ronald Donk

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818 NIAGARA MOVEMENT References Goslinga, Cornelis Ch. The Dutch in the Caribbean and the Wild Coast, 1580–1680. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1971. Goslinga, Cornelis Ch. The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guyanas, 1680–1791. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum Assen, 1985. Goslinga, Cornelis Ch. The Dutch in the Caribbean and in Surinam, 1791/5–1942. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum Assen, 1990. Postma, Johannes Menne. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Sypkens Smit, M. P. Beyond the Tourist Trap: A Study of St. Maarten Culture. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Publications Foundation for Scientific Research in the Caribbean Region, 1995.

NIAGARA MOVEMENT The Niagra movement was an earlytwentieth-century organized protest movement of African American men and a precursor to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1903, Atlanta University professor William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, which included an argument against Booker T. Washington’s acceptance of segregation. Two years later, in February 1905, Du Bois met with Monroe Trotter, John Hope, and others in Buffalo, New York, to further develop that argument. The meeting led to a larger one at Niagara Falls. Since no hotel on the American side of the falls accepted African Americans, the group met on the Canadian side. From July 11 to 14, 1905, 29 men developed a protest movement named after its meeting place, with Du Bois as general secretary. The Niagara movement called for immediate universal manhood suffrage, equality of www.abc-clio.com

economic opportunity, equality in education, and equality before the law for African Americans. Members distributed pamphlets decrying the accommodation proposed by Washington and lobbied against Jim Crow legislation. The group met again the following year in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Though it established 30 branches, a lack of both permanent headquarters and consistent financing kept it from garnering a large following. Though the movement’s call for suffrage only included men, and though Trotter opposed female membership, Mary White Ovington, a socialist settlement house worker, became the group’s first white member in 1908. Other liberal intellectuals from the white community soon joined her, leading directly to the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) the following year. Du Bois served as editor of the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, but his executive duties with the Niagara movement ended when the group disbanded in 1910. Thomas Aiello See also: Civil Rights Movement; Crisis, The; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Washington, Booker T. References Harris, Thomas E. Analysis of the Clash over the Issues between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: Garland, 1993. Rudwick, Elliot. W. E. B. Du Bois: Voice of the Black Protest Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

NICARAGUA The largest country in Central America, Nicaragua shares borders with Honduras on the north and Costa Rica to the south. Nicaragua has undergone significant political, economic, and social changes since the

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U.S. marines in 1932 hold the flag of Augusto Sandino, a liberal Nicaraguan leader who engaged the U.S. forces in guerrilla warfare for many years. The marines were withdrawn in 1933. (National Archives)

late 1970s. As a result, Nicaraguans have had to contend with serious challenges posed by natural disasters—such as earthquakes and hurricanes—and unstable and corrupt governments. Comparable in size to the state of New York, the vast majority of the population (approximately five million) is located in the Pacific lowlands around Managua, the capital city. Most Nicaraguans are mestizo (of mixed Indian and Spanish descent), but there is a large African influence on the Atlantic coast. In addition, most Nicaraguans are Roman Catholics, although Protestantism is growing. Nicaragua is home to several volcanoes (many of which are still active) and the two largest freshwater lakes in Central America—Managua and Nicaragua. Lake www.abc-clio.com

Managua gives the capital city a beautiful picturesque quality and Lake Nicaragua has the only freshwater sharks in the world. Nicaragua’s economy is based largely on the production and export of agricultural goods. The most important export crops are coffee, cotton, various hardwoods (such as mahogany), cattle, and seafood. However, in recent years dropping world prices for agricultural commodities, coupled with the effects of a decade-long civil war in the 1980s, rampant corruption, and Hurricane Mitch, has wreaked havoc on Nicaragua’s already weak economy. During the 1980s, Nicaragua was the subject of a foreign policy debate in the waning years of the Cold War. The Sandinistas— who had close ties to Cuba and the Soviet

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Union—were engaged in a destructive civil war against the contras (counterrevolutionaries supported by the Reagan administration). Unfortunately, scholarship on Nicaragua has focused on explaining the domestic and international sources of political instability in Nicaragua; few scholars have explored the Afro-Caribbean culture on Nicaragua’s east coast and its larger experiences in the Atlantic World. The AfroCaribbean community in Nicaragua is located in what is known as the Mosquito Coast. For centuries, the Mosquito Coast was under British control as Great Britain established beachheads in the strategically important Central American isthmus. Hoping to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, European—and later American— powers sought to control the vital passageway because it would ensure military and economic influence for the entire Western Hemisphere. In the late nineteenth century, the Liberal Party in Nicaragua— under the leadership of José Santos Zelaya—gained control of the government and with the aid of the United States, Nicaragua militarily regained control of the Mosquito Coast (roughly one-third of Nicaragua’s territory). The Afro-Caribbean community in Nicaragua thus dealt with Spanish, British, U.S., and Nicaraguan efforts to control their destiny. The first Garifuna to arrive in Nicaragua came to Pearl Lagoon, on the Caribbean coast, in 1880. That year Joseph Sambola, believed to be a descendant of a Carib chief, founded the first official Garifuna community of San Vicente in honor of their ancestral home. In 1892 Sambola also founded Ebo Point, while his descendants founded La Fe in 1901 and Justo Point and Orinoco (the largest Garifuna community in Nicaragua today) in 1907. The Garifuna in Nicaragua www.abc-clio.com

were involved in various aspects of the local economy, including cutting mahogany and working on sugar plantations and saw mills. The African presence on Nicaragua’s east coast, however, has a much longer history that precedes the arrival of Joseph Sambola. African slaves had been brought to the Mosquito Coast (named so after the Miskitu Indians in the region) since 1633, by the British living on the island of Providence, about 100 miles (1.6 kilometers) off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, who sent them to work on the sugar plantations. The slaves brought to Nicaragua were primarily from the modern states of Gambia, Togo, Ghana, and Benin. By 1787 there were roughly 1,800 slaves on the coast. With its commercial presence on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, Great Britain established the Kingdom of Mosquitia under the auspices of the governor of Jamaica. From here, Afro-Nicaraguans carved out their own unique way of life mediated by outside pressures from the United States and the government in Managua. On February 10, 1894, Nicaragua regained control of the Mosquito Coast. Comprising one-third of Nicaragua’s national territory, the Mosquito Coast had, for over 300 years, been outside the limits of Spanish then Nicaraguan authority. By the late nineteenth century, the Mosquito Coast, under the stewardship of Great Britain, was thriving economically. The region had become successful producing bananas, rubber, and gold. Economic reasons alone can account for why Nicaragua wanted to control its territory. The Mosquito Coast was the scene of a dramatic struggle over the future course of the region. Nicaraguan elites wanted to control the rich economic assets but viewed the inhabitants of their newly acquired land with suspicion. These

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fears were well founded as the Creoles and Garifuna (who by virtue of their experiences under British control and tutelage) viewed themselves as English and superior to their Hispanic neighbors. By contesting the process of state formation, the AfroCaribbean populations of Belize and Nicaragua showed how larger political and economic structures impacted daily life for these populations and how, in turn, the Garifuna and Creoles influenced the political, economic, social, and cultural institutions. These struggles are still very much prevalent in present-day Nicaragua. These struggles are most evident in the participation of the Afro-Caribbean community in the civil war that resulted in the overthrow of Zelaya, and later to the contra’s war against the Sandinistas. The Afro-Caribbean community on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast had a long history of being the center of contested struggles between empires seeking to control their land and its rich economic potential. When Nicaragua gained control of the Atlantic coast, policymakers in Managua confronted a foreign land. After centuries of British cultural influence, Afro-Nicaraguans resented their Spanish-speaking officials and the government in Managua. At first, Managua tried to culturally incorporate the Mosquito Coast but found resistance among the Afro-Caribbean. This resistance has made Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast a unique window with which to explore larger issues of state and nation formation within the context of the Atlantic World. The Mosquito Coast was at the center of various power struggles between Spain, Britain, the United States, and Nicaraguan authorities. The uniqueness of their culture (funneled through centuries of British influence), and the region’s economic importance made certain that the www.abc-clio.com

Atlantic coast would be at the center of intense political intrigue. History has shown that Afro-Nicaraguans have taken an active part in determining their own destiny, oftentimes resulting in armed struggle to maintain their autonomy. (They have been very successful in this regard as the Mosquito Coast, formerly known as the Department—or state—of Zelaya has been divided into two autonomous regions.) Afro-Nicaraguans were an important factor in the overthrow of Zelaya in 1909 and in the civil war that engulfed Nicaragua in the 1980s. The experiences of Afro-Nicaraguans thus show the lasting impact the African Diaspora had in the process of state and nation making in their new homelands. More than passive recipients of historical processes, Afro-Caribbeans in Nicaragua were active participants who helped shape the modern Nicaraguan state. Alberto Nickerson See also: Monroe Doctrine References Berman, Karl. Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United States since 1848. Boston: South End Press, 1986. Brooks, Ronald. Notes on the History of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast. Managua, Nicaragua: URACCAN (University of the Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua), 1999. Burns, E. Bradford. Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798–1858. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Cruz, Arturo Nicaragua’s Conservative Republic, 1858–93. Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Dozier, Craig L. Nicaragua’s Mosquito Shore: The Years of British and American Presence. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Leiken, Robert S. Why Nicaragua Vanished: A Story of Reporters and Revolutionaries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

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822 NIGER Millet, Richard. Guardians of the Dynasty: A History of the U.S. Created Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua and the Somoza Family. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1977. Walker, Thomas W. Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003.

NIGER This landlocked country in West Africa has a population of approximately 11,361,000 people, all of whom live in the capital and scattered oases. More than two-thirds of Niger is uninhabited desert. It was the source of slaves in the early days of the European slave trade. Captives were brought down the Niger River for sale to European slavers on the West African coast. Later, exploration of Niger and the Niger River would be significant to African Americans when the Niger Valley Exploring Party, which included Martin R. Delany, a black nationalist who had founded the first black newspaper west of the Alleghany Mountains and was a strong advocate of black emigration, sought possible settlements for African Americans. Their explorations would eventually lead to the establishment of Liberia. The French gradually took control of land east of the Niger River by signing treaties with rulers of individual ethnic states in the 1890s, and creating Niger in 1911. For 11 years, the area was under military rule, and in 1922 became the French colony of Niger. The French lieutenant governor from 1932 until 1933 was Théophile Antoine Pascal Tellier, who had come from the West Indies where he had been governor of Guadeloupe from 1929 to 1931. In the early twentieth century, U.S. missionaries became active in the region, www.abc-clio.com

with the Sudan Interior Mission starting work in Niger in 1924 and the Evangelical Baptist Missions in 1929. Ties with the United States would grow significantly afterward. In 1958 Niger voted to remain autonomous within the French Community, and became independent on August 3, 1960, as the Republic of Niger. The first president, Hamani Diori, ruled the country for the next 14 years. The United States immediately recognized the new country, appointing R. Borden Reams as their first ambassador. From the 1980s Niger’s main exports were uranium, coal, and gold. It rapidly became the fifth-largest uranium producer in the world. In the run-up to the U.S.led invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was much controversy in the United States over claims made by President George W. Bush that Iraq was sourcing supplies of uranium from Niger, which, although found to be based on faulty intelligence, focused U.S. and international attention on the country. Justin Corfield See also: Delany, Martin Robinson; French Empire; Liberia Reference Decalo, Samuel. Historical Dictionary of Niger. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997.

NIGERIA Nigeria is the largest country in West Africa, a land of diverse cultures, and a nation of many peoples with rich religious traditions. The name Nigeria was given to the country by the British Lord Luggard’s wife in 1914. Nigeria consists of different peoples and cultures, including the primary ethnic groups: the Fulani-Hausa, the

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Yorubas, and the Igbos, among many others. Nigeria is located in West Africa and bordered in the north by Niger, in the south by Gulf of Guinea, in the west by Benin, and in the east by Cameroon and Chad. Its present population is about 132 million within an area of 356,669 square miles (572,926 kilometers). Its climate varies from area to area and generally there are dry and wet seasons with different temperatures too. Nigerians speak different languages, among which are English, the official language, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. There are many other dialects. Nigerian currency is called Naira. Major holidays in Nigeria are New Year’s Day, Good Friday and Easter, Eid a-Fitr and Eid al-Kabir (Muslim festivals), Independence Day, and Christmas Day.

Government Nigeria is a federal republic. It won its independence from Britain in 1960 and became a republic in 1963. It has 36 states with a federal capital at Abuja. Nigeria has a long and rich history that goes back more than 3,000 years. It boasted major empires in Africa with very rich traditions and cultures. Among its past empires were Oyo, Igbo, Bornu-Kanem, and Hausa-Fulani. Each empire had its distinctive administrative structure and system of governance. In 1914, the British merged the empires and formed a cohesive government known as Nigeria. The integration has not been successful, in part because the country was divided into states after independence. A citizen of one state cannot become a governor or senator in another state. Hence, the sense of unity or patriotism among all Nigerians is always challenged. www.abc-clio.com

Religion Although Nigeria claims to be a secular state, religious issues permeate all aspects of Nigerians’ private and public lives. Religion shapes both local and federal policies to a large extent. Nigeria has three major religions: Islam, which is predominant in the north; Christianity, which is predominant in the east and many parts of the west; and African indigenous religions, which have minority followers in many parts of Nigeria. Muslims compose about 48 percent, Christians 40 percent, and African traditional and other religions 12 percent. Both Christianity and Islam are perceived as intolerant religions because of their contempt for indigenous religions, which they arrogantly label as paganism. Christianity and Islam are exclusive religions; they rival one another and occasionally resort to violence to achieve their missionary goals. The adherents of indigenous religions are the smallest group, yet they influence Islam and Christianity because many people resort to these indigenous beliefs during the time of crisis. One of the causes of tension between Muslims and Christians is the introduction and application of the Shari’ah (Islamic law) in 12 northern states. The issue of the application of Islamic law is yet to be resolved. There are other important causes of unrest in Nigeria, including like tribal and ethnic crisis, corruption, and unemployment.

Politics Politically, Nigeria is a recovering democratic country. It witnessed 29 years of brutal military dictatorship, from 1966 to 1979 (under four different military dictators who were either deposed and/or

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killed) and again from 1983 to 1999 (under three different military dictators who were deposed or resigned). Nigeria has also endured many years of corrupt civilian rule. After its independence in 1960, it went through many changes of government, from the British parliamentary system to the American presidential democratic system, from civilian to military dictatorial rule, until May 29, 1999, when the people chose an elected leader, Olusegun Obasanjo. Under his leadership, Nigeria became relatively stable and peaceful, even though there are occasional religious turbulence, ethnic crisis, civil demonstrations, and cult disturbances in colleges all over the country. The government tries to solve these crises amicably, but its failure to tackle the roots of the problems hampers its efforts. The roots of the problems are religious intolerance among the Muslims and Christians, the high rate of unemployment, mismanagement of the country’s resources, and corruption of the elected leaders. Nigeria had and continues to have a good relationship with its neighbors, particularly with African countries. It maintains trade relationships with nearly all countries of the world and has embassies in those countries. It has membership status in many international organizations and leads the world in international peacekeeping. Unfortunately, Nigeria has a bad image abroad due to the corruption of a few Nigerians who engage in fraud and international drug trafficking. Nigeria has produced great leaders who have contributed to its development. Among them are Sir Abu Bakar Tafawa Balewa, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Major General Muhammad Muritala, and former president Olusegun Obasanjo.

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Economy Nigerians are very hard-working people who believe strongly in capitalism. They are naturally entrepreneurial, especially the Yorubas and Igbos, and engage in all types of businesses and travel to any part of the world for trade. Women are the backbone of business in Nigeria because they control the local markets. However, they are underrepresented in the public sector and in politics despite representing more than 50 percent of the voters in the 2003 general election. Economically, Nigeria is extremely rich in natural and human resources but is laden with corruption and mismanagement. Nigeria is the sixth-largest crude oil producer in the world and 90 percent of its budget comes from oil revenue. Before the oil boom of 1973, Nigeria’s economy relied exclusively on agriculture; afterward it switched its reliance to the exportation of oil. Lack of adequate technological development has made Nigeria an underdeveloped country despite its abundant resources. The past civilian and military governments did not invest in the infrastructure of the country during the oil boom. Major public needs like electricity, good roads, and communications were not developed. Since the election of President Obasanjo, inroads have been made to develop the Nigerian economy by combating government corruption and mismanagement and building the infrastructure through foreign investment. The communication system has been improved the communication system and many government companies privatized to boost their productivity and efficiency.

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Education Nigerians value education and the nation has produced many scholars, educators, and artists in all fields of science, technology, law, religion, history, engineering, and so forth. Nigerian professors, doctors, artists, educators, and lawyers are all over the world. Even though there is still some illiteracy in Nigeria, the government continuously strives to provide free primary and secondary education for its citizens. Nigeria today has more than 48 universities, hundreds of technical schools, colleges of education, polytechnics, and thousands of elementary and high schools with more than 18 million students in schools and colleges in the year 2000. Nigerians begin their informal education at home and formal education at age six at school. They spend six years in elementary, three years in junior high, and three years in senior high. Interested students pursue higher education at one of the government or private universities, which lasts for four years. Every graduate student from university enrolls in one year of national youth community service after graduation. Many Nigerians study abroad, and after completion of their degrees, some return home while others stay abroad to work.

Culture Nigeria is a country of diverse cultures. Each ethnic group boasts its own culture and way of life. Although these cultures are similar, and sometimes identical, each has its own unique features that may not be shared by others. For instance, the sculptures of the Nok people of Jos Plateau and Zaria are a distinct art form that is collectively admired by Nigerians,

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as are the bronze works of the Yoruba in Ile-Ife and Benin. Each group maintains unique ceremonies. Egungun, Gelede, Bori, and other entertainments like mask, Sakara, Fuji, Apala dances, and boju-boju (“cover the eyes”games) are sources of pride and amusement for the spectators. In addition, marriage, birth, and funeral ceremonies in each community differ from one another. Nigerians make decorative carvings from wood, calabash (from Oyo), stone, ivory, and bones. These art forms are found in many regions and reflect ancient traditions of Nigeria. Furthermore, some Nigerians have received international recognition for drama and literature. Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986 for The Lion and the Jewel, and Chinua Achebe has had his novel Things Fall Apart translated into many languages. Yushau Sodiq See also: Economic Community of West African States; Efik; Ekwensi, Cyprian Odiatu Duaka; Emecheta, Buchi; Fulani; Hausa; Igbo; Kanem-Bornu Empire; Nigeria, Drama in; Nwapa, Flora; Oil; Okri, Ben; Religion (Africa); Soyinka, Wole; Yoruba References Crowder, Michael Ajayi. A Short History of Nigeria. New York: Frederich A. Praeger, 1966. Lawal, Nike S, Sadiku, Matthew N. O., Dopamu, Ade. Understanding Yoruba Life and Culture. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004. Okehie-Offoha, M. U., and Sadiku, M. N. O. Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Nigeria. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996. Owhonda, John. Nigeria: A Nation of Many Peoples. Parsippany, NJ: Dillon Press, 1998. Schwarz, Frederick A. O. Nigeria: The Tribes, the Nation, or the Race—the Politics of Independence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965.

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826 NIGERIA, DRAMA IN

NIGERIA, DRAMA IN The origin and development of drama in Nigeria has global political and cultural importance since it bears connections to playwrights of the African Diaspora. Drama in Nigeria has its origins from the indigenous traditional practices of the people and has developed through three major phases: the traditional/oral, the popular/itinerant, and the modern/written stages. These dramatic phases cohere with the developmental stages of the Nigerian nationhood— precolonial/preindependence, postindependence, and the modern/contemporary Nigeria. Even though these dramatic phases can be studied independently, they are in an intricate, symbiotic relationship with one another, indicating a continuum from the early to the contemporary times. Easily a microcosm of drama in Africa, Nigerian drama serves as a model to dramatic practices and norms in other parts of Africa. There are certain beliefs and values that underlie and inform Nigerian drama. They include the fact that all the people come from a common ancestor, the belief in the central unifying factor called tradition, the recognition of the sacredness of man and the immutability of humanity, and the argument that an umbilical cord links the worlds of the unborn, the living, and the dead. These beliefs and values constitute a corpus by which the three phases of Nigerian drama relate and are identified and they set guidelines for the exponents and practitioners over the years. Traditional drama in Nigeria, being a derivation of the folk tradition and practiced by people who, though not literate, yet are revered as the custodians of the community’s spiritual essence, is an integration of the religious and the secular. It delineates ethical codes for the people and manifests www.abc-clio.com

in rituals such as sacrifices, initiation, birth, funeral, mourning, and circumcision rites and festivals like coronation, seasonal and occupational celebrations, dances, songs, tales, mimes, and music. Its mode of transmission is oral and its setting is natural and realistic, with high audience participation. Toward the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, organized troupes, called traveling or itinerant theatres, emerged primarily in the southwestern (Yoruba) region of Nigeria and attached professionalism to the art. Pioneered by the Alarinjo Theatre, and later by The Popular Theatre of Hurbert Ogunde, itinerant theater entertained audiences mainly in the king’s palace or court. The texts embodied the praises of genealogies of royals. The traveling theatre employed the language of the people, incorporating traditional speech items and nuances into the dramatic performances. Thus it gained high popularity among the people. Between the nineteenth and midtwentieth centuries, Nigeria was colonized by Britain and the Christian religion imposed on its people. The religion condemned all forms of traditional drama as heathen, an entertainment that would only lead people to hell. As a result, dramatic practices were abandoned by many Nigerian artists as the dominant trend was to become converted to Christianity. However, in the 1940s Ogunde introduced a unique concept that involved the careful use of the Christian rhythm to render traditional songs. Having been a church choirmaster, Ogunde used traditional musical instruments to accompany familiar Christian songs and introduced into his theater Western theatrical features such as scripting of the lines, the use of a set stage, and microphones. Ogunde’s theater was

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greatly concerned with the sociopolitical issues that were then threatening the corporate status of the post-independence Nigeria. It actually marked the beginning of what is today called the Modern or Contemporary Nigerian Drama. There were various types of performances in southern and southeastern Nigeria, but the north could hardly develop a dramatic form, since the spirit of Islam rejects all forms of imitative and representative art. Modern drama in Nigeria emerged in credible forms in the 1960s when many Nigerians who studied abroad were returning home. These scholars, influenced by ancient European literary features, which they studied in colleges, applied them in their creative works. A major exponent, Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature, pioneered modern theater development in Nigeria. According to Osofisan, “Before Soyinka, there was no professional theatre company to undertake the production of plays in English” (154). While Soyinka’s pedestal was the University of Ibadan School of Drama, of which he was chair, Ola Rotimi’s was the University of Ife. Other pioneer Nigerian playwrights include J. P. Clark and Wole Ogunyemi. Their plays served as a medium for sociopolitical criticism, the condemnation of retrogressive and debilitating norms and trends, as well as the projection of an ideal society. Zulu Sofola was the first female Nigerian dramatist; her Wedlock of the Gods was published in 1972. There are generations of playwrights in Nigeria. The general characteristic among them is the careful integration of elements of traditional life into drama. The elements—songs, myths, legends, dances, incantations, chanting, rituals, tales, and www.abc-clio.com

traditional speech devices—are the forms through which drama is made manifest. The close relationship between human life and drama justifies the critical relevance of drama among Africans. The incidence of these elements in the dramatic practices of Africans in the Diaspora is therefore explicable. It is apparent that the African slaves in the New World went with their African traditional beliefs and practices— the songs, tales, dances, celebrations, folk beliefs and myths, and rituals. These have been handed down through the generations of blacks in the New World and account for the similarity in the themes deployed by playwrights in Africa and the New World. The theaters of Derek Walcott in the Caribbean, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and the contemporary Suzan-Lori Parks and others in America, reveal a meticulous transfer of African dramatic modes into modern American theater. Obviously, in spite of their forceful dislocation and slavery, the African slaves succeeded in sustaining their African heritage and practices. This connectedness stresses the common background of black people the world over. Ini Uko See also: Folklore, African; Hansberry, Lorraine; Hughes, Langston; Nigeria; Soyinka, Wole; Walcott, Derek; Yoruba References Akporobaro, F. B. O. Introduction to African Oral Literature. Lagos, Nigeria: Princeton Publishing, 2004. Osofisan, Femi. “Tiger on Stage: Wole Soyinka and Nigerian Theatre.” In Theatre in Africa. Edited by Oyin Ogunba and Abiola Irele. Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1978. Soyinka, Wole. “Theatre in African Traditional Cultures: Survival Patterns.” In Modern African Drama. Edited by Biodun Jeyifo. New York: Norton & Co., 2002.

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828 NIGERIAN TRADITIONAL DANCES

NIGERIAN TRADITIONAL DANCES Nigerian dance combines cultural and artistic forms—religious and theatrical, visual and musical arts—that reflect and develop the diverse traditions of Nigeria. The diverse cultural characteristics of Nigeria are manifest in not only the more than four hundred languages and dialects spoken there but also in theatrical arts that are from nature and holistic in concept. A typical cultural performance is a symbiosis of dances, drama and music, and visual traditional arts and crafts. The crafts include costuming, carving, musical instrumentation, and craftsmanship. Traditional performing arts in Nigeria are composed of both religious and theatrical elements, but historically, traditional dances are linked more closely to the traditional religious system. As a result, there are as many dances as there are gods and goddesses. But many dances also can trace their origin to occupational movements. Dances represent the manifest presence of Nigerian traditional performances because they have always been a very prominent feature of expression of a rich traditional repertoire across the diverse groups. Some Nigerian traditional dances show and possess unique characteristics, and at times they share identical characteristics with other dances of communities that are poles apart, stressing the concept of unity in diversity. However, whether unique or similar, certain characteristics have been observed representing the dominant movement styles of African, and by implication, Nigerian traditional dances. . . . the dominant movement styles include tilting of trunk, bent knees, angular arms, flat foot, earthbound movements, twisting of the waist, isolation of body parts,

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syncopated movements, acrobatic steps, expressive movements, shaking of the body (buttocks in female), improvisational movements resulting in poly-rhythmic movement style.” (Ugolo, 1998, p. 65)

Gelede Gelede is a sociocultural cult that represents the total and holistic nature of Nigerian theatrical performance. Gelede is one of the masking traditions (mask dramaturgy) of the Yorubas, which occurs mainly in the western coastal areas of Nigeria. Although it is holistic in context, dances form the climax of this rich theatrical performance. It is mainly entertainment in nature, but it still retains its socioreligious function of improving the lot of individuals. The dance may cleanse the society of pestilence, induce rain, enrich human fertility, or enlist the support of supernatural forces and the “powerful mother” in crucial times (e.g., wartime). The typical gelede dance performances consist of masked and unmasked dancers dancing side by side. The masked performers are two identical masquerades that dance in unison and also alternate to the Woro musical ensemble. The rhythm is peculiar; so also are the dances of both the masques and the male and female dancers. The movements vary, but the predominant one has to do with the wriggling of the entire body in a combination of fishlike and snakelike movements. Movement is punctuated with isolation of body parts to beats and other improvisational movements resulting in polyrhythmic movement style. A typical gelede ensemble is made up of eighteen members, including drummers, singers, and two or three masked dancers. The masked gelede dancer/performer is costumed beautifully. The costume comprises a

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painted wood carving communicating diverse messages and meanings, carved female breasts, and beautiful masquerade cloths, usually of variegated colors. Bangles made of brass or iron add to the beauty, as well as the music of the gelede. A nocturnal ceremony of “Efe,” an all-night concert or night of fun, is the climax of a typical gelede performance. The Efe male mask (the humorist) entertains the supernatural world and the general public with songs, poetry, dance, and satire. Gelede performance is highly rated among the Yorubas, to the extent that a proverb is devoted to it: “Oju ti o ri gelede ti ri opin iran,” meaning that an eye that begets a gelede performance has seen the ultimate in entertainment.

Swange Dance Swange is a dance of the Tiv people of the hinterland in northern Nigeria. Though dissimilar, it has identical choreographic structure with the coastal gelede. Swange dance steps include the vigorous twisting of the body in a snakelike form with expressive movements of the hands. This dance is accompanied by swange music produced by membrane drums, aero phone, and percussion musical instruments. Dancers are clad in white and black striped wrappers with white tops and wear anklets that produce sound to accompany the music.

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beads. The dancers stand in a straight line, holding white handkerchiefs in both hands, with beads on their necks, arms, and ankle. The ladies adorn their heads with beads in a hairdo called okunkun. The dancers move one leg and a hand at the same time and look at that direction (e.g., the left leg and the left hand to the left). At regular intervals, they squat slightly and shake the buttocks with their hands stretched out. The dancers wear the traditional attire of either white wrapper or the red velvet clothes; the women cover the body from the shoulder to the ankle while the men are well padded from the waist to appear as royal chiefs in the Obas palace. The musical ensemble is made up of metal gongs, membrane musical instruments, as well as some rattle guards (maracas).

Atilogu Dance The atilogu dance is indigenous to the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria. It consists of energetic movements that entail the effective use of the hand, leg, and waist, with the latter two most emphasized. Such dance vocabularies as hops, twist, jumps, turns, and shaking of the body in response to drumbeats are expressed in this dance. The musical ensemble includes big and small metal gongs, the wooden gong (ekwe), membrane drums, and traditional flute (ajah).

Ugho Dance

Bata Dance

Ugho is a royal ceremonial dance originally performed by both male and female members of the Benin royal family that later moved outside the royal courts. Except when performed in the palace by members of the royal family, female performers are banned from adorning their heads with the full royal hairdo decorated with coral

Bata dance is a very rigorous Yoruba dance executed with mathematically accurate expressive movements and accompanied with praise poems. There are as many as eight variants of this dance, the most prominent of which is the fast tempo gbamu. Bata can be claimed to be the source from which such popular Western “break” and “electric

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830 NOIRISME

shock” dances took their roots because of their identical features with bata. Bata music, which is produced by bata drums, is usually associated with the worship of Sango the Yoruba god of thunder. The ferocious sound of the beats and the rugged and intimidating shape of the instruments are in attunement with the ferocious disposition attributed to Sango in Yoruba history and mythology. The tempo of the dance is dictated by the lead drum (iya ilu), followed by the gentle caressing rhythmic sound of the small drum (omele abo), backed by the sharp sound of male or triple drums (omele ako or omele meta). A base drum (ijin) might be played to lessen the work of the lead drum.

The dancers representing two minor priestesses wear beads and rattles with bangles made of cowries, have their faces designed with native white chalk, and carry effigies of the goddess while holding two white horsetail flywhisks. The other dancers carry pots of glowing fire. Nigerian dances are as numerous as the ethnic diversity of the country and the above are just a few of the scores of other traditional dances still extant. While most of these dances often are performed outside their original context, their existence as traditional cultural entity is still retained and their rich traditional elements have survived adaptation. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley See also: Guinea Dance; Igbo; Music, African; Nigeria; Nigeria, Drama in; Yoruba References Enem, Edith. “Nigeria Dances” Nigeria Magazine Festival Issue, nos. 116–117 (1975): 68–115. “Gelede and Ife Festival of the Arts May 2005” (program of events). The Institute of Cultural Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, 2005. Ugolo, Chris. Introduction to Dance Choreography. Benin City, Nigeria: New Era Publications, 1998.

Imole Oloba Ritual Dance This dance is performed annually during the Oloba festival by the Yoruba people of AdoEkiti. Oloba is the goddess of fruitfulness, peace, and prosperity. About eight to twelve maiden initiates of the goddess perform it after a ritual preparation in the shrine. The lead performer, who represents the chief priestess, falls into a trance during the course of the dance while the other performers serve as chorus and dancers. Costumes depict the characters represented by each dancer. The veiled lead performer wears a beaded crown with a beaded bottle at its pinnacle. She puts on heavy coral beads from her neck to her breasts and around the waist as an ornamental short skirt over a cloth worn underneath. A breast band covers her body decorated with traditional white chalk, and she wears beaded bracelets on her wrists with metal rattles on her knees. She normally holds pigeons in both hands as a symbol of peace and progress. www.abc-clio.com

NOIRISME Noirisme (also known in Haiti as “Africanisme,” “Haïtienisme,” or “négritude”) is a Haitian black nationalist movement that emerged during the first U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), but many of its roots lay in Haiti’s racial past. Racial relations have long proved contentious in Haiti. During colonial times (1492–1791), the white minority (Spanish, then French) enslaved Haiti’s majority (Amerindian, then African). A few months after Haiti obtained its independence in January 1804,

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Governor-General for Life Jean Jacques Dessalines ordered all whites to be executed, with the exception of non-French foreigners (Poles, Americans) and skilled individuals (doctors, priests). The white population in Haiti has been small ever since. Many Haitians complain that colonial domination was replaced by Western economic and military domination (the United States invaded Haiti in 1915 and 1994). Relations between Haitians of pure African descent (authentiques, or noirs, or nègres) and their lighter-skinned compatriots (mulâtres, or jaunes) have also been tense. Many mulattoes were free during colonial times and owned black slaves. During the war of independence, mulatto generals such as André Rigaud shifted alliances, and black generals such as Toussaint l’Ouverture sometimes fought them. After independence, mulattoes played the leading economic and political roles even when they did not occupy the presidency. Today, with the exception of some rich blacks (gros nègres), most rich Haitians are mulattoes. When the United States invaded Haiti in July 1915, ostensibly to bring an end to the country’s extreme political instability, Haiti became, in reality if not in name, a U.S. protectorate patrolled by U.S. Marines and a U.S.-trained constabulary, the gendarmerie. Americans and gendarmes forced Haitians to work for free on road improvement projects, a system reminiscent of slavery. U.S. occupation officers, all of them white, brought with them the racial prejudices prevalent at that time and frequently disparaged Haitian character (even mulattoes were treated as secondclass citizens). Two revolts led by the mostly black force of mercenaries and bandits www.abc-clio.com

known as cacos (1915, 1918–1920) failed to oust U.S. forces. During the latter, U.S. troops killed caco leader Charlemagne Masséna Péralte. Noirisme, the intellectual equivalent of Péralte’s military revolt, was a reaffirmation of Haitians’ love for their country, pride in their African heritage, and confidence that the country’s failures were accidental, not a product of a national and racial inferiority. In practical terms, noiristes sought to study the country’s African roots, including the French-African dialect (Creole), the Catholic-Animist religion (Voodoo), and popular folklore, all of which had been disparaged by foreigners and the European-trained mulatto elite as inferior, barbaric, and satanic. Jean Price-Mars, the most famous Haitian intellectual and noiriste, is best remembered for the influential Ainsi parla l’Oncle (1928), in which he accused the Haitian elite of looking up to European culture while denying Haiti’s African past. He also founded the Society of Haitian History and Geography (1922) and the Institute of Ethnology. Fellow ethnologists Lorimer Denis and François Duvalier founded the review Les griots in 1938. Price-Mars’ protégés, like Jacques Roumain and Jean Brierre, strove to create a genuinely Haitian literature. Roumain, whose world-famous Gouverneurs de la rosée was published in 1944, also founded the Revue indigène in 1927 to encourage the study of Haitian folklore. In parallel, Selden Rodman’s Renaissance in Haiti played a great role in popularizing Haitian art, once derided as naïve in foreign countries. Even though the bulk of the noiriste movement must be associated with the first U.S. occupation of Haiti and its immediate aftermath, a mix of racial pride and Haitian nationalism has underpinned

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various regimes in Haiti’s history. Faustin Soulouque’s regime (r. Haiti 1847–1859) was one of them, as were those of François Duvalier (in power 1957–1971) and Jean-Bertrand Aristide (in power 1991, 1994–1996, 2001–2004). Other blacks inspired by Price-Mars and noirisme include Stokely Carmichael, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. Philippe R. Girard See also: Duvalier, François; Négritude; Péralte, Charlemagne Masséna; Price-Mars, Jean; Soulouque, Faustin; Voodoo References Antoine, Jacques C. Jean Price-Mars and Haiti. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1981. Shannon, Magdaline. Jean Price-Mars, the Haitian Elite, and the American Occupation, 1915–1935. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.

NON-ALIGNED MOVEMENT The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) emerged during the Cold War as a group of nations not formally allied with either the United States or the Soviet Union and includes key nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The movement was founded at a summit meeting in Belgrade in 1961 to address concerns of third world nations such as decolonization, human rights, and disarmament. Today, the NAM consists of over 100 nations that continue to discuss issues of polarization between the global North and South.

Origins of the NAM The 1950s and 1960s were a time of increasing interest in regional and global cooperation among emerging nations, and www.abc-clio.com

were marked by the formation of regional groups such as the Organization of American States and the Organization of African Unity. Other more expansive regional groupings, such as the 1955 Bandung Conference, brought together African and Asian states to discuss colonialism, economic development, and world peace. The sense of community among emerging nations engendered at the Bandung conference helped lead to the formation of the NAM. The founding figures of the movement were Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, along with Indonesian president Sukarno and Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. Yugoslavia, India, and Egypt had worked closely together since two formative events of 1956, the Suez Canal crisis and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary. These events encouraged Yugoslavia, India, and Egypt to collaborate in the face of superpower interests. Another factor leading to the emergence of the NAM was the rapid decolonization of Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The year 1960 has often been called the “Year of Africa,” since in this year 16 African states became independent and joined the United Nations. This year also marked the emergence of apartheid into global consciousness, when South African police fired into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in Sharpeville, killing 69 and leading to international condemnation of the country’s systematic segregation and oppression. In addition, war in Algeria was ongoing, and the government of the Congo had rapidly broken down within a few weeks of the granting of independence. Superpower support of Congolese factions, along with events such as the shooting

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down of an American U2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, led to heightened Cold War tensions in which it seemed increasingly difficult to avoid choosing sides in the Cold War. In this Cold War environment, Tito visited Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, and the United Arab Republic (later Egypt and Syria) from February 13 to April 23, 1961, to garner support for a conference of states amenable to maintaining their own national identities and interests. From September 1 to 6, 1961, the leaders of 12 Asian countries, eleven African countries, Cuba, and Yugoslavia met in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, at the first NAM summit.

Objectives of the NAM The goals of the NAM, as articulated at the summit, were both economic and political. Economically, these nations wanted effective international cooperation and economic development (discussed in terms of the unequal balance of trade between the North and South). Politically, the states desired independence for colonized peoples and international peace and security. Specific matters discussed included disarmament, self-determination, Palestinian rights, and condemnation of apartheid. Neutrality, or nonalliance with either the United States or Soviet Union, was seen as the way to achieve these goals. In the 1960s and 1970s, it seemed possible that the nonaligned states could form a power bloc challenging the dominance of the superpowers. In the United Nations General Assembly, nonaligned nations often voted as a bloc. Contradictions, however, existed within the movement. Some nonaligned countries were in practice aligned with one of the superpowers, as in www.abc-clio.com

the case of Cuba’s alignment with the Soviet Union. The NAM’s positions were not always consistent; while it advocated global disarmament, in the 1970s nonaligned countries such as Cuba and Egypt were among the top weapons exporters in the third world. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 split the movement. Afghanistan, a NAM member, was occupied by one of the superpowers. The NAM’s rotating leadership at that time rested with Cuba, and the movement’s sixth summit had just been held in Havana. In the United Nations General Assembly, the majority of NAM countries voted to condemn the occupation and call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Cuba and a dozen other NAM members opposed the condemnation.

The NAM Today Since 1970, member nations of the NonAligned Movement have met at a summit approximately every three years, often in Southeast Asia, but also in the African and American states of Algeria, Egypt, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Colombia, and Cuba. Some NAM members have left the movement since the end of the Cold War, yet today NAM nations make up almost twothirds of the United Nations’ membership and represent over one-half of the world’s population. While the NAM did not emerge as a viable third bloc acting outside the bipolarity of the Cold War world, the economic and political objectives of the NAM have consistently focused on promoting development and opposing neocolonialism. Patricia G. Clark References Jackson, Richard L. The Non-Aligned, the UN, and the Superpowers. New York: Praeger, 1983.

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834 NOTTING HILL CARNIVAL IN LONDON Kumar, Satish. “Nonalignment: International Goals and National Interests.” Asian Survey 23, no. 4 (April 1983): 445–462. Willetts, Peter. The Non-Aligned Movement: The Origins of a Third World Alliance. New York: Nichols Publishing, 1978.

NOTTING HILL CARNIVAL IN LONDON The Notting Hill Carnival is a Londonbased celebration of African folk memory, rooted in Trinidadian Carnival and representing diverse and multicultural identities. Notting Hill Carnival—originally transported to London by Afro-Caribbeans, mostly Trinidadians—takes place the last Monday in August, over a bank holiday weekend. What began as a nostalgic celebration of folk memory has proliferated to such an extent that it now has the potential to be used as a model for multicultural integration and instruction in other large European cities. Although this carnival has been acknowledged as “Europe’s largest street festival,” it is not celebrated as national culture in London or Europe. It takes place primarily in Notting Hill, in London’s peripheries—or out of urban space. Yet it transforms those very margins into center spaces, which paradoxically reclaims another type of identity for AfroCaribbean and other marginal groups. Furthermore, the carnival has contributed to London’s image as a world city because of the economic boost it provides through tourism and its highly professional aesthetic content jointly facilitated by carnival artists from London’s different multiethnic groupings. Notting Hill Carnival is rooted in Trinidadian Carnival: African slaves publicly

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celebrated emancipation in 1834 by taking to the streets, reinstituting their African cultural forms yet simultaneously adopting European festival forms. This historical legacy was transplanted to the global city of London when West Indian migrants began arriving in London in the early 1850s. However, the literature is sparse and contradictory regarding the actual genesis of the Notting Hill Carnival. Stuempfle states that as early as 1951, a group of 11 steel band players, the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra, was invited from Trinidad and Tobago to represent Trinidad by participating in the Festival of England (1995, p. 94). This festival engendered the space for the steel band to become a dominant art form in “Caribbean Britain,” since it created the possibility not only for homesick Trinidadians to display Trinidadian culture but also to give public prominence to steel band as a Caribbean musical form in Britain. This was further developed by Claudia Jones, a black Trinidadian writer and activist, who organized dances and parties at her home in Notting Hill. Trinidadians continued to come together, to drink rum, and “beat pan.” The creation of “rum shop culture,” in the late 1950s, at St. Pancreas, marks the genesis and the official birthplace of carnival in Britain. The 1960s saw the carnival adopting other features. As early as 1964, a social worker invited the steel band players to participate in the “Notting Hill Festival.” Notting Hill, a poor, migrant slum, adjacent to the wealthy streets of Kensington, with their “place-style” houses and expensive shops, was to become the official site for the celebration of carnival. In 1965, Notting Hill Carnival appeared in this area for the first time,

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although there was no financial support from the prestigious Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for this migrant and other lower-class peoples’ street festival. Rhaune Lazlett, a London-born woman of Amerindian and Russian descent, organized this multiethnic community event. Russell Henderson and other Trinidadians, all members of TASPO (Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra) took to the streets with a few masqueraders to celebrate this community event in Trinidadian style. In this way the steel band reclaimed public space for itself in Britain, thereby placing the carnival at Notting Hill, and initiating Notting Hill Carnival, as it is known today. At the beginning of the 1970s there were growing racial tensions between the police and Afro-Caribbean youths living in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, especially during the carnival celebrations. This hostility culminated in the race riots at Notting Hill. Numerous investigations revealed not only opposition from the authorities but the more serious problem of cultural fragmentation within the different Caribbean groupings, and the clash between black British-born Jamaican youths, who introduced reggae music to the carnival. Reggae music is associated with Rastafarianism while soca music is overtly associated with Trinidadian Carnival’s diverse forms of celebration. With this cultural fragmentation, Notting Hill Carnival began to experience a slow transformation from its initial traditional, Trinidadian Caribbean forms of celebration into a transnational, global site of struggle that was culturally different and differentiated. Nonetheless, the official threat to remove the carnival from the streets reverberated deeply among these groups, with the

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carnival providing the forum for these various groups to coalesce. This coming together facilitated a marking out and a shaping of new collectivities and multiple ethno-Caribbean identities in the British mainstream context. Notting Hill Carnival, although becoming a highly politicized event, assumed other features. In 1978 a commission was formed to develop and promote the carnival, to raise its profile as a multidiversified, holistic art form embodying dance, music, theater, as well as all the visual arts. At the start of the 1980s, the carnival’s reputation began to change as other celebratory forms were introduced. The addition of sound systems created publicity for Carnival, so that by 1986 a large number of white British youths attended. This changeover happened as a result of the popularity of Arrow’s calypso song “Hot Hot Hot,” since it introduced the white British population to soca music from Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival. Black Caribbean displaced culture began its slow trek out of its urban space to the center of global society in London. The presence of the white youth population also impacted the carnival in other ways. Jamaicans were delegated a special space to play their Jamaican music, so that they no longer formed a part of the parade route. The organizers for masquerade bands developed a special route. Carnival artists were invited to develop an education program for schools to depict the culture of carnival and carnival arts. Artists taught steel band, calypso, and soca music and costume-making skills in schools. Carnival at the end of the 1980s was one of the most successful for the police, schools, and the organizers.

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The 1990s saw economic development of the Notting Hill Carnival. As early as 1995, the carnival became known as The Lilt Notting Hill Carnival sponsored by CocaCola. In an attempt to raise the national profile of the carnival, the Arts Council of Britain provided financial support in collaboration with Roehampton Institute, London, to develop and compile a publicly accessible National Carnival Database of textual and visual information. The council also provided support to carnivalists. Notting Hill Carnival, enacted out of place in the urban metropolitan setting, has paradoxically transformed its urban place into a highly politicized space that has facilitated the actual development of a culture of carnival in the United Kingdom. This model has been used in many other cities in Britain as well as other European countries such as Sweden, Rotterdam, Greece, Tenerife, and Paris. The German Carnival of Cultures, celebrated in Berlin, Bielefeld, and Hamburg, is one example of how Notting Hill Carnival has been utilized as a multicultural, multidiversified form of celebration in a homogenous society. Patricia Alleyne-Dettmers See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Calypso; Jones, Claudia; Reggae; Reggae, African References Alleyne-Dettmers, Patricia T. Carnival: The Historical Legacy. London: Arts Council of England, 1996. Cohen, Abner. Masquerade Politics: Explorations in the Structure of Urban Cultural Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Jackson, Peter. “Street Life: the Politics of Carnival.” Society and Space 6 (1998): 213–227. Stuempfle, Stephen. The Steelband Movement: The Forging of a National Art in Trinidad & Tobago. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

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NOVA SCOTIA, AFRICAN AMERICAN DIASPORA IN The African American Diaspora in Nova Scotia is the migration, voluntary and involuntary, of blacks from the United States to this British North American colony during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when two separate African American migrations—black Loyalists and black refugees—took place. By 1784, following the American Revolutionary War, 3,500 black Loyalists had migrated to Nova Scotia and, in addition, hundreds of slaves were brought to the colony by their white Loyalist owners. The black Loyalists received small allocations of land in a number of widely separated locations (the largest population concentration was in Birchtown on the colony’s south shore) and some of them endured racial violence in 1784 as local whites attacked blacks for accepting lower wages from employers. They faced discrimination in terms of employment and an unfair judicial system. In search of better opportunities, nearly 1,200 left for Sierra Leone in 1793 with the aid of British abolitionist John Clarkson. Under similar circumstances during the War of 1812, 2,000 black refugees migrated to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Beset by poverty, government inaction, and the hostility of the local white population, the refugees were forced into menial labor jobs while attempting to farm unfertile land. Both the Loyalists and the refugees came north because of British military proclamations offering freedom, risking their lives in escaping from slavery and fighting for the British during the wars. Yet there is one important difference between these groups. Unlike the leadership of the black Loyalists, the refugee elite opted to stay in Nova Scotia. Thus, despite numerous offers

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from the colonial government, 94 percent of the refugee population remained in Nova Scotia. It is important to understand the black Loyalists and the black refugees in the context of the African American Diaspora. These migrants brought many of their experiences and cultural values to Nova Scotia, such as African churches, the Gullah language, burial ceremonies, and cooking styles. Moreover, African Nova Scotians were keenly aware of events in Afro-America. For example, although slavery had ended in Nova Scotia in the early nineteenth century, the black population founded the African Abolition Society in 1846. This society’s mission focused on the plight of long-lost relatives and friends still laboring in Georgia, Maryland, and Virginia. As events unfolded during the American Civil War, some African Nova Scotians attempted to aid the cause of freedom through service as seamen. The linkages between Afro-Nova Scotia and AfroAmerica continued throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century in at least three ways. First, preachers from southern and northern states plied their trades in Nova Scotia’s black churches. Second, after the Civil War, African Nova Scotians migrated to New England, generally and specifically to Boston, in search of better economic opportunities. Lastly, William H. Golar, born during the mid-nineteenth century in Nova Scotia to African American parents, moved to North Carolina and eventually became a professor and later president of Livingston College in North Carolina. Harvey Amani Whitfield See also: Birchtown; Blucke or Bleucke or Bluck, Stephen; Diaspora, Demography of; Gullah

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References Walker, James. “The Establishment of a Free Black Community in Nova Scotia, 1783–1840.” In The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays, edited by Martin Kilson and Richard Rotberg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Whitfield, Harvey Amani. Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860. Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006.

NOVA SCOTIA, BLACK REFUGEES IN The black refugees were American slaves who migrated to Nova Scotia during and after the War of 1812. These African Americans were primarily from the Tidewater Chesapeake region and the Georgia Sea Islands. During the conflict, British ships regularly raided the American coastline in hope of encouraging slaves to abscond from their owners. In April 1814, Admiral Alexander Cochrane issued a proclamation promising settlement in British colonies to any Americans willing to switch sides. This promise resulted in the moderate trickle of escaped slaves becoming a virtual flood as nearly 3,500 slaves fled to British ships. Of that total, over 2,000 had arrived on the shores of Nova Scotia by the end of 1818. Some 400 of these people went to New Brunswick. The remaining 1,600 settled in Nova Scotia. Once in Nova Scotia, the black refugees faced a host of problems, including but not limited to poverty, sickness, a postwar economic depression, and hostility from the local white population. Nova Scotia’s government was unprepared, and in some ways, unwilling to provide the refugees with the support that an indigent immigrant population required. For example, Lt. Governor John Sherbrooke failed to

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institute the imperial government’s provisions for the care of former slaves. Instead many refugees spent their first months in Nova Scotia searching for employment, shelter, and medical attention. Eventually, the colonial government decided to settle the refugees on 10-acre farms at Hammonds Plains and Preston (about 12 and 9 miles [20 and 15 kilometers] respectively from the colony’s urban center Halifax) in hopes that the new settlers would be able to provide for their own subsistence. Yet this plan was flawed from the beginning. The refugees were placed on some of the worst land in the colony and the small size of their lots made commercial farming impossible and subsistence farming tenuous. The refugees also obtained tickets of location as opposed to freehold grants. Thus they could not sell their land in order to raise capital to facilitate a move to another part of the colony. The failure of the government’s land settlement policy caused the refugees to seek government provisions as their small farms never produced enough foodstuffs to feed the communities. Indeed, throughout the refugees’ first 25 years in Nova Scotia, they faced starvation and malnutrition. Despite the challenges the refugees faced economically, they were able to create tightly knit communities that emphasized religious unity, as seen in their establishment of African churches, and mutual support in a racist environment that placed them at the lowest rung of the social ladder. In 1821, the government attempted to persuade the refugees to leave Nova Scotia for Trinidad. But barely 6 percent of them accepted this offer. They valued freedom in Nova Scotia despite the limitations placed on it by economic circumstances and white

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hostility. After 1821, the refugees developed separate black churches, political organizations, community associations, and an abolition society. Harvey Amani Whitfield See also: Diaspora, Demography of; Georgia’s Sea Islands; Nova Scotia, African American Diaspora in References Grant, John. The Immigration and Settlement of the Black Refugees of the War of 1812 in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Dartmouth, NS: Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, 1990. Whitfield, Harvey Amani. Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860. Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006.

NWAPA, FLORA (1931–1993) The Nigerian writer Flora Nwapa Nwakuche was an important participant in the global effort at redefining womanhood in the twentieth- and twenty-first century. She made history in 1966 when she published Efuru, the first novel in English by a woman from black Africa. With this groundbreaking act, she altered a tradition of publishing male-oriented and maleauthored works. She also rejected the established literature’s conventional representations of women in secondary, trivial, or unrealistic positions. Nwapa’s versatile and prolific output is evident in her literary achievements: six published novels, two collections of short stories, one collection of poetry, three plays, as well as 10 children’s books. Nwapa’s Efuru commenced the process of reconfiguring the African (and particularly Nigerian) female image from the distorted portrayals in male-authored literature.

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The monumental and unprecedented importance of this novel in world literature accounts for its translation into French (1986) and Dutch (1991). Except in some of her short stories and children’s stories, Nwapa assesses the woman within the context of marriage. This setting allows her to reaffirm support for the marriage institution as an authentic African value and offers a framework within which the woman encounters the most severe forms of dehumanization, subjugation, relegation, and injustice. Her major preoccupations include defending the integrity of Nigerian and African womanhood, projecting means of empowerment for women, and giving credibility to the female essence, while attempting not to denigrate men. She places the woman against the pervasive backdrop of feminism from which she weaves an authentic African dimension that is tangential to its Western counterpart. In her plays, as Emenyonu notes, “Nwapa portrays women who are no longer content to wait for their oppressors to bequeath freedom on their own (men’s) terms. . . . [She] shows flickers of hope, of restoration and of rebirth” (1998, p. 385). Nwapa demonstrates the prospect of resilience in different types of women—the traditional, Muslim, literate and illiterate, the primitive, as well as the sophisticated. She stresses that given the opportunity and right conditions, the Nigerian woman can excel, whether or not she is married or has children. Nwapa advocates female economic independence as a means for female transcendence of the immanent and age-long male sexism that preserves the deplorable status of the woman in a decadent, morally bereft society with a highly insensitive and corrupt leadership.

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Nwapa expresses her concern about the fate of the black woman, whether in Africa, North America, or the Caribbean in her writings. This preoccupation is also evident in literature of the black diaspora, indicating at its root the commonality of experience. Writers such as Alice Walker and Maya Angelou echo Nwapa in One Is Enough. In the novel, Amaka abandons her marriage to escape domestic violence and brutality, moves to the city, applies herself properly, becomes wealthy, and gives birth to a set of twin sons by a Reverend Father, thus debunking the notion of her barrenness. Her economic independence and critical impulse empower her to choose motherhood but not marriage, arguing that the latter and female debasement and enslavement should be mutually exclusive. The legacy of this writer can easily be deduced from her influence and facilitation of the enhanced ideas of female selfhood and assertiveness in Nigeria and all of Africa. Buchi Emecheta, perhaps the most prolific African female writer today, has said she was motivated to write after she read Nwapa’s Efuru. Nwapa’s publishing company, Tana Press, was the first to be established and run by a woman in Africa. It helped give voice to women who hitherto had no access to publishers, and also inspired Emecheta to establish her publishing company in England. Nwapa evolved themes in her writings that many other writers on both sides of the Atlantic are still developing. Ini Uko See also: Emecheta, Buchi; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, African; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, U.S.; Nigeria; Okri, Ben

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840 NWAPA, FLORA References Emenyonu, Ernest N. “Portrait of Flora Nwapa as a Dramatist.” In Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa: Critical and Theoretical Essays, edited by Marie Umeh. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998. Nwapa, Flora. Efuru. London: Heinemann, 1966.

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Nwapa, Flora. One Is Enough. Enugu: Tana Press, 1981. Nwapa, Flora. “Interview with Adeola James.” In In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk. London: Heinemann, 1990. Ojo-Ade, Femi. “Female Writers, Male Critics.” African Literature Today: Recent Trends in the Novel, no. 13 (1983): 158–179.

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O OBEAH Widely believed to have African origins, Obeah is a New World folk religion that employs sorcery, using spells as conduits of power. The word’s real origin is dubious, but the general consensus regarding its etymology points to the Egyptian word for serpent, oph. There is also thought to be a relationship between the term “obeah” and the Ashanti word Obayifo, meaning a wizard or witch. Prevalent in the West Indies, Obeah mingles shamanism and African spirituality along with Christianity, combining folk mystic and Spiritual Baptist religions. Its heterogeneous foundations also involve ancient powers of the occult passed down through oral traditions, as well as African factions of sorcery and voodoo. Obeah is practiced throughout the Caribbean and is most concentrated in areas populated by descendants of Ashantispeaking West African slaves. Various religious groups, such as Christians, Muslims, and Hindus, adopt aspects of Obeah into their own religious doctrines and texts, however. There is an emphasis on blood and sacrifice within Obeah, which leads many to assume that it dabbles only with evil and death. While many dismiss it as a pejorative form of witchcraft, practitioners see it as extending into the everyday

concerns of health, domesticity, and love, among other things. A religious leader, called an Obeahman or Obi, can be a woman or a man and is greatly respected. All spells or practices must occur through an Obeahman, who can divvy out spiritual help or harm. These shamans have abilities that stem from spiritual knowledge, and their powers extend from healing to casting/undoing spells to mediating between the living and dead. They often use elements from nature, including herbs and roots, to concoct a mixture for a spell. Obeah practitioners often wear charms to protect themselves from danger or evil. These are so widespread that the word “obeah” can actually be used to describe a charm or talisman that one wears in the practice of the religion. Along with actively engaging in casting spells and communicating with spirits, an Obeahman also serves as a religious advisor for people who desire insight into the everyday and/or the supernatural. Thus, Obeah reaches far beyond the evil, “black magic” stereotype imposed on it. This reductive view, however, is what caused colonial slave owners to forbid its practice. A report written in London in 1789 by a committee on trade and colonial plantations revealed the European anxiety

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over the etymology of Obeah regarding serpents. Called Ob or Aub in the Egyptian language, a serpent represented original sin and evil to European Christians. In the Bible, Moses does not even allow the Israelites to ask about Ob, the name connoting wizardry and sorcery. This 1789 report reduced Obeah merely to antiquated and distant African spiritual rituals that Jamaicans pretended to practice so as to threaten white rule. The colonialists accordingly regarded Obeah as an insubordinate or rebellious practice. After British colonialists noted the prominence of Obeah on their sugar plantations in the seventeenth century, they perceived its practice as a threat because of the potential for insurrection and retribution. Obeah provided for the slaves an interpersonal social order and an important sense of autonomy apart from their European masters. Wielding the ability to ensure personal self-interest through the manipulation of certain rituals and substances, slaves used their religious practices as fuel for resistance. In the Jamaican rebellion of 1760, for example, Obeah played an important role by providing inspiration to the leader Tacky, who claimed to have been aided by an Obeahman in the struggle. Because of the threat of uprisings, British slave masters did not hesitate to outlaw Obeah’s practice. After becoming illegal, Obeah rituals were forced to be performed in secret. They are still against the law today in most parts of the Caribbean, but they tend not to be prosecuted. Still, however, Obeahmen must work inconspicuously, usually holding individual consultations from their homes or from storefront spaces. Obeah is still not considered an “organized” religion

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like Haitian Voodoo and other Creole faiths because it does not have official or recognized rituals due to its legal marginalization. Despite European efforts to erase the religious rituals of the African Diaspora, however, Obeah still remains a powerful force among its practitioners throughout the Caribbean today. Merinda Simmons See also: Creole/Criollo; Religion (Africa); Slave Revolts/Maronnage; Slavery (History) References DeBarros, Juanita. “‘Setting Things Right’: Medicine and Magic in British Guiana, 1803–38.” Slavery & Abolition 25, no. 1 (2004): 28–50. Olmos, Margarite Fernandez, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gerbert. Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería, to Obeah and Espiritismo. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Olmos, Margarite Fernandez, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gerbert, eds. Sacred Possessions: Voodoo, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

O’FARRILL, ARTURO “CHICO” (1921–2001) Chico O’Farrill was one of the three great pioneers of Latin Jazz—along with Mario Bauzá and Machito (Francisco Grillo). O’Farrill was expected to go to law school, but his love for big band music made him take up the trumpet. He studied with Cuban classical composer Félix Guerrero and played with the Orquesta Bellemar. By 1948 he was in New York ghost composing for Gil Fuller, then wrote a hit for Benny Goodman (“Undercurrent Blues”). O’Farrill later wrote for Dizzy Gillespie, Noro Morales, Stan Kenton (“Cuban

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Episode”), and Machito. O’Farrill abandoned the trumpet and dedicated himself to composing, directing, and arranging. His “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite” (1950), a recognized masterpiece of the genre, was followed by a “Second Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite” (1952) and the “Manteca Suite” (1954), where he added three movements to the Gillespie-Pozo original to form the suite. From 1951 to 1954, he released six landmark recordings of Latin big band jazz, which included the Afro-Cuban suites, as well as “Cuban Blues.” Although composing prolifically and still popular in the fifties, O’Farrill moved to Mexico in 1957, where he composed “The Aztec Suite” (1959). His son Arturo, an accomplished pianist, was born in Mexico. O’Farrill returned to the United States in 1965, and from 1967 to 1994 did not record as a band leader, but instead arranged extensively for La Lupe, Cal Tjader, Count Basie, Ringo Starr, Clark Terry, Charles Mingus, David Bowie, and Gato Barbieri, among others, and also wrote music for TV commercials. O’Farrill made a comeback in the mid-nineties with three extraordinary recordings, the first being Pure Emotion (1995), which won a Grammy nomination, and features a twelve-minute version of “La Cucaracha” that mixes in Ellington with show tunes and twelve-tone passages. Heart of a Legend (1999) features vintage work in different Afro-Cuban genres and Carambola (2000) is a fitting end to a prolific career. With his classical training, O’Farrill showed a remarkable handling of form that always seemed effortless and elegant, buoyed by infectious rhythms. He was comfortable composing songs, cha-cha-chas, rumbas, guajiras, as well as blues and jazz, often

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going from genre to genre within a song almost unnoticeably. Featured in Fernando Trueba’s film on Latin Jazz, Calle 54, O’Farrill also wrote classical compositions, from symphonies to chamber pieces. Alan West-Durán See also: Bauzá, Mario; Cuban Music, African Influence in; Jazz and the Blues References Acosta, Leonardo. Raíces del Jazz Latino, Un Siglo de Jazz en Cuba. Baranquilla, Colombia: Editorial la Iguana Ciega, 2001. Chediak, Nat. Diccionario de Jazz Latino. Madrid, Spain: Fundación Autor, 1998. Roberts, John Storm. Latin Jazz: The First of the Fusions, 1880s to Today. New York: Schirmer Books Macmillan, 1999. Yarnow, Scott. Afro-Cuban Jazz. San Francisco, CA: Miller Freeman Books, 2000.

OGUN Ogun is a Yoruba divinity. He is god of metallurgy (iron) and war. He is an Orisha—an agent of God Almighty, Olodumare. In the Yoruba pantheon he is next to Orisha-nla, the archdivinity. He is the guardian spirit of all metalworkers, smiths, warriors, and all who deal in metallic objects. In modern Yoruba religious thinking, he is the guardian spirit of drivers, engineers, pilots, and all who operate machinery of one kind or another. In Yoruba religion and culture, there are two traditions regarding the person of Ogun. He is sometimes portrayed as a primordial deity created by Olodumare, or God Almighty. According to oral tradition Ogun—as a hunter divinity—came down from the heavens on a spider’s web in the company of other divinities to possess the earth. During their descent to earth, they became stuck in a forest. Ogun used his

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magical sword to clear the way and this enabled them to proceed. The Yoruba therefore regard Ogun as a problem-solver who clears the way for humans in all areas of life here on earth. According to another tradition, Ogun is one of the numerous sons of Oduduwa, progenitor of all Yoruba people. Thus, Ogun is a real human being transformed into a deified ancestor because he led an exemplary life; was elevated to a titan (as in Greek mythology) in the culture. He lived as a valiant warrior, inventor of agriculture, and founder of cities. Ferocious and unforgiving, Ogun had a propensity for carnage. He had a destructive temper; causing him to destroy the very things he created. His favorite drink was the palm wine. Legend has it that after a drunken and destructive binge, Ogun, filled with remorse, attempted to restore what he had destroyed. Symbolically Ogun represents the creative, benevolent, as well as the evil and destructive forces of nature. He can be compared to Cain of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Ogun shares the creative and destructive attributes of the Trimurti of Hindu tradition—Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. In Greco-Roman mythology, Ogun is the equivalent of Mars and Ares—god of war and iron. Devotees of Ogun must make ritual sacrifices to him before embarking on any project. This ritual usually includes a dog, a ram (ritually slaughtered), palm oil, palm wine, yams, and kola nuts. Ogun is also celebrated during annual festivals. In the Americas, Ogun is venerated in diverse forms in the Afro-Caribbean religions of the southern United States, Cuba (Santeria), Brazil (Candomble), and Haiti (Vodun; popularly known as Voodoo). The tradition of worshipping Ogun and other African deities in these places is clear www.abc-clio.com

evidence of the survival and resilience of African religions and cultures in the New World. ’BioDun J. Ogundayo See also: Orisha; Religion (Africa); Voodoo; Yoruba References Awolalu, Omosade J. Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites. London: Longman, 1979. Idowu, E. Bolaji. Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief. Brooklyn, NY: A & B Books, 1994. Ladele, T. A. A., Mustapha, Oyebamiji, Aworinde, I. A., Oyerinde, Oyedemi, and Oladapo, O. Akojopo Iwadii Ijinle Asa Yoruba. Lagos: Macmillan Nigeria, 1986. Lawal, Nike S., Sadiku, Matthew N. O., and Dopamu, Ade P., eds. Understanding Yoruba Life & Culture. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004. Oduyoye, Modupe. The Sons of the Gods and the Daughters of Men: An Afro-Asiatic Interpretation of Genesis 1–11. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983.

OIL Numerous sedimentary basins with oil deposits exist in the Americas and in Africa. The oil industry connects nations and is a focus of a great deal of economic and political activity in the modern era. Oil has a long history. In the middle of the 1800s, oil was found in western Pennsylvania. At first the oil was extracted from hand-dug shallow wells, a method used since ancient times. On August 27, 1859, the first cabledrilled well was brought in on Oil Creek, near Titusville, Pennsylvania, by Colonel Edwin Drake. The well initiated the modern oil industry. On January 10, 1901, a rotary drill on Spindletop, a small hill near Beaumont, Texas, brought in a gusher. Soon many new discoveries were made in Texas. The East Texas oil field (1930) was America’s largest.

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Many fields were also drilled in Oklahoma at places like Bartlesville and on Indian reservations. Other early important oil fields were in California. Great oil companies developed to find and sell oil—Standard Oil of California, Texaco, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Phillips Petroleum, and many others. Eventually oil was found in great abundance in Louisiana, Kansas, Michigan, and other states including Alaska. Canada’s oil industry began when Imperial Oil brought in its first well on February 13, 1947, at Leduc near Edmonton, Alberta. Oil has been found in a number of Canadian locations since. Oil has been discovered in several Latin American countries. Drilling produced the first commercial well in Mexico in 1901. By 1910 exploration defined several fields in central Mexico near Tuxpan. New sources have continued to be discovered. Since 1911 Mexico has been an oil exporter. Both Mexico and the United States have exploited oil under the Gulf of Mexico using offshore oil platforms and rigs. Venezuela’s first commercial well began producing in 1917. Lago de Maracaibo is the center of the oil industry. Farther south great deposits of oil have been found in Patagonia and in the Pampas and Grand Chaco regions of Argentina and Paraguay. After World War II oil was found in the Sahara Desert by French petroleum engineers. In Algeria, oil was found in the 1950s. Libyan oil fields were brought online soon afterward. The challenges of the Sahara desert have made locating and producing oil a challenge. Far more difficult have been the political struggles that have threatened peaceful business operations. In southern Tunisia, oil has been found in several locations including the Ghadames Basin. Northwestern and southeastern www.abc-clio.com

Egypt and Sudan have been the locations of new oil fields. The Niger River delta is the location of Nigeria’s oil industry. The first commercial well was drilled in 1956 at Oloibiri in present-day Bayelsa State. Likely African prospects are in the coastal regions of Western Sahara, the coastal regions of the Congo and Angola, and in southern Sudan and southward. The modern search for petroleum has intensified in Africa because of political instability in Venezuela. The industrial areas of the United States and Canada are in need of greater supplies of oil than are available domestically. However, the development of oil fields in Africa has in recent decades been accompanied by political tensions. Some of these have been caused by the failure of local elites to share oil revenues. In other cases the search for oil in Africa has environmentally impacted the local populations. The quest for oil by American oil companies has made many of the African oil fields into global hot spots. Andrew J. Waskey See also: Dutch Empire; Egypt; Mexico; Nigeria; Paraguay References Gantzel, Klaus Jurgen, and Helmut Mejcher. Oil, the Middle East, North Africa and the Industrial States: Developmental and International Dimensions. Paderborn, Germany: F. Schöningh, 1984. Owen, Edgar Wesley. Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum. Tulsa, OK: American Association of Petroleum Geologists, 1975.

OKIGBO, CHRISTOPHER (1932–1967) Christopher Okigbo was one of the leading poets of African decolonization. In the

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second half of the 1960s, as Africa began to truly understand the significance of its political and economic independence from colonial rule, and as Nigeria fell into a terrible civil war, the work of a generation of African poets—Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark, Kofi Awoonor, Lenrie Peters, Okot p’Bitek, Dennis Brutus, and Christopher Okigbo— announced a new and powerful voice in English poetry. Articulating the sensibility of a decolonized Africa, Okigbo composed a poetry that skillfully blended European and African narrative themes and forms. It was an uncompromising and difficult poetry that forced American and European scholars to reconsider the manner in which they approached and judged not just the poem form but literature as a whole. Okigbo was born in the village of Ojoto, Anambra State, Nigeria, in 1932. Educated at Government College in Imuahia and the University of Ibadan in Nigeria’s west, Okigbo met and became friends with such notable Nigerian writers as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Considered an excellent student, Okigbo completed his degree in Classics in 1956. After holding various administrative positions for the next ten years in Nigeria’s major towns, Okigbo, like many other Nigerian intellectuals of his day, responded to the worsening political situation in Nigeria’s east by choosing to return home to help in the eastern provinces’ drive for secession from the nation-state of Nigeria. Taking the rank of major in the newly formed Biafran army, Okigbo opted to lead the struggle for independence from the front. He was killed in the Nigerian military’s assault on the town of Nsukka in 1967, at the age of 35. His death at such a tragically young age deprived the world, in the words of www.abc-clio.com

Donatus Ibe Nwoga, of one of Africa’s most original, distinctive, and important poets. However, the initial response to Okigbo’s poetry in the West was not so favorable. Along with the work of the other Ibadan poets, Okigbo’s poetry was considered to suffer from an “overdose”—as Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier saw it—of Ezra Pound, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. It was an “affliction” that Ken Goodwin saw in most African poetry. In his study of ten African poets in the early 1980s, Goodwin concluded that much African poetry did little more than imitate the American and European poetry upon which it was clearly modeled. As such, the African names that obviously populated much African poetry were devalued as inauthentic expressions lacking the originality of their European counterparts. However, as American and European critics began to understand how formal poetry worked in terms of African oral traditions, the response to Okigbo’s poetry changed dramatically. Forced to acknowledge the important role played by previously unrecognized traditional African disciplines—such as the Yoruba praise song—in Okigbo’s poetry, Western academics began to admire the skill with which Okigbo managed to weave together the disparate European and African narrative forms. The result was an African voice that drew worldwide attention to the artistic, cultural, religious, and political concerns of the postcolonial Nigerian nation. Grant Hamilton

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References Nwoga, Donatus Ibe, ed. Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984. Okigbo, Christopher. Labyrinths: With Path of Thunder. London: Heinemann, 1971.

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OKRI, BEN (1959–) Ben Okri is a London-based Nigerian novelist, born in 1959 in Minna, Nigeria, to Igbo and Urhobo parents. He spent his early years in London, where his father was studying law, returned to Lagos, the then capital of Nigeria, in 1965, and permanently relocated to England in 1976. While Okri seldom reveals details about his childhood, he has extensively commented on his first literary discoveries. They range from the African tales and legends his parents used to tell him to Greek and Roman myths, as well as European authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Dickens, Ibsen, Maupassant, and Chekhov. This double heritage, the intermingling of African stories and European sources, and the later influence of contemporary African writers, was to become the major inspiration for his work. Okri began writing in 1976 while waiting to get a place at a university in Nigeria. When his application was rejected, he moved to England, first to work and write in London, where he still resides, then to study comparative literature at the University of Essex. His first novel, Flowers and Shadows, published in 1980, features a teenager’s disillusionment with Nigeria’s corrupt society, of which his own father turns out to be a part. Okri’s second book, The Landscapes Within (1981), which he was to rewrite under the title Dangerous Love (1996), may be considered an early artistic manifesto, for it seems to reflect the author’s views on language and creation, as expressed further in the collection of essays A Way of Being Free (1997). The Landscapes Within, as well as some of the short stories contained in Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New www.abc-clio.com

Curfew (1988), read as tales of a country, Nigeria, struggling with poverty, corruption, and sometimes war. Some of these thematic interests are also central in The Famished Road (1991), for which Okri won the Booker Prize. Based on the Yoruba myth of the abiku (the spirit-child who is born, dies, and is reincarnated endlessly), the novel is told from the perspective of Azaro, a spirit-child who has decided to stay on earth. Throughout the book, the constant interaction between “reality” and the spirit world reminds one of African folktales as well as twentiethcentury narratives inspired by the oral tradition. Ultimately, the abiku, who is infinitely dying and reborn, is intended as a symbol for the Nigerian nation. In 1993, The Famished Road was followed by a sequel, Songs of Enchantment; the abiku trilogy was later completed by Infinite Riches (1998). The 1990s also saw the publication of Okri’s allegorical novel Astonishing the Gods (1995) and two collections of poetry, An African Elegy (1992) and Mental Fight (1999). His 2002 novel, In Arcadia, recounts a film crew’s journey to Arcadia, a region of Greece traditionally depicted as an idyllic setting. The book explores, among other themes, man’s everlasting quest for happiness. Daria Tunca See also: Achebe, Chinua; Ekwensi, Cyprian Odiatu Duaka; Emecheta, Buchi; Nigeria; Nwapa, Flora References Fraser, Robert. Ben Okri: Towards the Invisible City. Devon, UK: Northcote House, 2002. Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. London: Jonathan Cape, 1991. Okri, Ben. Dangerous Love. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996.

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ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES The Organization of American States (OAS) is the oldest regional security organization. It was established in Bogota, Colombia, with the signing of its charter on April 30, 1948. Its purpose was and is to promote regional integration, cooperation, and security among member states within the Western Hemisphere. The original twenty-one signatories to the charter were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Subsequent new members are Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago (1967); Jamaica (1969); Grenada (1975); Surinam

(1977); Dominica, Saint Lucia (1979); Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent, and the Grenadines (1981); Bahamas (1982); St. Kitts and Nevis (1984); Canada (1990); Belize, Guyana (1991). Today all thirty-five countries of the Americas have ratified the charter. In 1962, despite the opposition of the largest Latin American member countries, Cuba’s rights to participate and vote in OAS activities were suspended. In recent years, however, there has been some support among some Latin American members to reinstate Cuba’s participation in the organization. The idea of regional integration and cooperation did not originate with the OAS. Latin American leaders such as Simon Bolivar and intellectuals such as Haya de la Torre previously advocated

Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Cesar Gaviria (right), inspects the collection of signatures during a referendum in Caracas, November 23, 2003. (AFP/Getty Images)

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various forms of Pan-Americanism or hemispheric unity. Practical attempts at regional cooperation were made in the late nineteenth century as represented by the First International Conference of American States held in Washington, D.C., in 1890. In 1910 representatives of American states established the International Union of American Republics and its secretariat, the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics, which became the Pan American Union in 1910. As the twentieth century progressed, the U.S. State Department became increasingly concerned with what it termed “creeping communism” in Latin America and the Caribbean. To address U.S. security concerns and protect U.S. interests in the region, the Pan American Union was transformed at the Ninth International American Conference in 1948 into the OAS, resulting in the creation of an inter-American collective security system. The OAS charter, however, proclaimed the more expansive principles of peace and justice, collaboration and cooperation, national sovereignty and independence, nonintervention and noninterference, and by the 1950s Latin American and Caribbean members hoped the organization would expand its interests beyond security issues to economic development. But the Cold War had begun and the U.S. kept the organization’s priorities focused on hemispheric security. The basic structure of the OAS includes the General Assembly, which sets major policies and meets once a year. The Permanent Council, whose ambassadors are appointed by member states and who hold regular meetings at OAS headquarters in Washington, D.C., oversee the organization’s ongoing policies and actions. To ensure equal representation among member www.abc-clio.com

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states, the chairmanship of the Permanent Council rotates every three months in alphabetical order of member countries. The OAS conducts its business in four official languages (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese) and generally seeks consensus decisions in all matters. The OAS functions on simple majority rule: one country–one vote with no veto powers vested in any member. But the United States has often been able to marshal enough votes from smaller members to push its interests and priorities. An example of this was the 1954 Declaration of Caracas, which condemned Marxist ideology as foreign and unacceptable in the Western Hemisphere. In addition to the General Assembly and Permanent Council, there is the General Secretariat (GS), whose secretary general and assistant secretary general are elected by members for five-year terms. The GS carries out programs and policies set by political bodies of the OAS, which include specialized units on democracy, trade, tourism, social development, and education. Other specialized agencies with headquarters throughout the hemisphere include the Pan American Health Organization, the Inter-American Children’s Institute, the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, and the InterAmerican Indian Institute. Over time the OAS has expanded its agenda of concerns to include human rights, poverty, drugs, and corruption. Added to its specialized agencies in 1978 were the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Interest in the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) fostered interest in the promotion of free trade in the region and discussion of the

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potential of a Free Trade Zone of the Americas. The 1980s also brought increased concern to the organization about hemispheric drug production and trafficking as well as political corruption. In the 1990s, the subject of hemispheric concern revolved around the promotion and protection of democracy in the region. Events in Haiti, Peru, Guatemala, and Paraguay resulted in the OAS drafting Resolution 1080, which established procedures for collective reaction to threats to democracy in the hemisphere. To further OAS goals, the First Summit of the Americas was held in Miami in 1994. All members but Cuba were invited and attended. The purpose was to establish broad political, economic, and social development goals, which included revisions of old policies as well as addressing new threats to hemispheric stability and security including corruption and illegal arms trafficking and production. In the 2000s, the OAS has expanded its interested to address collective action against terrorism. Coincidentally, the membership signed the Inter-American Democratic Charter on September 11, 2001, defining democracy and establishing further guidelines for collective membership action. This led to the creation of the Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism (CICTE). As with most regional organizations, the effectiveness of the OAS has been undermined at times by the inherent contradictions caused when its founding principles of national sovereignty, nonintervention, and democracy collide with the national and hemispheric interests of its members. Conflicting agendas between major Latin American nations and the United States have often added tensions to the OAS and crises such as the www.abc-clio.com

Falklands/Malvinas War between Britain and Argentina, the U.S. mining of Nicaraguan harbors, and U.S. invasions of Panama and Grenada have highlighted the conflict between national interest and hemispheric unity. Finally, the status of Cuba within the organization remains an unresolved issue of the Cold War for OAS members. Heather Thiessen-Riely See also: Brazil; Caribbean Community and Common Market; Chile; Cuba; Economic Community of West African States; Good Neighbor Policy; Jamaica; Mexico; Monroe Doctrine; Nicaragua; Paraguay; Uruguay; West Indies Federation References Cooper, Andrew F. Intervention without Intervening? The OAS Defense and Promotion of Democracy in the Americas. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Gilderhus, Mark. The Second Century: U.S.–Latin American Relations since 1889. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2000. Niess, Frank. A Hemisphere to Itself: A History of U.S.–Latin American Relations. London: Zed Books, 1990. Raymont, Henry. Troubled Neighbors: The Story of U.S.–Latin American Relations from FDR to the Present. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2005. Smith, Peter. Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.–Latin American Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

ORISHA Orisha is the Yoruba term for a deity, or divinity. It is also spelled as orisa, or orixa, in Afro-Brazilian religions. These supernatural beings are part of a well-articulated belief system of the Yoruba that has existed for centuries. In the past, Europeans in Africa and the New World, out of ignorance and cultural bias, tended to describe orishas as nothing more than primitive mumbo-jumbo;

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they saw orishas as evidence of fetishism, idolatry, or of Africans’ lack of spirituality and cultural sophistication. However, this attitude has changed. Orishas are increasingly recognized as an important part of the African religious Diaspora. In Latin America, Brazil, and the southern United States, unique and hybrid forms of orisha worship and Yoruba religion can be found in the practice of Santeria and Candomblé. Orishas are part of an elaborate theology comparable to any in Western civilization. In Yoruba traditional religion, Olodumare, God the Almighty One, is at the helm of a clearly established hierarchy of beings, both spiritual and human. He is Oluwa Eleda, self-created Lord of all creation, who resides high in the heavens, and is also known as Olorun, or owner of the heavens. He does not intervene directly in human affairs, but is believed to have created the orishas to assist him in governing all of creation in its diverse forms and manifestations. On the other hand, orishas are highly evolved beings who are directly involved in the affairs of humans. Thus, they are intermediaries between God and man. They belong to a pantheon of divinities, spirits, and deified ancestors. They constitute an essential part of Yoruba cosmogony, individual, and collective identity. Orishas are the Yoruba and African equivalent of gods, goddesses, and saints in Western culture. In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, these are called devas. Just as in Western or Eastern religions, there are major orishas and lesser ones. For example, higher orishas are Ifa, the orisha that foretells and guides the destiny of humans; Ogun, the deity of war and metallurgy; and Shango (also spelled Xango or Sango), the deity of thunder and lightning. Osun www.abc-clio.com

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(Oxun in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé), the river goddess, and Aje, the goddess of commerce and prosperity, are lesser orishas. However, for the devotees and adherents of particular orishas, this categorization might be pointless insofar as their spiritual and existential needs are satisfied. Thus, orishas can be considered to be agents of Olodumare’s will and influence in the affairs of humans. Because of their importance in the daily lives of people, an orisha is also seen by the Yoruba as an inseparable part of each individual’s destiny (or Ori, which is also an orisha) here on earth. Sacrifices are often offered to propitiate the orishas in order to gain their protection or support. Each orisha has specific offerings and rituals peculiar to their qualities. There usually are priests and priestesses who specialize, through decades of training, in specific orishas and thus become traditional healers and counselors. In Yoruba society, these agbalagba, or wise men and women, play a preeminent role in the maintenance of social and moral order. Indeed, they are the glue that have held Yoruba (and African) societies together given the often negative consequences of African encounters with Western systems of thought. In the context of the African Diaspora, orisha worship can be seen as part of the hybridization of African religions with Western Christianity, especially Catholicism, in the Americas. Its presence attests to the enduring capacity of the African spirit and imagination to survive despite the severing of familial, cultural, and religious ties that was part of slavery. ’BioDun J. Ogundayo See also: Cuban Ritual Music, African Influence in; Diaspora; Ogun; Religion (Africa); Yoruba

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852 OROONOKO References Bisnauth, Dale. History of Religions in the Caribbean. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1989. Ray, Benjamin C. African Religions: Symbol, Ritual, and Community, 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999. Taylor, Patrick. Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

OROONOKO Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko; or The Royal Slave (1688) is a heroic tragedy, courtly romance, and travel narrative all rolled into one. Oroonoko is a slave of noble birth, a king, who falls victim to the tragedy of British slavery and racism. Though Oroonoko is enslaved, he never loses his royal dignity nor his essence of virtue, even in the face of his enslavement. Oroonoko loves the beautiful Imoinda, who he eventually murders. He is betrayed by his own people and meets a bloody and tragic end. As the executioner cuts off parts of his body, Oroonoko calmly smokes a pipe until he “gave up the Ghost, without a Groan, or a Reproach.” Oroonoko explores themes of human nobility, slavery, and European inhumanity to African slaves. Though her hero is black, Behn emphasizes he is a person of “quality.” Behn’s Oroonoko is one of the first attempts to portray the lives of African characters from an African point of view, and one of the first attempts to explore the contradictions between human dignity and European racism. Debbie Clare Olson References Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Catherine Gallagher, ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2000. Lipking, Joanna. Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text, Historical Background, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

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OUSMANE, SEMBENE (1923–) Born in 1923 in Ziguinchor, Casamance, southern Senegal, Sembene Ousmane is a major African writer and filmmaker, with a long-term commitment to social justice and a vision to reach African popular audiences. He started his artistic career as a poet, a short story writer, an essayist, and a novelist, but is best known as a filmmaker. Considered the father of sub-Saharan African cinema, he is the most interviewed Senegalese and African film director so far, and has received countless awards and distinctions. Since his first poem, published in 1956 in Cahiers du Sud, a Marseilles-based left-wing journal, he has produced five novels, five collections of short stories, and directed seven short films, ten features, and four documentaries. From traditional storytellers, he inherited a bold and independent voice, unique communication skills, and a passion for his country. While his first novels drew on his personal experience of manual work, it was his concern for the uneducated and the marginalized, born of the same experience and practice of trade unions and political activism, and his desire to communicate with the ordinary people of his country in a language they could understand, that led him to film production. His films, written or subtitled in French, Wolof, or Diola, but also in English, French, German, Chinese, and Japanese, are now reaching an international audience. They are mostly adapted from his earlier novels or stories, which have been on African high schools and universities’ curricula for decades. Moolaade, Ousmane’s first film produced outside Senegal’s national borders, in Burkina Faso and in Bambara, came out in 2003. Seven of his ten published literary works have been translated into English. Doctoral theses,

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master’s dissertations, and a vast number of scholarly articles have been devoted to his literary and film work. The son of a fisherman from Dakar, Ousmane left school at age 15 but kept on reading and acquired a vast knowledge of culture. In 1938, he was already acquainted with the power of pictures, but his career as a film producer really took shape in the early 1960s when he went to study cinema at the Gorki Studios in Moscow. The feature and short films he produced after his return to Senegal range from satirical comedies to dramas and documentaries. They project a distinct African voice and aesthetics, and illustrate his vision of art and culture as a school to raise the political awareness of his audiences, promote social justice, and restore dignity to African people. Ousmane offered Faat Kine to the national Council of Senegalese Women (COSEF). His first short film Borom Sarett won the first prize at the Tours festival. Ousmane’s first feature film, La Noire de . . . , produced in 1966, was the first feature ever produced by an African filmmaker and won the Jean Vigo prize at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. Mandabi (1968) received the international critique prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1969. It was also shown as part of the 7th Film Festival at the Lincoln Centre, New York. Camp de Thiaroye (1989) was presented at the Hartford’s Spring Film Festival in April 2002.

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The United States discovered Sembene Ousmane at the time their African American elite was reconnecting with its African roots, and he has given the Diaspora a new understanding of Africa. In 1996, his work inspired Florence Ladd’s novel Sarah’s Psalm, set in the 1960s in Cambridge and Dakar. That same year a weeklong screening of Ousmane’s work at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, gathered crowds of students, film critics, and cultural workers. On May 5, 2001, Ousmane received the Harvard Film archive prize from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On American university and college campuses, and in the Caribbean, he is now one of the most studied and sought after African writers. Francoise Parent Ugochkuwu See also: Achebe, Chinua; Film, Africa; Soyinka, Wole References Gadjigo, Samba, ed. Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics and Writers. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Murphy, David. Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film & Fiction. Oxford: James Currey, 2000. Petty, Sheila, ed. A Call to Action : The Films of Ousmane Sembene. Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 1996. Pfaff, Françoise. The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene: A Pioneer of African Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

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P PAGEANT,THE AFRICAN AMERICAN The African American Pageant is an African American communal dramatic form that addresses links to Africa and forms a black aesthetic. With the adoption and reapplication of the medieval pageant tradition, the early half of the twentieth century witnessed a significant development in African American drama. Following a history of slavery, post-Reconstruction disappointments, and Jim Crow laws, black dramatists identified in pageantry the opportunity to reaffirm cultural identity, instill racial pride, rectify history, and venerate black heroes and heroines. Both ritualistic and regenerative, emergent black pageants thus served to relink culturally and artistically with Africa, promote a black aesthetic, and counteract ingrained stereotypes. Subsequently, they became a propaganda tool and a means of distinguishing black culture from the dominant European. Black pageants were partially an offshoot of changes in black economic, cultural, and artistic life during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The European pageant, on the other hand, derived from more auspicious circumstances, evolving from religious ceremonies to more secular performances where comedy, spectacle, and

the confirmation of class were central attributes. Even so, the pageant tradition comprised fundamental elements that were germane to the type of functional theatre that blacks aspired for, including communal involvement; performeraudience interaction; improvisation; emphasis on movement, mime, dance, music, and song; as well as ceremonial and episodic arrangements. W. E. B. Du Bois defined the black pageant as “a great historical folk festival . . . with the added touch of reality given by numbers, space and fidelity to truth” (p. 231). Like its European antecedent, it was not confined to formal theatrical space, but could be produced outdoors or in churches, homes, and grand halls, thereby attracting crowds and emerging as an ideal public and communal medium for reaching large African American audiences. However, a unique black experience demanded stylistic and thematic changes in borrowing and transplanting the form. In its original European setting, the pageant tradition underwent significant changes before black dramatists exploited it. The liturgical roots of English drama around the sixth century BCE flowered into the famous cycle plays beginning in the tenth century. The cycle plays constituted

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major pageants during the medieval period, having first shifted from a strict preoccupation with biblical subject matter to more secular themes and styles. The pageantry of cycle plays gave rise to other pageant traditions that made elaborate use of masks, movement, mime, and improvisation, marginalizing the written text and encouraging collective participation. They were subsequently more elaborate, more vibrant, and more colorful than their precursor cycle plays, and emerged in the form of masques, mummings, the Italian intermezzi, and fetes. This rich legacy of post-cycle-play pageants remained popular well into the nineteenth century and was sustained during the festive and spirited Elizabethan Age and reign of James I. Weddings, canonizations, coronations, funerals, military triumphs, and state visits formed the bases for pageantries during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. As a medium of hospitality, the genre reflected on and preserved the magnitude of status and nobility, as was apparent in their flamboyance and in the introduction of extravagant feasts. Operating within a more gloomy setting and detached from the fanfare and ostentation that informed the European pageant, African American pageants incorporated black music and concentrated on issues, themes, and characters that were familiar to the black community. Stock characters, common in Renaissance pageants, for instance, would be transferred to African American realities and rematerialize in the form of character-types like Art, Invention, Literature, Business, Womanhood, Adventure, and Slavery, whose designations defined their messages and roles. Thus, unable to explore and preserve the aristocratic space, splendor, and wealth of www.abc-clio.com

European Renaissance pageantry, African American dramatists were able to adopt certain components of the tradition that they adjusted to their unique circumstances. In general, black pageants, like their medieval predecessor, were different from conventional plays. Ranging from comedies to tragedies, they relied on sizable casts, elaborate sets, outdoor or large space performances, improvisation, and processional finales that featured historical figures or qualities like Truth and Freedom. Standard plot development was replaced with episodic presentations that utilized prologues, tableaux, and vocal or orchestral musical interludes. Character depictions were often symbolic of people and values relevant to the community, while storylines sometimes commemorated important events that took place as recently as the year of the production. Communal involvement was reinforced by neighborhood participation in making costumes, painting sets, posting notices, practicing musical scores, researching histories and characters portrayed, and working onstage and backstage. Shows were frequently advertised in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), making them easily accessible to the people. Through pageants, black audiences and performers were thus offered opportunities to encounter and learn from familiar situations, experiences, and characters. Two Races [n.d.] by Inez M. Burke, a pageant specifically written in the interest of seventh and eighth grade children, sets out to rewrite history and acknowledge historic black achievers who are otherwise excluded from standard educational curricula. The pageant relies on a combination of character-types that are conventional,

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symbolic, and allegorical. Typical of Renaissance pageants, action and storytelling take precedence over dialogue in Two Races, while music and song complement this approach. Dorothy C. Guinn’s pageant, Out of the Dark (1924), which was written primarily for high school students, lauds African American ingenuity and provides information generally lacking in mainstream history books. Comprising a prologue, four episodes, and an epilogue, the pageant traces the history of African Americans from Africa through slavery to post-slavery and modern times, thus documenting their exploitation, sufferings, struggles, survival, and accomplishments. The main characters represent key African American heroes and heroines, as well as sociopolitical and artistic facets of the black experience. A truly composite piece extensively employing the storytelling tradition, pantomime, dance, music, song, poetry, and tableaux, Out of the Dark is one of the more elaborate African American pageants. Frances Gunner’s The Light of the Women (1930)—subtitled A Ceremonial for the Use of Negro Groups—was mainly written in the interest of junior high and high school girls. Much like in a morality play (a secularized offshoot of medieval cycle plays), its characters—which are all female—are allegorical and symbolic of the historic achievements of black women in America. Besides individual representations, a communal effect is delineated and sustained through the presence of an active crowd. The Light of the Women also relies heavily on action, movement, music, song, and storytelling, while keeping dialogue to a minimum. None of the eulogized women from the past or present have speaking roles. Like imaginary, expressionistic www.abc-clio.com

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figures, they simply emerge and fade away after their accolades are announced. While hymns are sung to complement the sacred dimensions of the drama, they also recapture the soothing and inspirational role of spirituals and gospel music throughout African American history. In the end the pageant becomes a ritual of rejuvenation and hope, one that envisages limitless possibilities for black women. Edward J. McCoo’s pageant Ethiopia at the Bar of Justice (1924) employs perhaps more dialogue than was common in African America pageants of the 1920s. But the large number of characters present, the allegorical casting, the use of narratives, and the interspersing of music and song in the pageant retain the holistic and rite-of-passage attributes that are typical of the form. In spite of the secularization of drama during European Renaissance and postRenaissance periods, religious ideals were not completely lost even if they were not strictly applied. African American pageants also preserved a religious angle either in the utilization of direct Christian principles or in the creation of sacred icons and precepts. Ultimately, a sacred ambiance was achieved and presupposed the deliverance of blacks through methods that were not just tangible but were also divine. This spiritual paradigm would have a strong impact on future African American drama, especially during the critical periods of the 1960s and the post-1960s. Dramatists like George Wolfe, Barbara Ann Teer, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, and George Houston Bass subscribed to styles that leaned on ritualistic patterns, some of which were similar to those featured in earlier pageants. Philip Effiong See also: Baraka, Amiri; Harlem Renaissance; Nigeria, Drama in; Shange, Ntozake

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858 PAIGE, LEROY ROBERT References Du Bois, W. E. B. “A Pageant.” Crisis 21 (1915): 230–31. Gray, Christine Rauchfuss. “Introduction.” In Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro. Edited by Willis Richardson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Palmer, Daryl W. Hospitable Performances: Dramatic Genre and Cultural Practices in Early Modern England. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1992. Richardson, Willis, ed. Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Richardson, Willis. “Propaganda in the Theatre.” Messenger 6 (1924): 353–354.

PAIGE, LEROY ROBERT (CA. 1906–1982) Leroy “Satchel” Paige, a great pitcher in the Negro Leagues and, near the end of his career, in the Major Leagues, was known for his control, fastball, showmanship, and philosophical aphorisms. Born in Mobile, Alabama, somewhere around 1906, Paige earned his nickname by carrying luggage at a railroad depot. He began playing semipro baseball in the early 1920s and signed his first professional contract in 1926 with the Chattanooga Black Lookouts of the Negro Southern League. He played for some of the greatest Negro League teams, establishing his reputation as possibly the greatest pitcher in the history of the Negro Leagues, as well as the equal of the great major League pitchers of his time. He finally was given an opportunity to play in the major Leagues, with the Cleveland Indians in 1948, one year after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Although well past forty, he was still an outstanding pitcher, helping the Indians win the American League pennant and the World Series. Paige starred for the Pittsburgh Crawfords (teaming with catcher Josh www.abc-clio.com

Gibson to give Pittsburgh one of the greatest batteries in baseball history) and the Kansas City Monarchs, and for a variety of other teams, along with playing in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. He excited fans with such theatrics as summoning his outfielders to sit behind the pitcher’s mound while he struck out the batter. He delighted in showing off his control, for example, by repeatedly firing his fastball over a chewing gum wrapper set on home plate. He liked to share philosophical musings, most famously the cautionary imperative “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.” A huge celebrity, especially in the South, Paige even did some guest guitar playing with Louis Armstrong’s band. Despite being shut out of the Major Leagues for most of his career, he often faced the greatest of major leaguers in exhibition games, and with great success. Joe DiMaggio called Paige his toughest pitcher to hit against, and the great major league pitcher Bob Feller claimed that Paige was the best pitcher that he ever saw. In one especially memorable outing against another Hall of Fame hurler, Dizzy Dean, Paige outdueled Dean one to nothing in a thirteen-inning game. In another contest, he struck out Rogers Hornsby five times. Paige won six of seven decisions in his first season with the Indians, whose owner, Bill Veeck, had integrated the American League the year before by adding African American outfielder Larry Doby to his team. Paige later followed Veeck to the St. Louis Browns, with which he made the AllStar team in 1952 and 1953. He continued to pitch effectively in the minors as late as 1961. In 1965, he was brought back to the majors by the Kansas City Athletics to

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pitch one game. He hurled three innings, giving up only one hit. Satchel Paige was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971, the first individual who played most of his career in the Negro Leagues to be so honored. Edward J. Rielly See also: Mays, Willie Howard; Negro Leagues; Robinson, Jack Roosevelt References Holway, John. Josh and Satch: The Life and Times of Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992. Paige, Leroy. Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever: A Great Baseball Player Tells the Hilarious Story behind the Legend. 1962. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Ribowsky, Mark. Don’t Look Back: Satchel Paige and the Shadows of Baseball. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

PALM OIL Palm oil is a local and export commodity important to the economy of southern Nigeria. The harvesting and processing of palm oil (Elaeis guineensis) has long been important to the economy of southern Nigeria. The fruit of the mature palm can be processed to make palm oil. The fruit is steamed and pounded to remove the shell, and oil is pressed from the pulp. Palm oil was used indigenously as cooking oil, lighting fuel for lamps, and to make cosmetics and medicines. Palm oil was also an export crop, transported by European slave traders and used for the manufacture of candles and soap. The Industrial Revolution in Britain increased the demand for palm oil in the nineteenth century; it was used to maintain factory machinery and make cooking oils. When the British slave trade ended in 1807, traders in southern Nigeria made a www.abc-clio.com

rapid transition to the legitimate palm oil trade. The trade centered upon Calabar, New Kalabari, and Bonny, with shipments from Calabar increasing from around 1,200 tons in 1812 to 4,500 tons by 1864. The palm oil trade in Calabar was expanded by traders such as Great Duke Ephraim, who founded plantations in Akpabuyo, east of the city. The plantations were farmed by the large pool of labor that formed with the end of the slave trade. Palm oil was also gathered throughout the hinterland regions of southern Nigeria. Some was kept for domestic use, while the rest was taken to the oil house to be boiled. Each rural area had a market where produce was gathered from the area. Trading stations developed in the interior measured crops and put them in containers for transport by river to the coast. At the coast the oil was boiled again before export. As the volume of oil increased, new oil hulks, ships with a larger capacity, were built by European traders. Initially, the nineteenth-century palm oil trade continued to operate the “comey duty” and trust trade system that had structured trade relations between Europeans and African traders during the slave trade. Comey duty was a levy paid by European traders to Calabar kings, per ton of cargo, for the right to trade within their territory. After comey duty was paid, the traders would “break trade”—hold open negotiations with the exchange of gifts and dinners served by Calabar kings in their palaces and by European traders on board ship. In the trust trade system, goods, such as liquor, weaponry, cloth, and building materials, would be advanced to Calabar traders, who then organized the harvesting and transportation of palm oil to the coast for export.

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The oil hulks would spend up to a year moored offshore, negotiating trade, unloading European goods, and loading palm oil. The management of credit and debt in the trust trade often led to disputes, with some European traders becoming known as “palm oil ruffians” due to unscrupulous trading practices. Some European traders in Calabar joined the ekpe secret society to gain recourse to indigenous authority to recover trade debts. With the establishment of the British Consul in Calabar in 1861, shippers increasingly called upon the intervention of the consul to settle trade disputes. In the colonial era, oil palm and oil kernel became the main exports of southeastern Nigeria. Palm kernels were produced from the 1870s onward for export only and were used for the manufacture of industrial oils and animal feeds. Women provided much of the labor in the local processing of palm kernels and controlled the income from their trade. The local trade in foodstuffs such as yams meant that women could concentrate their labor on oil and kernel production. However, in the early twentieth century the export market price fell, and the British colonial government began to intervene and manage the marketing and processing of palm oil. The worsening trade conditions sparked unrest, which became widespread in the 1929 Women’s War when women oil producers protested against the impact of falling prices, increased taxation, and government marketing cartels. More than fifty women were killed when police fired on protesters. The colonial government response to the protest was to reform the corrupt “warrant chief ” administration system, in which local leaders had been www.abc-clio.com

imposed by the government. Political office and administrative posts provided new spheres of employment for men, while women retreated from the palm oil export trade to produce food for the household economy and domestic markets. A British monopoly over the palm oil trade was secured when the United Africa Company was set up in 1929. European companies started to exert greater control at local levels through taxation and produce inspection. The processing of oil palm was also removed from the control of local producers when the colonial government introduced large-scale mechanized presses. After 1945 the government established mechanized “pioneer palm oil mills,” ordering eighteen mills for the eastern provinces of Nigeria. In the 1950s production and processing were further centralized when bulk oil plants (BOPs) were set up by the United Africa Company in conjunction with the colonial government. There were seven BOPs in Nigeria, and by 1958 the plants processed 177,800 tons of palm oil. The marketing of oil became controlled by the Commodity Marketing Boards from the late 1940s onward, along with the other main export crops in West African colonies, namely cotton, groundnuts, and cocoa. By the mid-twentieth century, palm oil processing for export in southern Nigeria was completely controlled by large firms. The decline in the value of oil palm as an export crop had started in 1914 and continued into the 1960s. The dependence of the agricultural economy of the region upon a single export crop increased vulnerability to market shifts and meant production increased even when prices fell. Nigeria was the largest supplier of palm oil to Britain until the 1960s, when East Asian

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oil producers started to supply the colonial oil market. By the 1970s, the Nigerian palm oil export industry had collapsed. The impact on Nigeria’s gross domestic product was muted by the growth of the petroleum oil industry, but the economy of the rural interior which had become structured around oil palm production was severely damaged. The great wealth generated by both the palm oil and petroleum trade, and its inequitable distribution, are pervasive themes in contemporary Nigerian popular culture. In the play All for Oil (2000), Clark-Bekederemo draws parallels between the way palm oil and petroleum oil exports sustained the colonial and postcolonial Nigerian state, and enriched Nigerian and overseas traders, while impoverishing people in the oil-producing regions and devastating the environment that they inhabit. Philippa Hall See also: Calabar; Nigeria References Aye, Efiong Ukpong. Akpabuyo in Transition. Calabar, Nigeria: Glad Tidings Press, 1994. Clark-Bekederemo, John Pepper. All for Oil. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997. Ifeka-Moller, Caroline. “Female Militancy and Colonial Revolt: The Women’s War of 1929, Eastern Nigeria.” In Perceiving Women, edited by S. Ardener. London: Malaby Press, 1975. Martin, L. Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Martin, Susan. M. Palm Oil and Protest: An Economic History of the Ngwa Region South-Eastern Nigeria 1800–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Watts, M. “Black Gold, White Heat: State Violence, Local Resistance and the National Question in Nigeria.” In Geographies of Resistance, edited by S. Pile and M. Keith. London: Routledge, 1997.

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PAN-AFRICAN CONFERENCE (1900) The Pan-African Conference was held from July 23 to July 25, 1900, in London’s Westminster Hall. It was organized by members of the Pan-African Association, led by Sylvester Williams as general secretary, and comprised of a number of distinguished individuals, both of African and European descent, who were devoted to addressing the issues facing persons of color in the African Diaspora. The purpose of the conference, then, was to bring together blacks from all parts of the Diaspora to discuss such topics as colonialism and discrimination, while attempting to forge solidarity among blacks. Among those in attendance were delegates from North America, the West Indies, Ethiopia, and West Africa, including Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Gold Coast (Ghana). While a permanent body and plans for further meetings were created, the most tangible results of the conference consisted of two notable statements. The first was a petition to Queen Victoria of England, ostensibly to draw her attention to the injustices suffered by Africans as a result of imperialist activity. Indentured labor, segregation, economic and political disenfranchisement, and other forms of discrimination were the subject of outrage among the delegates. The petitioners appealed to Queen Victoria to address the situation affecting the African colonies and asked her to recognize the humanity of the Africans under her dominion. The Pan-African Conference concluded with an “Address to the Nations of the World” given by African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois asked Europeans to work toward “racial uplift” in Africa, which included

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working toward prosperous black states in Africa and bringing an end to racial injustice. However, much of his message was geared toward peoples of African descent themselves. Du Bois demanded that blacks be responsible for their own uplift, and that the states of Ethiopia, Liberia, and Haiti provide positive examples of black selfdetermination. The discourse that emerged from the Pan-African Conference continued in the years to come as persons of color around the world became increasingly aware of their shared struggles. Furthermore, the meeting served as a forerunner of a series of similar conferences, known as congresses, in the decades to follow, the last one being held in 1945. Carmen Lenore Wright See also: Du Bois, William William Edward Burghardt; Haiti; Pan-Africanism References Hooker, J. R. “The Pan-African Conference, 1900.” Transition 46 (1974): 20–24. Toll, William. The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Congress. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979.

PAN-AFRICANISM Pan-Africanism describes the idea of unity among people of African descent against oppression. This spirit of solidarity emerged during World War I when a group of black intellectuals and political leaders from the Caribbean, the Americas, and Africa met in London to discuss the future of blacks worldwide. While the list of Pan-Africanists is long, it includes key figures such as the African American W. E. B. Du Bois, the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, the Beninese Kojo Houenou-Tovalou, the Trinidadian George Padmore, and the www.abc-clio.com

Ghanaian Kwame N’krumah. These figures, and many others, contributed greatly to the ideological and political development of the Pan-Africanist movement. Du Bois was the most outspoken defender of the idea of unity between blacks of the Diaspora and Africa. According to Du Bois, these blacks were united by the social heritage of slavery and their close connections with Africa. Du Bois envisioned Pan-African kinship to be not just a slogan of brotherhood and sisterhood between blacks but the expression of a true political and economic unity between blacks. In order to put his ideas into practice, Du Bois helped organize the PanAfrican Congresses of 1919 (held in Paris) and of 1921 (held in London, Paris, and Brussels). These congresses allowed black leaders from Africa, America, and the Caribbean to meet in the West to discuss the predicament that colonization had created in their nations and propose ways in which they could achieve equality, democracy, and economic and political development. The most salient aspect of Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism was its description of the physical suffering, the loss of life, and the devastation of land that European imperialism brought about in Africa. Du Bois lamented how European colonialism opened the way from the Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope for marauding masses of Bantu warriors and for committing relentless aggression and conquest. In this sense, Du Bois’s PanAfricanism was a strong denunciation of the impact of European colonization of Africa. Garvey’s Pan-Africanism took a different turn than Du Bois’s did, because it centered not just on the idea of unity between the black Diaspora and Africa but

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also on the belief that such unity would lead to a return of all people of African descent to Africa. Garvey’s motto—which later became a rallying slogan for black nationalists of the 1960s in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa—was one of the strongest expressions of cultural and political solidarity between blacks. The essence of Garvey’s Pan-Africanism was his theory of re-Africanization that urged blacks of the Diaspora to go back to Africa and use their skills to help develop it. Garvey interpreted this return as a reconnection with the continent that great kings and queens used to rule in ancient times. In the 1920s, Garvey collaborated with an African political figure named Kojo Tovalou-Houenou, who was a firm backer of his Pan-Africanism. Tovalou-Houenou’s support of Garvey’s Pan-Africanism is visible when, in his address at Carnegie Hall, he endorsed not only Garvey’s immigration project in Liberia but also his plans to extend his influence across the African continent. Tovalou-Houenou was impressed by Garvey’s perception of Liberia as a black Zion that symbolized African liberty. In this sense, Tovalou-Houenou was one of the strongest validations Garvey received from a highly educated African intellectual of the 1920s. Tovalou-Houenou’s views on Garvey contradict the unsubstantiated notion that Garvey was an imperialist or a colonialist. Like Garvey, Tovalou-Houenou recognized the importance of racial alliance in the development of nationhood and technological advancement in Africa. Although he was proud of the forms of cultural and industrial development that already existed in traditional Africa, Tovalou-Houenou admitted that Africans could take advantage of the intellectual, artistic, and www.abc-clio.com

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scientific know-how of the black Diaspora. Referring to the delegations of UNIA members that Garvey had sent to Liberia in the 1920s, Tovalou-Houenou said: “You will bring to your brothers in Africa the arts and industries of the world . . . you will bring all the education and morality and all that you have learned . . . and there shall be a fusion and community of ideas and spirit in our great motherland, Africa.” Tovalou Houenou’s statement reflects a very practical concept of solidarity between blacks of the Diaspora and Africa. Instead of just mentioning such unity, he points out the need to concretize it in the Diaspora’s use of its manpower and intelligentsia to give actual support to Africa. Tovalou-Houenou envisions the union between blacks of the West and Africa as a blending between the people, ideas, and spirit that could uplift the conditions of blacks worldwide. Both Garvey and the UNIA admired this part of Tovalou-Houenou’s nationalism. In its edition of August 30, 1924, the Negro World praised Tovalou’s Pan-Africanism as a call for blacks from around the world to march back to their homeland and wrest it from its oppressors. Pan-Africanism would not have had a strong meaning without the contributions that the Ghanaian Kwame N’krumah and his close friend George Padmore made in its development. After completing his studies at Lincoln University, between 1939 and 1942, and at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1942 and 1943, N’krumah returned to Ghana to become the secretary general of the West African Secretariat, an organization that was founded at the fifth Pan-African Congress to fight for the independence of European colonies in West Africa. In I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (1961), N’krumah

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developed his thesis that the freedom of Ghana would not mean anything unless it was linked with the total liberation of the entire continent of Africa. Earlier, he had said that the independence of West Africa required the speedy liberation of all dependent territories in Africa from colonialism, imperialism, and racialism. N’krumah’s Pan-Africanism expands the concept of African independence and self-determination, which was at the core of Padmore’s philosophy. In Pan-Africanism and Communism (1956), Padmore described what he viewed as a growing political consciousness among Africans that what happens in one part of Africa has effects on Africans living in different parts of the world. Padmore firmly believed that this awareness would lead to the creation of a United States of Africa. Padmore’s concept of a “United States of Africa” rejuvenated a key ideology of Pan-African resistance that had parallels in Garvey’s “Africa for the Africans” slogan. Padmore had great influence on N’krumah, especially during the 1960s when N’krumah thought to convince the leaders of the independent African states to unite with Ghana to form a United States of Africa. N’krumah’s dream has not been realized yet, but it continues to inspire millions of people of African descent worldwide toward the liberation of their nations. Pan-Africanism has a long history in which many black intellectuals from both Africa and the black Diaspora contributed to defend Africa and its descendants worldwide against oppression. The central ideology of the movement is the unbreakable bond between people of African descent. These ties should be given concrete meaning so that the noble development goals of Pan-Africanism can transform the lives of www.abc-clio.com

blacks worldwide. Many believe that the ideals of Pan-Africanism will remain alive as long as people of African descent continue to be denied the justice and equality they have been fighting for throughout the history of the modern world. Babacar M’Baye

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See also: Baraka, Amiri; Diaspora; Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Garvey, Marcus; Liberia; N’Krumah, Kwame; Négritude References Asante, Molefi Kete, and Abu S. Abarry. African Intellectual Heritage. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996. Bennett, Lerone, Jr. Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America. New York: Penguin, 1988. Du Bois, W. E. B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward An Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1940. Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Rape of Africa.” In The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Parts Which Africa Has Played in World History. New York: Viking Press, 1947. Garvey, Marcus. “The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.” In The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, or Africa for Africans. Edited by Amy Jacques-Garvey. Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1986. Houénou, Prince Kojo Tovalou. “The Problem of Negroes in French Colonial Africa.” Opportunity 2 (July 1924): 203–207. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Edited by Robert A. Hill, et al. Volume IV: 1 September 1921–2 September 1922. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Martin, Tony. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1976. Martin, Tony. Marcus Garvey, Hero: A First Biography. Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1983. Mazrui, Ali. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1986. Nelson, Stanley. Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind. VHS. Arlington, VA: PBS Home Video, 2001.

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PARAGUAY Nkrumah, Kwame. I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology. New York: Praeger, 1961. Padmore, George. Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. London: D. Dobson, 1956. Wolters, Raymond. Du Bois and His Rivals. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.

PARAGUAY Paraguay, a country of south-central South America, has a history of African peoples, spanning from its involvement in slavery to its views on racial mixing as an independent nation, and how its contemporary African population operates in the nation’s contemporary life and politics. Despite the very modest presence of African descendants living in Paraguay today, their profound contributions to the country’s history should not be ignored. African slaves first came to Paraguay during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries via trade routes through Brazil, Uruguay, and the port city of Buenos Aires. In the early seventeenth century, some of the earliest African slaves to enter the region accompanied Jesuit missionaries to isolated frontier settlements. Small numbers of slaves were imported primarily because Paraguay lacked large plantations and rich mines, such as the one in nearby Potosí. This insured that African slaves would not be needed in great numbers to augment the region’s labor supply. The consistent demographic decline of Guaraní due to epidemic diseases did not compel the Spanish to import slaves on a large scale. Still, the African slaves that did arrive lived near indigenous reducciones, or settlements organized by the Spanish to concentrate native groups, and helped build farms, churches, www.abc-clio.com

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and roads during the entire colonial period. This proximity assured that Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples would be in regular contact with each other in spite of the Jesuits’ best efforts to keep Europeans and Africans isolated from the Guaraní. By the eighteenth century, hundreds more slaves were brought in to cultivate yerba mate, a tea grown primarily in southern South America. This crop eventually became Paraguay’s most lucrative export, and the Jesuits were particularly adept at running productive estates. With the blessing of royal authorities, some AfroParaguayan settlements, like Emboscada, Areguá, and Guarambaré, were founded. Emboscada, in particular, was given the unfortunate role of serving as a buffer colony for the white populations against raids from hostile indigenous groups. This would not be the last time that African peoples would be compelled to sacrifice their lives in this way. Many slaves bought as domestic servants lived primarily within or near Asunción or Villa Rica. Compared with the working conditions of slaves who worked in the rural areas of the country, these urban slaves lived much more independently and were by far treated better. They were also able to form stronger family linkages within their own communities and experienced modest natural growth. In the mid-1780s, according to colonial census records, both freedmen and slave descendants of the first Africans totaled almost 15 percent of the population. African peoples, also called pardos by most Paraguayans at the time, declined in number after 1811, when Paraguay achieved its independence from Spain. At first, this was due in large measure to the process of mestizaje, or race mixture. An

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increasing number of free pardos lived near and among indigenous communities as skilled workers and farmers on statesupported ranches. Moreover, the Paraguayan state sanctioned miscegenation by passing laws promoting the practice. Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, Paraguay’s dictatorial ruler between 1814 and 1840, promulgated a unique law in the Americas that ordered local elites to marry members of other racial groups, including free pardos and mulattoes, as long as these groups were similar in terms of socioeconomic status. Dr. Francia also used the power of the state to resettle a thriving Afro-Paraguayan township called Tabapí to the northern frontier region of the country. The new settlement at Tevegó would serve to alert and perhaps stall any Brazilian incursions into Paraguay. Modest yet significant sources of African immigration came from Argentina and Uruguay, respectively. Afro-Argentine troops accompanied the Argentine independence leader, Manuel Belgrano, in his failed military campaigns in the region. Also, after José Gervasio Artigas, an early hero of Uruguay’s independence movement, was forced into exile in Paraguay by a combination of Brazilian and Argentine forces, numerous Afro-Uruguayan soldiers followed him. The descendants of these veterans settled in Cambacuá (also spelled Camba Cuá), located approximately 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of Asunción. Paraguay’s government assisted these settlers’ efforts to start a new community by providing them with land grants, farm supplies, and animals. Cambacuá ultimately thrived as an independent community, and their descendants still live there to this day. Peculiar characteristics of the slave system developed that had more to do www.abc-clio.com

with the authoritarian features of the Paraguayan state. First, slave purchases and sales were tightly regulated by the state because it emerged as one of the largest owners of slaves. The first rulers of an independent Paraguay during the early nineteenth century would often confiscate slaves from their political enemies and use them in state-supported estates, factories, and public works projects. Second, and perhaps paradoxically, slaves were, as a general observation, not treated as harshly as in other areas of the Americas. In fact, on state-run farms and factories, slaves were often promoted to oversee other slaves. Still, as was the case with Tabapí, the state had the power to move large numbers of pardos around the country whenever it deemed necessary. An abolitionist movement slowly evolved in Paraguay beginning in the 1840s. In 1842, the government issued a “free womb” legislation that led to the emancipation of slaves when they reached adulthood. As a result of this law, the free Afro-Paraguayan population experienced a growth spurt. In addition to those classified as free and slave, these Libertos de la República, as this new generation of freedmen was called, created a third class of Afro-Paraguayans. As in Brazil and Mexico, for example, Paraguayan slavery ended gradually in stages. A generation later, full emancipation would be given to slaves in a new constitution. By 1846, pardos constituted a little over 7 percent of the population, and just under half of these remained enslaved. Generally, however, their numbers continued to fall. Race mixture was not the only reason for the demographic decline of Afro-Paraguayans. Many were killed as soldiers in the War of the Triple Alliance

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(1865–1870), considered by most scholars as the most devastating total war in South America’s history. The modernization policies of Paraguay’s dictatorial leaders, Antonio Carlos López (ruled 1840–1863) and his son Francisco Solano López (ruled 1863–1870), threatened Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil enough for them to form a military alliance against the landlocked nation. Solano López, in particular, drafted pardo troops and placed them on the frontlines and in the cavalry—some have argued as cannon fodder. To be sure, the Paraguayan dictator’s act significantly thinned the numbers of male AfroParaguayans. Paraguay maintained the integrity of its borders as long as it could, but it could not sustain the constant attacks of its neighbors. Eventually, the war took a dramatic turn for the worse. When Solano López ran out of state-owned slaves, he demanded and received others that were privately owned. Nevertheless, most, if not all, of these slaves were sent to their deaths in desperate offensives. It should be noted that Africans were disproportionately represented as soldiers in the ranks of Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan armies as well. Paraguay experienced high casualty rates among its military and civilian populations, and it eventually lost the war. This costly conflict led to what seemed like the certain disappearance of African peoples (in both Paraguay and Argentina). Because a disproportionate number of Afro-Paraguayan males were sent to die in the war, the result was that females greatly outnumbered males. After the war, Paraguay’s puppet government incorporated an abolition provision into the alliedcreated Constitution of 1870, but few Afro-Paraguayans, especially males, remained alive to see the benefits of freedom. www.abc-clio.com

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According to international figures, Paraguay has a population of approximately 156,000 Afro-Paraguayans, representing 2 to 3 percent of the country’s population. This total is disputable since the government does not officially make it a point to include pardos in its census counts. Still, nongovernmental organizations have verified these numbers. Two communities make up the largest concentrations of AfroParaguayans: Emboscada and Cambacuá. The municipality of Emboscada is now primarily a mining community located about 50 miles (31 kilometers) outside of Asunción. Cambacuá is now incorporated within the Fernando de la Mora municipality, an important suburb of Asunción. As with the rest of the country, this community suffered great losses as its male members were drafted into the War of the Triple Alliance. Since then, the Cambacuá community has been gradually dispossessed of its lands to make way for urban sprawl and development. The area’s impoverished conditions and racial discrimination have forced many Afro-Paraguayans to look for jobs and housing elsewhere, but some have remained. Those who have stayed face unemployment, racism, poverty, and the lack of educational opportunities. Still, a strong sense of cultural pride exists within the Cambacuá community. Evidence that Afro-Paraguayans have maintained their heritage is seen in the annual festival of St. Baltazar, a Catholic patron saint, also celebrated by many African descendants in Uruguay and Argentina. This festival represents a mixture of African-based and Catholic rituals. Every January 6, the Ballet Cambacuá demonstrates to outsiders that a vibrant Afro-Paraguayan community thrives despite its hardships. The painful yet inspiring story of Afro-Paraguayans

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continues to attract attention from scholars, human rights groups, and nongovernmental organizations from around the world. Jesse Hingson, Ph.D. See also: Brazil; Diaspora, Demography of; Slavery (History); Uruguay References Argüello Martínez, Ana María. El rol de los esclavos negros en el Paraguay. Asunción, Paraguay: Centro Editorial Paraguayo, 1999. Cooney, Jerry W. “El afroparaguayo.” In Presencia africana en Sudamérica, edited by Luz M. Martínez Montiel. Mexico, DF: Consejo Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995. Livi-Bacci, Máximo, and Ernesto J. Maeder. “The Missions of Paraguay: The Demography of an Experiment.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35 (2004): 185–224. Pla, Josefina. Hermano negro: La esclavitud en el Paraguay. Madrid: Paraninfo, 1972. Williams, John H. “Tevegó on the Paraguayan Frontier: A Chapter in the Black History of the Americas.” The Journal of Negro History 56 (1971): 272–283. Williams, John H. “Observations on the Paraguayan Census of 1846.” Hispanic American Historical Review 56 (1976): 424–437. Williams, John H. “Black Labor and State Ranches: The Tabapí Experience in Paraguay.” The Journal of Negro History 62 (1977): 378–389.

PEACE CORPS The Peace Corps is a U.S. governmental agency established by Executive Order on March 1, 1961. The Congressional Peace Corps Act of September 22, 1961, formally authorized the Peace Corps to foster world peace and camaraderie. Congress passed legislation making it an independent federal agency in 1981. With a yearly budget of about 1 percent of the U.S. foreign www.abc-clio.com

operations spending, the Peace Corps’ relatively small size and careful oversight by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) helps the agency maintain flexibility, effectiveness, and efficiency. By 2006, there were 7,810 Peace Corps volunteers serving seventy-seven countries in six program areas: education, youth outreach, and community development; health and HIV/AIDS; agriculture; environment; business development; and information technology. The purpose of the Peace Corps is to have skilled Americans living abroad for twenty-six months in order to help foreign countries meet their development goals. Volunteers learn the host country language and live at a level comparable to a host-country counterpart. The overarching aim of every volunteer is to transfer necessary skills to their counterpart. The Peace Corps has worked hard to find the right programs to fit each country’s unique needs, though occasionally these programs are not entirely successful. Throughout its tenure, three goals have consistently directed the Peace Corps’ mission: (1) to help the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women; (2) to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served; and (3) to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans. Since the program’s humble beginnings, the Peace Corps has placed more than 182,000 volunteers and trainees in 138 countries, 48 of which are located in Africa alone. In his 1960 speech at the University of Michigan, Senator John F. Kennedy challenged students to go abroad and model U.S. values, promote development, and share their expertise as a testament to the American spirit. By March 4, 1961,

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President Kennedy had appointed his brother-in-law, Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., as the first director of the Peace Corps. Under Shriver’s leadership, 55 countries invited more than 14,500 volunteers to live and work outside the United States. By June 1966, the Peace Corps had reached its largest number of Americans serving abroad at any one time, with 15,556 volunteers in 52 countries. When volunteer training was outsourced to host countries in 1973, administrative diversity increased. Appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Loret Miller became the longest-serving director and the second of only four women to hold the post (the first woman and the first African American director was Carolyn R. Payton). The 1990s saw even more diversity with the initial deployment of volunteers to Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, China, and South Africa. As of June 27, 2000, all volunteers in Africa must be qualified as educators of HIV/AIDS prevention and care. The Peace Corps also committed an additional 1,000 volunteers worldwide to work on HIV/AIDS-related activities as part of President George W. Bush’s Global AIDS Relief Package in 2003. (In that same year, sixteenth director Gaddi H. Vasquez made historic inroads in Mexico, providing technical volunteers to the National Council for Science and Technology [CONACYT].) By 2006, Ron Campbell became the first Peace Corps AIDS Relief Coordinator. The range of diversity among volunteers is quite high. The biographical breakdown from a September 2005 Peace Corps survey suggests that the average volunteer is a 28-year-old single white female with an undergraduate degree (with 58 percent female, 9 percent married, 16 percent www.abc-clio.com

minority, 6 percent over 50 years old [oldest 79], 96 percent with undergraduate degree, 13 percent with graduate training, and a median age of 25). This bipartisan institution (one senator and six representatives have served as volunteers) continues to innovate. For example, the Coverdell World Wise Schools program (initiated by Director Coverdell) promotes correspondence between thousands of U.S. teachers and serving volunteers. Director Mark Gearan’s 1995 Crisis Corps initiative has recently gained worldwide attention. It provides returned volunteers with the opportunity to give short-term assistance to victims of natural disasters and humanitarian crises. In only ten years, more than 900 Crisis Corps participants have served special needs. For example, 272 volunteers worked domestically for the first time in Peace Corps history alongside the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) relief operation after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region in September 2005. Brandon Lundy See also: International Development References Baca, David R. The Peace Corps: A Bibliography. Monticello, IL: Vance Bibliographies, 1989. Peace Corps. RPCV Update: News for RPCVs and Friends of the Peace Corps, Winter/Spring 2006. Ridinger, Robert B. Marks. The Peace Corps: An Annotated Bibliography. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1989. Schwimmer, Brian E., and D. Michael Warren. Anthropology and the Peace Corps: Case Studies in Career Preparation. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1993. Searles, P. David. The Peace Corps Experience: Challenge and Change, 1969–1976. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

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PEACEKEEPING AND MILITARY INTERVENTIONS Peacekeeping is an international action authorized under Chapter VI and Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations (UN), which invokes an array of measures including forcible and nonforcible military intervention by individual states or an organized group of states in order to “maintain or restore international peace and security.” Traditionally, peace enforcement actions have been used to resolve interstate conflict. However, with the sharp rise in civil strife within countries in the post– cold war years, peacekeeping operations have increasingly been organized against internal conflicts such as civil wars, massive violations of human rights in ethnic struggles, and state-supported or directed genocide, as in Rwanda in 1994. In the case of genocide, the Security Council can be called upon by signatory states of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (signed by the United States in 1948 but not ratified by the U.S. Senate until 1988) to take action to prevent genocide by invoking Article VIII of the convention. Efforts to organize an international humanitarian intervention in Darfur (Sudan) in 2006 by the United Nations or other multilateral or unilateral force, such as the United States, for example, emphasized the importance of enforcing the convention. A small regional multilateral force of some 7,000 African Union (AU) troops, which had been dispatched to help enforce a U.S.-brokered peace agreement, failed to stop the genocide in Darfur. Furthermore, a more forceful UN military action remained stymied by the objections of the autocratic Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who rejected a foreign military presence as a form of recolonization of his country. www.abc-clio.com

Often international peacekeeping forces must deal with sticky sovereignty issues and negotiate the terms of intervention. The Clinton Doctrine, proposed by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1999, and subsequent legal opinions further asserted a responsibility by the world community to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide whenever and wherever it occurred. In international relations, intervention covers a wide range of international actions that seek to influence and affect the internal politics, processes, structures, and conditions within another country. Generally, direct military intervention involves the overt and limited use of military personnel or special expeditionary forces, short of outright, full-scale warfare. However, the line between lowintensity intervention and interstate warfare is often blurred, so that some authorities consider the Vietnam War and the Korean War direct military interventions by the United States. Indeed, intervention as a form of warfare is justified on legal and political grounds under the Christian theory of “just war,” and the international legal principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, which establish the appropriate reasons for war and the correct means for its conduct. Interventions, therefore, not unlike wars, can be considered legitimate if used as a last resort, conducted for a just cause with limited force and protection of civilians, and if sanctioned by a legitimate authority, such as an international organization like the United Nations or regional organizations like the Organization of American States (OAS) or African Union. Also, under both the charters of the defunct League of Nations and the United Nations (and regional organizations such as the OAS and the AU), the use of force,

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such as military intervention and outright war, are permitted in self-defense and for collective security. Nevertheless, unless there is an uncontested just cause, unilateral intervention by a powerful state is no longer an accepted international norm. The majority of contemporary interventions, whether unilateral or multilateral, have been conducted under (or in part appealed to) the rubric of humanitarian interventions. Human rights law mandates that outside parties (national states and/or international organizations) have not only the right but the obligation to intervene in the internal affairs of another state to protect a people against abuses by their fellow citizens or own government. Since the end of the Cold War, peacekeeping operations and interventions of every type have been on the rise. The majority of interventions and humanitarian and peace operations—both peacemaking and peacekeeping—have been multilateral ventures, or multinational force (MNF) actions, requested by the local government and/or sanctioned under the United Nations Charter and Office of Peacekeeping Operations. Under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, member states can resort to regional organizations to resolve international peace and security issues. Although regional enforcement methods and operations which employ armed intervention and military power require Security Council authorization, this rule has been flexibly applied. Since the early 1990s, with the emergence of new security threats, increased armed conflicts globally, as well as greater regional dimensions to conflict in Latin America and especially Africa, there has been a shift to greater regional peacekeeping operations. Indeed, many contemporary peace and humanitarian operations www.abc-clio.com

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have drawn on multiple sources for support and legitimacy, including the UN Security Council, regional organizations, informal regional and subregional groups, and major powers. The international community has encouraged a greater capacity and proactive posture by the African Union (as in Darfur, for example), unlike the feeble role of its predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Efforts are being made to develop an African Standby Force (ASF), and to have subregional organizations, such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), take the lead in such a force and in regional and subregional peacekeeping and security issues. The history of military interventions in Latin America and Africa is quite extensive and complex. During the first half of the twentieth century, and prior to the founding of the United Nations, the majority of interventions were unilateral incursions by a superpower or a major or regional power (often an imperial or postcolonial power). In the Western Hemisphere, the United States intervened repeatedly in the Caribbean and Central America in order to advance and protect its national interests and national security. For example, the United States conducted a series of military interventions between 1898 and 1934 in the Caribbean Basin in the name of promoting “civilized behavior,” trade and investments (so-called “dollar diplomacy”), and democracy. Such interventions included Panama (1903–1914), Haiti (1915–1934), the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), Cuba (1917–1922), and Nicaragua (1909–1925 and 1926–1933). Other forms of interventions included propaganda and misinformation and coercive measures short of direct military action such as economic sanctions. With the onset

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of the cold war after 1949, U.S. interventions in Latin America and Africa often involved such indirect and covert operations by national security agencies such as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and reflected the ideological struggle against communism and potential Soviet, communist Chinese, and Castroite influence in the third world. Noteworthy cases included Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), Zaire/ Congo (1961–1964), Chile (1973), and Angola (1975). Both Zaire and Angola involved early UN peacekeeping operations that were complicated by covert CIA interference and cold war rivalry among the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Peoples Republic of China. And since 9/11 and the War on Terrorism, covert interventions appear on the rise. In 2006, the CIA secretly funded secular warlords in unstable Somalia in order to marginalize Islamist militias and forestall (unsuccessfully) their control of the country and interim government. On the other hand, several major U.S. cold war interventions in the Dominican Republic (1965) and Grenada (1983) were direct, overt, and mobilized thousands of predominately U.S. troops. Generally, these interventions, like those before the onset of the cold war, were justified as “national self-defense,” “protecting lives, liberty and property,” “maintaining law and order,” and “restoring democracy.” Often the actions were invited (and therefore legitimated) by a domestic government or faction and sanctioned under the charter of the Organization of American States and/or the United Nations Security Council. The majority of post–cold war interventions, such as Panama (1989) and Somalia (1992–1994), have followed this pattern, but have introduced new justifications such www.abc-clio.com

as fighting the drug war and humanitarian relief, respectively (and most recently, the global War on Terrorism). In Somalia in December 1992, the United States became engaged in a major peacemaking and peacekeeping operation. Prodded by scenes of massive starvation and criticisms of racism by UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and panAfrican NGOs and interest groups in the United States, a U.S.-led and dominated humanitarian mission was dispatched to Somalia by U.S. President George Bush. At the time, the United States had limited its involvement in the Balkans (Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999) because intervention there appeared difficult and the United Nations, European governments, and NATO were willing to take the lead. By contrast, the humanitarian mission in Somalia was assessed as “do-able,” and the humanitarian crisis, although grave, was alleviated by a small-scale conventional peacekeeping force. However, the U.S.-UN intervention proved disastrous in the end, evolving from its limited humanitarian mandate to a wider peacekeeping, peaceenforcement, and nation-building role. Although the immediate problem in Somalia was mass starvation, drought, and environmental degradation, the underlying problem was endemic religious, regional, and clan conflict. After three years of civil war in 1991, a coalition of clans toppled Mohamed Siad Barre, who had seized power in a coup in 1969 and had installed a socialist-Islamic dictatorship. Within this volatile context, the U.S.-UN humanitarian rescue mission, “Operation Restore Hope,” was successful initially, but soon became hostage to the feuding among rival warlords like the notorious General Mohammed Farah Aidid. The intervention

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disintegrated into a nasty policing operation, resulting in hundreds of Somali casualties and the sensational death of a small contingent of U.S. Army Rangers (“Black Hawk Down”) and the mutilation of their bodies. After the failed nation-building attempt, U.S. forces finally pulled out in March 1994, and the UN a year later. The UN operation had cost billions of dollars, and over a decade later the Somali state remained near collapse, politically unstable, and on the edge of one humanitarian crisis after another. The main lesson for the U.S. military and policymakers was to avoid becoming overextended in intrastate and ethnic conflicts, especially in Africa. The hazard of another Somalia-type imbroglio partly explained the U.S. and international community’s failure to intervene in Rwanda and Zaire/Congo from 1994 to 1997, and the general reluctance to do more in Darfur in 2006. The Somali case has also led to harsh critiques of humanitarian intervention as a form of legitimate and effective intervention. Most post–cold war interventions have been justified, at least in part, by humanitarian claims, which provide a ready moral escape clause to the international legal principle of nonintervention. Critics question whether this may dilute the meaning of humanitarianism, and whether the results of foreign military involvement endure and provide long-term security. Thus the term “humanitarian intervention,” even when authorized by the UN Security Council, has been challenged as a misnomer. In other words, can a military operation be “humanitarian” in all its aspects: motives, purposes, methods, and results? Or can a humanitarian intervention do more harm in the end than good? www.abc-clio.com

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Also, some question the “doublestandards” or political selectivity of some operations over others, and argue that under the UN charter humanitarian intervention derives its legality from the existence of “a threat to international peace and security.” Thus the UN Somalia Operations (UNOSOM I and II) were both legally justified as security and peacemaking and peacekeeping operations. Finally, can a UN intervention occur against the express opposition of the target state’s government, as in Darfur? In the Somali crisis there was no effective government that could provide or withhold consent. And, fearing the establishment of a precedent for intervention, the African states urged cautious wording in Resolution 794 of December 4, 1992, which authorized Operation Restore Hope. The preamble to the resolution specifically emphasized the “unique character,” “extraordinary nature,” and “exceptional response” in the Somali case. Nevertheless, since the first peacekeeping operation in 1948, the United Nations has been active, if not always completely successful in the prevention, management, and resolution of conflicts around the world. The majority of third world conflicts have had similar instigating conditions: histories of internal economic and political oppression; colonial exploitation and dependent development; severe resource scarcities, poverty, and ecological and environmental degradation; ethnic, religious, and nationalistic tensions; unequal minority-majority power relations; and regional structural inequalities. In many cases (such as the Sudan, Somalia, and the Congo), local instability has threatened regional and global peace and security. As a consequence, multilateral

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interventions for peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement purposes have expanded steadily, as have postconflict reconciliation, rehabilitation, and reconstruction efforts in the third world. In these efforts, a critical problem has been the need for greater military force, which created its own risks to peacekeepers and civilians, and to the impartiality of the UN missions. In Africa, especially, these problems have been endemic and severe. Indeed, a majority of peacekeeping operations since 1999 are on the African continent: six in Africa (the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Ethiopia and Eritrea; Liberia; Ivory Coast; Burundi; and the Sudan), compared to one in the Caribbean (Haiti) and one in Europe (Kosovo). And in 2006, the crisis in Sudan—ethnic cleansing and over 2.2 million refugees—escalated further. A concerned international community and African Union (whose peacekeeping troops were undermanned and besieged) appealed to the UN Security Council to authorize deployment of a 20,000-strong multinational force under a Chapter VII mandate to enforce the 2004 Darfur Peace Agreement and to protect the civilians caught in Sudan’s brutal civil war. Peacekeeping results have been mixed and highly dependent on the financial and political commitment and the military and technical support of the international community. In mid-2006, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) was engaged in 15 peacekeeping operations and three special political and/or peace-building missions, involving 108 contributing countries, more than 72,000 uniformed personnel (that is, troops, military observers, and UN police), as well as several thousand www.abc-clio.com

international and local civilian personnel and UN volunteers. These were expensive operations and a number of truce and observer missions, established as early as the late 1940s, remained ongoing for decades. Since 1948, the estimated total cost of peace-related activities approached $41 billion; and for one year alone, from July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006, approximately $5 billion was approved for peacekeeping operations and missions. The dominance of U.S. power in the contemporary international system also has meant greater pressures and opportunities for U.S.-led military interventions. During the 1980s, interventions involving U.S. troops doubled over totals in previous decades, and jumped further in the 1990s. In the post-9/11 world, there has been a new wave of interventions to counter terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In this context, peacekeeping and interventionist operations have taken on even greater significance. These operations demonstrate more than ever that national security and global security are interdependent and that both entail progress in sustainable development and human rights in the third world. State collapse, civil wars, and governance vacuums in Africa and Latin America not only fuel humanitarian and refugee crises and contribute to regional instability but may provide safe havens for radical militias and terrorist groups. Nevertheless, the international community has learned a degree of caution. Any intervention, even if well-intentioned or for justifiable ends, such as the U.S.UN Somalia operation, can provoke local resentment and opposition and further complicate rather than decrease the “threat to international peace and security.” On

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the other hand, the strong international commitment to protect human rights and prevent and punish genocide may continue to challenge and expand the notion of a global security community and the support for humanitarian intervention and peace enforcement operations, at the expense of the traditional principles of sovereignty and nonintervention. Waltraud Q. Morales See also: African Union; Central Intelligence Agency; Congolese Independence; Humanitarian Assistance; Military Forces; Organization of American States; Rwanda; Sudan (Darfur Region) References Adams, Robert. “The Road to Hell: A Critique of Humanitarian Intervention.” Harvard International Review 16, no.1 (Fall 1993): 10–14. Bellamy, Alex, Paul Williams, and Stuart Griffin. Understanding Peacekeeping. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. Center on International Cooperation. Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2006. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006. Haass, Richard N. Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post– Cold War World. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1994. Hirsch, John L., and Robert B. Oakley. Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflections on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1995. O’Neill, John Terence, and Nicholas Rees. UN Peacekeeping in the Post–Cold War Era. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005. Ramsbothan, Oliver, and Tom Woodhouse. Humanitarian Intervention in Contemporary Conflict: A Reconceptualization. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Straus, Scott. “Darfur and the Genocide Debate.” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005, 121–133. Western, Jon. “Doctrinal Divisions: The Politics of U.S. Military Interventions.” Harvard International Review 26, no.1 (Spring 2004): 46–50.

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PENTECOSTALISM Pentecostalism is a Christian religious movement that started in Los Angeles, California, in 1906. Its origins lie within African American culture because it was founded by William Joseph Seymour, a black preacher from Louisiana. He had been taught religion by a man named Charles Parham, a teacher of the Bible and a leader of the Topeka Revival. After working under Parham, Seymour moved to Indianapolis, where he learned even more about what he would later call Pentecostalism after he joined a church there. Seymour then moved to Cincinnati and later to Houston. In both cities he attended church and learned about the Holy Spirit and “speaking in tongues.” But it was not until he moved to Los Angeles that he began to preach on his own. There Seymour preached in an old abandoned building on Bonnie Brae Avenue to a small congregation that consisted “largely of black domestic servants and washer women.” But the makeup of his congregation would change within a short time. Seymour eventually moved his congregation to a church on Azusa Street. Although Parham is believed to have been the first head of the church, it is clear that within a short time Seymour himself was in charge of the congregation. For many historians of religion, Seymour’s move to Azusa Street signifies the birth of Pentecostalism as a religious movement. But the new religious movement that was called “Pentecostalism,” and indeed Seymour’s church itself, were the target of media criticism. Reporters from the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Record, and the Los Angeles Daily Times, for example, all mocked the religious services that Seymour and his followers performed. Indeed, other churches were also critical. They were

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particularly critical of the tongues that practitioners spoke in, and of the ecstatic behavior that they witnessed. However, what the reporters and other people did not know was that Pentecostalism shared many of the same religious elements found in more traditional forms of Christianity: the Bible, religious pamphlets, songs, and ecstatic behavior. They also were not aware of the fact that ecstatic behavior was similar to the shouting and dancing that were so prevalent in predominately African American churches at the time. What was different about Pentecostalism, then, was that unlike other religious movements at the time it attempted to embrace individuals from all walks of life, from every social and economic level, and from every racial and ethnic group. Because of de jure segregation at the time, however, it became difficult to maintain the racial and ethnic diversity that was a part of the church when it began. Within a short time, Seymour’s church became almost entirely black. Diversity also brought about a plethora of different beliefs about the Holy Spirit, church doctrine, and the religious services themselves. Members who held different views often departed to start their own churches. Differences in views and segregationist practices were such that by 1906 there were nine Pentecostal assemblies in Los Angeles. This process of breaking and reorganizing continued throughout the twentieth century. Today, Pentecostalism has managed to become the fastest-growing Christian movement. It has a membership estimated to be almost two billion. But there are other factors that have caused Pentecostalism to spread rapidly around the globe. From the outset, those who practiced Pentecostalism relied on improvisation and innovation; this, along www.abc-clio.com

with cultural diffusion and syncretism, helped Pentecostals to increase their membership not only in the United States and in Europe but also in Latin America, Africa, and Asia at a time when other denominations such as Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians have not been able to do so. The rise of African Pentecostalism is directly connected to the healing of the body that Seymour began in his church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, as the faith promises a saved soul and improved health. Early in the twentieth century, John Alexander Dowie, a healing evangelist who was a member of the Assemblies of God, a newly organized movement that broke away from Seymour’s church, led missionaries to South Africa. However, it was not until the 1970s that Pentecostalism began to expand rapidly throughout other parts of Africa. In fact, it has been argued that Pentecostalism has experienced its greatest growth in Africa as well as in Latin America. The religious movement has maintained its own distinctiveness in Africa, and yet in some instances it has also incorporated some of the religious practices found in the more traditional African independent churches into its own doctrine and services. Overall, however, as Pentecostalism continues to expand in Africa, it likely will become the religious movement that the majority of African Christians worship. The rising number of Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica and West African immigrants primarily from Nigeria increased the presence of black Pentecostal churches in Britain. The construction and expression of black identity played a role in the formation of these churches. The desire for black group solidarity and the need to

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be protected from racism were additional reasons why blacks in Britain turned to Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism’s doctrine has been defined in two stages and in three stages. Central to the two-stage doctrine is baptism in the Holy Spirit, which also includes sanctification by faith. Although baptism in the Holy Spirit is important in the three-stage doctrine, “speaking in tongues” is important as well. The threestage doctrine encompasses justification by faith, sanctification by faith, and healing of the body; the premillennial return of Christ; and baptism in the Holy Spirit. Harvey Cox, in Fire from Heaven, critiques how doctrine is accomplished by Pentecostals by focusing on the three dimensions of elemental spirituality. According to Cox, these three dimensions are primal speech, primal piety, and primal hope. Primal speech is about communication; it specifically includes glossolalia, which is sometimes referred to as “speaking in tongues.” One’s ability to speak in tongues, then, is a sign that a person has been baptized in the Holy Spirit. Primal piety is also about communication, but nonverbal communication. It points to the resurgence in Pentecostalism of trance, vision, healing, dreams, dance, and other archetypal religious expressions. Primal hope points to Pentecostalism’s millennial outlook—its insistence that a radically new world age is about to dawn. It should be thought of as a final mission for the church and its members, which means for Pentecostals the full restoration of this new life and age will come in the next world, in the afterlife. Darrell Donnell Darrisaw See also: Christianity (African American); Diaspora

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References Beckford, Robert. Dread and Pentecostal: A Political Theology for the Black Church in Britain. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2000. Cox, Harvey. Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twentieth-Century. London: Cassell, 2000. Hollenweger, Walter J. The Pentecostals: The Charismatic Movement in the Churches. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1972. Martin, David. Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Toulis, Nicole Rodriguez. Believing Identity: Pentecostalism and the Mediation of Jamaican Ethnicity and Gender in England. Oxford: Berg, 1997.

PÉRALTE, CHARLEMAGNE MASSÉNA (1885–1919) Charlemagne Masséna Péralte was a Haitian patriot who led an unsuccessful effort to oust U.S. troops during the first U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). Born in Hinche on October 10, 1885, Péralte studied at the elite institution of St. Louis de Gonzague, and then became a lawyer. Bright, wellducated, and handsome, Péralte would probably have pursued a successful career in the ranks of the elite (he served as diplomat, judge, officer, and mayor) had it not been for the political turmoil affecting Haiti in the 1910s. In the early twentieth century, political instability increased in Haiti, with no less than six different presidents from 1911 to 1915. Following an established pattern, the mulatto elite would hire cacos (mercenaries and bandits) to overthrow the sitting president, raid the national treasury, then establish a new president—who was himself overthrown within a few months. The United States grew concerned that chaos in Haiti might help European powers (Germany, in

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particular) take over the country, thus threatening the Windward Passage and access to the Panama Canal. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson also concluded that Haitians were incapable of ruling themselves and that he, acting as a “benevolent” imperialist, should preside over Haiti’s destiny in order to teach Haitians how to elect “good men.” When President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was literally dismembered by a crowd on July 28, 1915, Wilson ordered U.S. sailors and Marines ashore to invade Haiti. Cacos made an unsuccessful attempt to expel U.S. troops from September to November. The U.S. occupation force proceeded to stabilize the country, and it carried out its promises of building hospitals, roads, and bridges, but Haitian nationalists resented the humiliation of being occupied by a foreign power. Public anger focused on the corvée, which the U.S. occupation force had reestablished in July 1916. A form of taxation originating in medieval France, the corvée required peasants to work for their lord without payment. The corvée was legal under an 1863 Haitian law, but it had been rarely enforced prior to the U.S. arrival. Work gangs did improve the country’s dilapidated road system, but Haitians could not help but associate this institution with slavery (in some cases, foremen tied the workers with ropes to prevent escapes). In early 1918, Péralte was sentenced to five years of hard labor for complicity in a raid on the Hinche barracks. He managed to escape in September 1918 while sweeping a Cap Haïtien street. He started putting together a 5,000-strong army of cacos, occasionally supplemented by irregulars, with which he attacked garrisons and towns held by the U.S.-trained constabulary, the www.abc-clio.com

gendarmerie. The abolition of the corvée (October 1918) failed to bring the revolt to an end. By early 1919, the United States put several companies of Marines, backed by World War I vintage “Jenny” planes, on Péralte’s trail. Dozens of engagements followed, most of them in the North and along the Artibonite River. By bribing a caco general, Jean-Baptiste Conze, U.S. forces were finally able to ascertain where Péralte would strike next. On October 31, 1919, as Péralte’s troops were attacking Grande Rivière, Marine Sergeant Herman “Hard Head” Hanneken, accompanied by a small group of men disguised as cacos, managed to slip into Péralte’s camp and gunned him down. Marines then propped up Péralte, tied him to a plank, and took a photograph that they hoped would prove to all Haitians that Péralte was dead. The move proved less effective than initially hoped, for it gave rise to a widespread belief among Haitians that Péralte was crucified and that he ended his life as a Christlike martyr. After killing Péralte, U.S. forces went on the offensive and brought the second (and last) caco rebellion to an end by May 1920. Dr. Philippe R. Girard

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See also: Haiti; Noirisme References Boot, Max. The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. NY: Basic Books, 2002. Castor, Suzy. La ocupación norteamericana de Haití y sus consecuencias, 1915–1934. Mexico City: Siglo Veinteuno Editores, 1971. Michel, Georges. Charlemagne Péralte and the First American Occupation of Haiti. Dubuque, IA: Kendall and Hunt, 1995. Schmidt, Hans. The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1971.

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PERU Peru, located on the west coast of South America, is the third largest country on that continent after Brazil and Argentina. During the colonial period, Peru was one of the most important centers of the Spanish colonial economy in the Americas. The African presence in Peru dates from the first years of the Spanish conquest. African slaves were present with Fernando Pizarro when his forces conquered the Incas in 1532. From colonial time to emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century, the owning of African slaves became widespread in Peru, especially along the coast, where the native population decreased significantly after the arrival of the Europeans. Various social groups in Peru owned slaves, including artisans, priests, merchants, sailors, and even free blacks. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that Peru was never a major slave center in the Americas. It has been estimated that about 100,000 slaves came to Peru from the early colonial period onward. Most slaves in Peru were personal servants, even though significant numbers were also employed in agriculture and mining. For instance, on the Peruvian coast, African slaves worked on farms, especially on sugar plantations; they also worked in artisan shops and as domestic servants. In addition, many Peruvian slaves were employed in mines, mainly gold mines. In the rich silver region of the Andes, the native population remained fairly large, so they were the major labor force in the silver mines. This labor force makeup contrasts with the situation in many other areas of Latin America and the Caribbean, in that Peru never depended on African slave labor for its most important export economy. www.abc-clio.com

In addition, African slavery in Peru was very much an urban institution. Of all of the slaves who arrived in Peru, about 40 percent were kept in the city of Lima or in the surrounding region. In Lima, from the late sixteenth century through most of the seventeenth century, blacks numbered the same as Spaniards. The city also counted a large number of free blacks and mulattos working alongside the slaves. The slave trade to Peru had to overcome significant obstacles. Slaves brought from Africa, after surviving the perilous Middle Passage, were landed at Cartagena in modern Colombia where they were sold, and then taken by sea and land to the Pacific, before being shipped again to Peru. The mortality rate was consequently very high and African slaves were frequently bought from other Latin American regions instead of directly from Africa. The number of slaves in Peru began to decrease from the late seventeenth century as prices rose with the booming sugar economy of the Caribbean. Numbers increased again toward the end of the eighteenth century with the establishment of free trade and the Spanish crown’s wish to stimulate its colonies’ economies. After Peru acquired its independence from Spain in the 1820s, slavery in Peru began showing signs of decline, in part due to the influence of the new liberal ideas propounded by leaders such as Jose de San Marti and Simon Bolivar. In 1821, the same year that independence was declared, all children of slave mothers were declared free. That same year the African slave trade was abolished, thereby seriously weakening the institution. Yet, total abolition came only in 1855, around the same time that other Latin American countries—such as Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and

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Argentina—were also going through the same process. The delay indicated the continuing strength of slavery and the slave owners, despite the apparent commitment to liberal values. The main argument for the continuation of slavery came mostly from landowners, who believed that the economy of the country would suffer without slave labor. Nevertheless, slavery was in decline. Various factors explain its eventual demise. For instance, at the time of abolition, the number of slaves had decreased significantly, from around 89,000 in 1821, to about 25,000 in the early 1850s (or 1.3 percent of the population). The decline was, in part, a result of slaves buying their own freedom. At the same time, slave resistance increased in the nineteenth century, with the Haitian revolution remaining a terrifying reminder to all slave owners in the Americas of the possible fate awaiting them. In addition, Peruvians were looking for alternative sources of cheap labor abroad and began importing significant numbers of Chinese coolies. Finally, international pressure, mainly from Great Britain, influenced Peruvians to end slavery. One aspect of slavery in Peru that was common to other parts of Latin America was the high level of race mixture among blacks, Spaniards, and natives. As a consequence, Peru always had a substantial population of free mulattos. This is not to say that all mulatto children were born free, as before the law of 1821, Afro-Peruvians assumed their mother’s status. Since most mulatto children were fathered by Spaniards, remained slaves for the rest of their lives. Nevertheless, a significant number of these mixed children were freed by their fathers. www.abc-clio.com

However, these children of mixed race, even if they were free, still suffered racism in Peruvian society. As in many other American states, the color of one’s skin determined how one was accepted in society. In this context, the lighter the color, the easier it was for one to be accepted by the white population. As a result, many blacks in Peru viewed mixing with lighter skinned people as a positive step in order to better the social position of their offspring. Today only a small number of blacks can still be found in Peru. Still, Africans have influenced Peruvian culture, and in the early twentieth century, there was an acceptance in the country of the influences from the former slaves. For instance, the national dance of Peru is the marinera, an AfroPeruvian dance. Rosana Barbosa

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See also: Diaspora, Demography of; Slavery (History) References Blanchard, Peter. Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992. Bowser, Frederick. The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974. Brown, J. Latin America: A Social History of the Colonial Period. New York: Harcourt College Publishers, 2000. Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Klarén, Peter Flindell. Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Klein, Herbert. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Hunefeldt, Christine. Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s Slaves, 1800–1854. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pescatello, Ann, ed. The African in Latin America. New York: Knopf, 1975.

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PÉTION,ALEXANDRE SABÈS (1770–1818) After playing a prominent role in Haiti’s War of Independence (1791–1804), Alexandre Sabès Pétion became president of Haiti’s South and West provinces (1807–1818). Pétion was born in Portau-Prince on April 2, 1770, the son of a free mulatto woman and an unknown white Frenchman (the name Pétion stemmed from his childhood nickname, pitchoun, or “little one.”) A soldier, Pétion studied at the French military academy. During the War of Independence, he helped oust British forces, and then fought a losing civil war against Toussaint Louverture. Allying himself with the French when they returned in 1802, he finally joined a united Haitian front against the French. After Jean-Jacques Dessalines was overthrown and killed on October 17, 1806, Pétion drafted a new constitution that would give extensive powers to the president of the senate, a position he occupied, and more limited powers to the president, Henri Christophe, a black general and his most dangerous rival. Civil war quickly pitted Pétion against Christophe, with the former in control of Haiti’s South and West, and the latter in control of the North province. After Christophe installed his own independent government in the North (February 17, 1807), Pétion had the senate elect him president of the South (March 9, 1807). Thanks to its tight control of the senate, Pétion was reelected in 1811 and 1815; he then became president for life in 1816. Pétion faced numerous military challenges throughout his presidencies. Christophe repeatedly, though unsuccessfully, attacked Port-au-Prince, hoping to reunite the country under his rule. Fellow mulatto soldier and revolutionary www.abc-clio.com

Undated portrait of Alexandre Sabès Pétion, president of the Republic of Haiti from 1806 until his death in 1818. (Library of Congress)

veteran André Rigaud ruled a breakaway state in the South. Jérôme-Maximilien Borgella took over after Rigaud’s death on September 18, 1811, and was finally ousted on March 7, 1812. Around Grande-Anse, Pétion also faced a long-running insurgency led by Jean-Baptiste Perrier (aka “Goman”), and partly financed by Christophe, which only ended in 1819. Despite his weak democratic credentials, Pétion was much less harsh than Christophe was in the North. He founded a pension for girls and a high school in Port-au-Prince (now known as Lycée Pétion). His land policies earned him the nickname of “Papa Bon-Coeur” (“goodhearted Daddy”). In stark opposition to Christophe, who forced his peasants to remain on plantations under conditions reminiscent of slavery, Pétion decided in 1809 to confiscate the French’s former plantations and to distribute the land to Haiti’s

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inhabitants (soldiers, for example, were given three carreaux, about nine acres). However generous, this policy proved to be the South’s (and later Haiti’s) ruin. Abandoning sugar, Haiti’s main export crop, peasants turned to small-scale subsistence farming, complemented by a few coffee bushes. With the exception of coffee, exports, along with the country’s importance in world trade, markedly diminished. Pétion also provided a safe haven for Latin American revolutionaries fighting wars of independence against Spain. Most famously, in 1815 and 1816, Pétion twice hosted South American patriot Simón Bolívar and gave him money, weapons, and a printing press (in exchange for this help, Bolívar abolished slavery in South America). Pétion died in Port-au-Prince on March 29, 1818. Jean-Pierre Boyer succeeded him as president of the South. Dr. Philippe R. Girard See also: Christophe, Henri; Dessalines, JeanJacques; Haiti; Louverture, Toussaint Bréda References Heinl, Robert D., Nancy G. Heinl. Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995. New York: University Press of America, 1996. Price-Mars, Jean, and Hénock Trouillot. La République de Pétion et le peuple haïtien. Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Société haïtienne d’histoire, de géographie et de géologie, 1960.

PHILIP, MARLENE NOURBESE (1947–) Born in Tobago, Marlene Nourbese Philip immigrated to Canada to complete her university education and to pursue a career as a barrister; she abandoned the law for writing in 1982. In addition to her poetry, she has published two novels and two www.abc-clio.com

books of essays that investigate racism, colonialism, and the position of the woman of color in Canadian cultural life. Philip was awarded the Casa de las Americas Prize for her 1989 poem sequence She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, a work that Philip has described as “kissing cousins” with North American language poetry because of a shared interest in typographical experimentation and a common foregrounding of the materiality of language. What differentiates Philip’s poetic from its American cousin and suggests a closer, Caribbean, kinship is her concern with voice; moreover, the major theme of She Tries Her Tongue—that of the motherdaughter relationship—recurs in much Caribbean women’s writing, from Jamaica Kincaid to Lorna Goodison. She Tries Her Tongue is concerned with memory, origins, and genealogy. As Philip has stated, genealogy is “an account of descent.” In She Tries Her Tongue, Philip redeploys the myth of Persephone’s descent into the Underworld as the unwilling consort of Pluto or Dis and her partial restoration to her mother to explore her own experience of exile and separation from her native Tobago and the wider history of African transplantation. Philip, like Kamau Brathwaite, has argued that language was and continues to be one of the most important sites of struggle between the Old World and the New World, and her Persephone also figures the “linguistic rape and forced marriage between African and English tongues.” Philip’s exploration of displacement and marginality, and the quest for reunion with the mother and the retrieval or creation of a mother tongue, is conducted with greatest intensity in a remarkable triad of poems, “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” “Universal Grammar,”

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and “The Question of Language Is the Answer to Power.” Lee M. Jenkins See also: Brathwaite, Kamau; Caribbean Literature; Creole/Criollo; Kincaid, Jamaica References Philip, Marlene Nourbese. Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture. Toronto, ON: Mercury Press, 1992. Philip, Marlene Nourbese. A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays. Toronto, ON: Mercury Press, 1997. Philip, Marlene Nourbese. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. London: The Women’s Press, 1993.

PHILLIPS, CARYL (1958–) Caryl Phillips is a novelist, travel writer, and essayist, born on the Caribbean island St. Kitts. He immigrated to Britain at the age of 12 weeks in the arms of his mother and grew up in white working-class neighborhoods in Leeds, later Birmingham, “riddled with the confusions of being Black and British,” as he puts it. Neither his mother, who decided not to confront her son with his past in order to facilitate his integration into the new society, nor the syllabuses of the educational establishments he visited—including Queen’s College, Oxford—provided any answers. As a crucial experience in his life, Phillips therefore often refers to his first trip to the United States where he came across the novels of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and discovered in them a tradition that provided him with a sense of belonging; this experience, eventually, also led to his decision to confront his confusion and write. Phillips’, career as a writer started in 1980 when his first play, Strange Fruit, was staged and published, followed by Where There Is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter www.abc-clio.com

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(1984). After that, he continued to write dramatic pieces (especially for the BBC) and hung on to journalistic work (about literature, music, and sports); this, however, he considered as his “other job” next to what he truly intended to be, a novelist: His fictional debut The Final Passage was published in 1985, followed by A State of Independence (1986). The unifying thematic core of Caryl Phillips’s work fundamentally consists in the human experience of uprooting and displacement. Many of the themes he traces in his novels were already addressed in his dramatic work. The Final Passage, covering the experience of a young West Indian family emigrating to England, and A State of Independence, whose protagonist returns to the Caribbean after years of English “exile,” for instance, closely link up with the early plays. They also address the tensions and turmoil both between firstand second-generation immigrants and the West Indian and British cultures, respectively. Higher Ground (1989), his third novel, marks a point in Phillips’s oeuvre when he extends his (biographically influenced) focus on the British-Caribbean axis to what Paul Gilroy termed “the Black Atlantic.” This is shown in the thematic scope of the novel ranging from the sufferings of an African collaborator in the last days of the slave trade via the fate of a black prisoner in the American South to the brief meeting of a Caribbean immigrant and a Polish Holocaust survivor in London. It is, however, also manifest in the novel’s rhizomorphic, polyphonic structure that is to become a fundamental characteristic of his later work. In Cambridge (1991), Phillips chooses a singular setting on a Caribbean island in

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the early nineteenth century and essentially juxtaposes the conflicting voices of a planter’s daughter, Emily, and an elderly educated slave, Cambridge. The polyphonic, fragmentary dimension of Cambridge surfaces only at second sight, that is, intertextually: the two narrative voices are in fact pastiches, artistic recompositions of bits and pieces of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury travelogues on the one hand, and slave narratives on the other. With Crossing the River (1995) and The Nature of Blood (1997), Phillips continues his investigations of human displacements in further historical depth and aesthetically challenging forms. Crossing the River comprises four fragments of narration, together spanning 250 years of black Atlantic history: A tale of repatriation in Liberia is followed by the experience of an ex-slave in the American West; a slaver’s log gives way to the diary of a white British woman who falls in love with a black American GI. The Nature of Blood, while similarly weaving four different narrative threads, daringly juxtaposes issues of anti-Semitism and racism. The majority of the novel is dedicated to the Jewish girl Eva who goes through the holocaust; her story, however, is continually cut through by narratives evoking Jewish victims of anti-Semitism in fifteenth-century Venice, Othello’s life in Venice a century later, and finally the fate of a young Ethiopian woman in Israel. With his latest novel, Caryl Phillips has returned to a contemporary setting somewhere in rural northern England. In A Distant Shore (2003), he stages the careful mutual approaches of two social outsiders, an aging English woman and a West African refugee. It further testifies to the deeply political concern of Phillips’ art, www.abc-clio.com

which nevertheless transports its messages in lyrical, emotionally perceptive, and aesthetically complex forms. These qualities also apply to the broad range of Phillips’s nonfiction. Notable publications in this context are his travel writings in The European Tribe (1987) and The Atlantic Sound (2000), as well as his collection of essays, A New World Order (2001). Lars Eckstein See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Diaspora; Saint Kitts and Nevis References Ledent, Bénédicte. Caryl Phillips. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002. O’Callaghan, Evelyn. “Historical Fiction and Fictional History: Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29, no. 2 (1993): 34–47. Phillips, Caryl. A New World Order. London: Secker and Warburg, 2001. Phillips, Caryl. A Distant Shore. London: Secker and Warburg, 2003.

PLANTATIONS AND PLANTATION SYSTEMS The variety of plantations and plantation systems of Africa and the Americas developed between the early fifteenth and late nineteenth centuries. These large-landed estates were mostly export-oriented enterprises, supplying sugar, rice, tobacco, indigo, and other key staples to northern Atlantic markets. As the number of plantations expanded after 1500, the demand for laborers also increased, and European merchants, planters, and colonial governments turned to the forced enslavement of millions of Africans. It is difficult to generalize about the nature of plantations or plantation systems in the Atlantic World because they evolved in

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a variety of climatic and regional zones. Moreover, plantations differed in size, scale, demographics, ownership, management, living conditions, and what types of crops were planted. Historian Philip D. Curtin notes that the first plantations in the Americas originated in the sugar-growing estates of the Mediterranean and the Madeira, Cape Verde, and Azores islands of the eastern Atlantic. After 1500, Europeans adapted these models to the soils and climates of the Americas; still, variations in the types of plantations increased even more as Europeans cultivated newer “American” crops, such as tobacco, coffee, and cacao, although sugar production dominated. The first problem in establishing plantations was that they were extremely labor intensive, often requiring hundreds of laborers to function efficiently. In certain parts of the Americas, Europeans attempted to enslave Amerindian peoples, but the indigenous populations declined dramatically as a result of deadly diseases that Europeans brought with them. In response, Europeans imported African slaves as the best and proven alternative to chronic shortages of labor, yet they accomplished this on a much larger scale than had been previously attempted. Plantations and plantation systems touched almost every aspect of economic activity in the Americas. Living and working conditions varied greatly depending on the region, and more often on the individual owner. African slaves not only worked in various agricultural situations but also near or within plantation households as domestic servants, cooks, midwives, and artisans. The vast majority of slaves that worked on plantations originated from West Africa, but they were commingled with slaves from other regions even before www.abc-clio.com

arrival to the Americas because slave traders crudely mixed ethnic groups. In addition, natural increases in slave populations were rare due mainly to high death rates from overwork, disease, and poor diets. Until the early nineteenth century, planters looked mostly to slave traders for additional workers. Crown and local authorities enacted laws regulating the treatment of slaves on plantations, but enforcement depended in large measure on the behavior of individual owners. In some regions of Spanish and Portuguese America, for example, slaves petitioned colonial courts for freedom or recourse for excessive punishments while others turned to religious institutions. In addition, there is ample evidence of planters manumitting slaves in legal documents and wills. Still, laws governing plantation life tended to focus on limiting the social, legal, sexual, cultural, and political behavior of African slaves. Legal codes in various parts of the Americas indicate that plantation slaves had few rights; they were more often not allowed to receive an education, marry, or possess weapons. Planters and local authorities were particularly interested in keeping Africans separate from other social groups so that no class or racial alliances could form to threaten the plantation system and other colonial institutions. Penalties for violating laws or rules were especially harsh and inhumane, including whipping, beating, torture, rape, and death. At the same time, policies designed to control slave plantation laborers simply could not be enforced because of the slaves’ resourceful ways of resisting. In the course of their lives, African slaves resisted plantation labor by employing a variety of nonviolent and violent resistance strategies. On a broad level, personal confrontations (and

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not violent rebellions) were the most common expressions of slave resistance. Slaves broke tools, allowed farm animals to escape, and robbed crops or important agricultural implements with much more frequency than they engaged in violent confrontations with their masters. Slaves also escaped, and depending on the availability of mates, established sexual unions with members of other racial groups. More violent means of slave resistance included spontaneous and organized revolts and suicides. Rebellions occurred in Haiti and Cuba that challenged plantation slavery. In addition, the establishment of runaway (or maroon) slave communities throughout the Americas attest not only to the vitality of slave resistance to plantation labor but also the reproduction of cultural patterns similar to those in Africa. Indeed, plantations were sites for the retention and mixture of African cultural traits. The resistance that occurred on plantations affected the trajectories of colonial politics and expended almost all of the resources, energies, and lives of both plantation owners and slaves. The Spanish crown, for example, decided to ban the importation of slaves in some parts of the Americas because the cost of imposing authority upon an increasingly resistant slave population proved too much to bear. Plantation slavery was clearly on the decline in various parts of the Americas by the nineteenth century, but plantations were incredibly persistent, innovative, dynamic, and adaptable institutions. In Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, plantation slavery lasted until the early to midnineteenth century after a long and protracted death. In the United States, Cuba, and Brazil, however, the plantation system ended only in the latter part of the www.abc-clio.com

nineteenth century. Moreover, the end of the slave trade and eventually slavery in the Americas did not mean the end of the plantation system. In the West Indies, the British abolished slavery in 1807, but sugar plantations continued strong as colonial authorities decided to import East Indian and Chinese laborers to replace recently emancipated black plantation workers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new sugar, cotton, and rubber plantations emerged as European powers took control of large swaths of territory in Africa. Jesse Hingson

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See also: Agriculture; Slavery (Economics) References Curtin, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Eltis, David, Frank Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, eds. Slavery in the Development of the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage, 1976. Klein, Herbert. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Law, Robin. The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Miller, Joseph C. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. London: James Currey, 1989. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin, 1986. Schwartz, Stuart. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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POPULAR MUSIC, AMERICAN INFLUENCES ON AFRICAN

POPULAR MUSIC, AMERICAN INFLUENCES ON AFRICAN Contemporary African popular music has had many elements contributing to its evolution and development, the most significant being the rich eclectic cultural diversity of the continent’s inhabitants and the influence of foreign cultures. However, American music styles, such as rumba, jazz, blues, funk, reggae, soul, and rock, have been the most influential. Just as Africa impacted the music of the New World in the aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade, the Americas have reciprocated by strongly influencing the music of Africa. Music styles, musical thought, and musical technology from North America, Brazil, and the Caribbean have had a great impact on African popular music because Africans can easily relate to the historical experience of blacks in the Americas. The beats and rhythms of these imported styles provide a visible link between Africa and the Americas. African musicians see in the discourse and aesthetics of their American counterparts outstanding models to emulate. Popular music is an expressive practice and performance in African daily life. This reservoir of African cultural values is a portrait of local realities, the motor of society, and the soul of the people. Apart from the entertainment and identity functions, popular music has become a singularly effective weapon against socioeconomic and political injustices in contemporary African societies. It speaks of social problems and proffers possible solutions through its lyrics that focus on such issues as politics, economy, health, literacy, working conditions, nutrition, urbanization, and agriculture. Hence, popular music may be described as a powerful sense of people to name the www.abc-clio.com

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inequality they suffer from and recognize, often with humor or bitter irony, their own struggle and endurance, the desire for change, and the belief in the possibility of change. In order to ensure relevance to the needs of their immediate audience, most musicians use local themes and rhythms. However, with improved communication and transportation, societies across continents and cultures have been and continue to be tremendously influenced by one another. Africa is no exception to this trend, which entails conscious and/or unconscious drawings from elements of foreign cultures. The product of this process is an African popular music that combines local rhythms and tools with foreign music; it also leads to renewed creativity and a wider audience while retaining the African flavor. Because African musicians realize that their music draws strength from syncretism, because they are eager to experiment, and also because they are enticed by the prospect of international sales, they are very receptive to foreign rhythms, particularly American styles. This receptiveness has led to a fusion of African local music styles and American music traditions, such as rumba, jazz, gospel, funk, reggae, and rock. These American influences result from contacts between Africa and the Americas, contacts that have more recently been enhanced by the electronic media, including radio, television, the Internet, recordings, and satellite and cable networks. Many factors contributed to American influences on popular music in Africa, notably the long-standing transatlantic connections that kept Africans in the Diaspora connected. Black influence from the

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Americas started with the policy of returning freed slaves from the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean to Africa in the early nineteenth century. These returnees had a tremendous musical effect on native Africans. They brought with them dance music styles originally from Africa but adapted to the New World, where they created an enormous impact before being fed back into the mainstream of African music. One of the earliest New World influences on African popular music was that of Afro-American and Caribbean sailors who visited African ports—Monrovia, Freetown, Cape Coast, Accra, Lagos, and Cape Town, in the mid-nineteenth century and introduced calypso, merengue, ragtime, and minstrelsy to the continent. Caribbean regimental bands stationed in West African forts, American warships refueling along African coasts during the American Civil War in 1862, and the influx of American troops during World War II further spread this early American influence. In most cases, there was a small contingent of African Americans on board who served as cleaners and mess stewards, and also provided musical entertainment for the crew. With increased urbanization and the impact of Western culture, new music styles that combine African and American elements emerged largely in the cities that provided leadership during the 1950s and 1960s in bringing about social, economic, and political change in Africa—Accra (Ghana), Lagos (Nigeria), Nairobi (Kenay), Dar-es-Salam (Tanzania), Kinshasa, or Leopoldville (Zaire), and the black ghettoes of the cities in the Republic of South Africa. These new forms include West African highlife (showing certain Caribbean traits), Congolese popular music (reflecting Latin American influence), and www.abc-clio.com

Southern African sabasaba and kwella (both similar to American swing and jive music). Additionally, Africa was not left out of the great progress witnessed by the music industry in the post–World War II years as the art developed in different directions, including style and technique. Manhattan Research, the world’s first electronic music studio, was founded in 1946, and studios started using magnetic tape for recording. With the development of technology, American electric and electronic instruments spread, affecting the way musicians played and having a repercussion on African artists. In the 1970s and 1980s numerous African artists and musicians migrated to Europe and the Americas to pursue a professional career. Many traveled to the United States to study at various institutions including the Manhattan School of Music in New York. In the process, they were influenced by American sounds and new recording technology, and subsequently they reinvented African music in its contemporary form, with many variations and styles. The products of such influences would create new rhythms incorporating African sounds. Similarly, visits and tours by African American artists, such as Louis Armstrong, veteran jazz saxophonist Paul Winter, Trummy Young, and Edmund Hall, among others, were a source of great inspiration. Those visits afforded African popular musicians to have firsthand experience with American artists through exchanges and personal contacts. Also, as African native churches began to separate from those of the white missionaries and take on an independent existence, special styles of music were developed. One source for these was the American Negro spiritual, which

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became an inspiration for Africans early in the twentieth century. Since then there has been a continuous stream of American dance music styles to Africa, bringing rumba, samba, conga mambo, merengue, Dixieland jazz, bebop, and pop music, including rock and roll, soul, blues, twist, funk, and reggae, which all became popular and made a tremendous impact on African musicians. Local artists began to imitate the newly introduced American rhythms and styles; it was often a matter of taking an African traditional style or song and adapting it to American sounds. In the postwar years (the 1950s and 1960s), while highlife and calypso transformed the musical scene in Englishspeaking Africa, Latin American music and Afro-Caribbean styles, particularly the rumba and Afro-Cuban percussion, dominated the French-speaking countries. In the 1970s, American soul and rock music spread in West Africa where it was adapted to local realities to produce highlife. Highlife music is the Ghanaian and Nigerian ballroom music. Its instrumentation may consist of Western instruments, such as saxophones, trumpets, trombones, flutes, and electric guitars, but there is almost always a rhythmic ensemble consisting of African drums, bells, xylophones, mbiras (thumb-pianos), flutes, and sometimes rattles, which backs up the melody instruments. In order to produce rhythms that fit more easily into a Western musical scheme, many highlife bands have come to use Latin American rhythms. Among the early pioneers of Ghanaian concert parties and highlife are King Bruce and his Black Beats, E. T. Mensah and his Ramblers dance band, Roy Chicago, Ashanti Brothers, Nana Ampadu, City Boys, and Hi-Life International. www.abc-clio.com

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Trumpeter Victor Olaiya and guitarist Bobby Benson led Nigerian highlife music. Besides bringing calypso to West Africa, Benson also formed in 1948 a band called Bobby Benson Jam Session Orchestra, which played pop, swing, ragtime, jazz, and later highlife music. Other influential Nigerian highlife bands include Rex Lawson’s Mayors Dance Band, Osita Osadere’s Soundmakers International, Oriental Brothers International Band, Orlando Owoh’s Omimah Band, and Oliver de Coque’s Expo ’76 Ogene Super Sounds. Ebenezer Obey modernized juju—the African equivalent of American folk-rock, derived from the samba, which was introduced to Nigeria by the descendants of freed Brazilian slaves—by drawing on highlife. “King” Sunny Ade, a key figure of juju music, emphasized the techniques of Jamaican dub and sonic details. To confirm their American connections, highlife bands often take their names from American models (e.g., the Ramblers, the Comets, the Stargazers of Kumasi, the Black Beats, the Modern King Stars, the Ambassador Springboks), and they exhibit the influence of the big-band styles of jazz and Western pop that was so prominent in the 1940s. Highlife was later influenced by American jazz, rock, reggae, and hip-hop. It absorbed many elements of jazz, especially in ordinary orchestras of wind and string instruments. It also took on many aspects of Afro-calypso and reggae from guitar and Caribbean inspiration. The introduction of soul and reggae in the late 1960s and 1970s ushered in a very creative era in African popular music, bringing about Afro-rock, Afro-reggae, and Afro-hip-hop. The black American soul message “Black and Proud” was taken up by a whole

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generation of Africans listening to American soul music, spirituals, and jazz. Soul stimulated a new crop of creative musicians, including Nigerian Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Ghanaian Osibisa, and Cameroonian Manu Dibango. Fela was deeply impressed by American artists, which led him to use jazz as a steppingstone to African music, and subsequently used African music to play jazz. In 1968, he coined a new style of music, Afro-beat, by combining James Brown’s funk music, highlife, and jazz with Nigerian beat. American jazz and the Black Power Movement influenced him during a ten-month promotion tour in the United States. His intricate music, which might arguably be called Afro-jazz, blends African rhythms and jazz horn lines with sociopolitical lyrics that defend the rights of the common people. Manu Dibango, Africa’s best-known jazz saxophonist, developed distinctly African forms of jazz and rhythm and blues, and became famous thanks to his legendary jazzy sound on his album Soul Makossa (1972). This album was followed by African Soul, a mixture of jazz, rumba, and Latino rhythm. He later fused African rhythms and melodies with reggae, notably on Gone Clear (1979), with the participation of American artists Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar, and funk on Waka Juju (1982). Dibango also started a vogue for makossa, which combined Western and African instruments and confronted sociopolitical issues. In 1983, he recorded Electric Africa, with help from the great jazz musicians Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrel, and Herbie Hancock, to produce an extraordinary mixture of sounds combining jazz, rap, and traditional music. www.abc-clio.com

Rumba, originating from Latin America, surfaced in the Congo Basin area in the 1940s and 1950s. Its spread was made possible thanks to the prevailing cosmopolitanism and a relatively booming economy. It was immediately embraced to enrich the existing musical heritage with numerous variations ranging from rumba-sukumu at the beginning of the war to rumba-kara, rumba-boucher, rumba-sukusu, and rumba kiri-kiri or soukous, which is one of the most popular music and dance styles today in Africa. In the 1960s, the region was invaded by American rock and Cuban salsa. The Cuban rumba fused with African rhythms to produce the first distinct syncretic dance style in Francophone Africa, Congo music. Congo music later went electric and incorporated a brass front line, creating the popular Congo jazz style. The most prominent Congo jazz groups include Joseph “Grand Kalle” Kabasselleh’s African Jazz, Jean Serge Essous’s O.K. Jazz, Orchestre Bella Bella, “Franco” (François Luambo Makiadi’)s T.P.O.K. Jazz, Tabu Ley Rochereau’s African Fiesta (that played Latin rhythms on the drums of rock music), and Papa Wemba’s Viva La Musica (that was inspired by Puerto Rican star Ray Barreto and Otis Redding’s sweet soul). As rumba penetrated in some places, ragtime was shifting into Dixieland jazz in other areas. Many local Dixie bands were formed in South Africa, like the Dark Town Strutters and the Big Four of Johannesburg. Ragtime became part of the black urban marabi music of the 1920s and 1930s. In the black urban centers where different tribes met, and met with former slaves from the Americas, a dance style called “marabi” evolved. It was originally a humble form of music, but it became similar to the jazz music played by swing

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bands in the United States when the relatively wealthy and free blacks of Sophiatown adopted it. Much of the South African music of the 1950s was born at the crossroads of American jazz, African American choral styles, and African folk music. For example, vocalist Miriam Makeba and her husband, trumpeter Hugh Masekela recorded in a pop-jazz style. In Ghana, Dixieland became part of the repertoire of 1920s bands such as the Jazz Kings of Accra. During the 1960s another imported dance style, the twist, became popular in Africa. The dance sprang from the popular music explosion among urban youth ignited by rock and roll and originating from black Americans. The decade witnessed the formation of many African popular bands, such as the Avengers of Ghana, the Heartbeats of Sierra Leone, and the Cyclops of Nigeria, with their own unique styles. In 1979, an American production outfit invited Congolese musicologist Ray Lema to work in the United States, where he learned studio sound-recording technique. In 1983, Lema released Kinshasa-Washington, DC-Paris, an album that sums up his career and reflects a mixture of influences: rumba, rock, funk, reggae, jazz, tradition, and modernity. Kassav, the inventors of zouk, which fuses Caribbean musical influences with funk and rock to produce an unusual, rhythmic cocktail, constitutes a significant factor in American influences on African popular music. The group’s first tour of a dozen African countries was a huge success, and many African artists emulated the band. The interest in their music is no doubt a reflection of the growing recognition for the culture of the Antilles, and for Caribbean culture in general. www.abc-clio.com

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Many African artists have undertaken pilgrimages in Jamaica, which boasts of many excellent recording studios. For instance, Côte D’Ivoire’s Alpha Blondy, who calls himself an African Rasta and creates Jah-centered anthems, made a pilgrimage in 1983 to the legendary Tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, where he recorded his phenomenal Jerusalem album with the Wailers. He became the first African star of reggae with Jah Glory (1983). Ivoirian Tiken Jah Fakoly, who has established himself as one of the figureheads of the new reggae scene in Côte D’Ivoire, had a series of concerts in 1999 in New York and Philadelphia where he appeared on stage with a Jamaican backing band. Tiken’s Cours d’Histoire and Françafrique (2000) were mixed in Tuff Gong Studios and fused reggae beat with hard-hitting lyrics. On Apollo 95 (400 percent Zoblazo) by Côte D’Ivoire’s Frederic Desire Ehui, known as Meiway, are numerous guest performers, including Jacob Desvarieux of Kassav from the Caribbean island of Martinique. Ehui’s Extratrerrestre features Cuban musicians playing the brass and cord section and spicing the album with Latino touches. African music experienced a boom in the 1980s as it absorbed elements of American rock and pop music, including musical rhythms, styles, and tools. This absorption led to experimentations with various aesthetic innovations in which musicians incorporated elements of American flamenco, blues, soul, rock, jazz, reggae, and funk and took advantage of Western studio techniques, while remaining faithful to their African roots by performing traditional instruments. Malian musicians Toumani Diabate and Ali Farka Toure played African versions of the blues, while Issa Bagayogo updated the traditions of Mali

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to the age of electronic dance music in the 1990s. Ethiopian Aster Aweke adapted her extraordinary voice to a repertory of souljazz-rock. Salif Keïta’s repertoire includes Afro-Cuban numbers, Mandingo blues-rock fusion, as well as jazz orientation salsa and zouk. Keïta has collaborated with several American jazz artists, including pianist Joe Zawinul and guitarist Vernon Reid. Mory Kante’s music is a deeply hybrid mix of traditional rhythms from around the world blended with modern sounds—rock, funk, jazz, and synthetic—thanks to numerous musical influences (Congolese rumba, Cuban salsa, American pop and rock) and to collaborations with American producers David Sancious and Carlos Santana. Several other African artists and groups have developed unique musical sounds. Senegalese Youssou N’Dour established mbalax (Cuban music performed with Western aesthetics and supplemented with African polyrhythms) as a major form of dance music, just as Senegal’s Orchestra Baobab successfully mixed Cuban music and African music on Pirate’s Choice (1982). Benin’s Angélique Kidjo performs a mixture of Afro-punk, reggae, samba, salsa, jazz, rumba, zouk, and makossa. Sudanese singer-songwriter Rasha invented a mishmash of jazz, pop, reggae, and American dance music for Sudaniyat (1997). Moroccan Maleem Mahmoud Ghania collaborated with jazz giant Pharoah Sanders on Trance of Seven Colors (1994), while his countryman Hassan Hakmoun created fusion tracks of trancey gnawa, rock, and American dance music on Trance (1993). Benin’s Gangbé Brass Band explores in their music the rich Voodoo culture and ancient songs of their country, which are combined with jazz melodies to produce a powerful contemporary sound. www.abc-clio.com

Hip-hop, the most ubiquitous musical style in the world, is another African American cultural movement, which has had tremendous influence on African contemporary popular music. This distinctly urban American form has been absorbed and transformed by African youth; it has now led to the birth of an African rap, including the original hip-hop of Nigeria, South Africa, Cameroon, Senegal, Tanzania, Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, Angola, Congo, and Mali. There are hundreds of hip-hop groups in most African capitals. They rhyme in Wolof, Malinke, Dioula, Baoule, French, English, Fon and Yoruba, and Jamaican patois; they sing in both rhythm and blues and jail styles, which are fused with the tones of the kora and ngoni harp-lutes and balafon xylophone. However, very few of the African groups have adopted the sexist language and violent imagery favored by some American rappers. The end result is a sound that is distinctly hip-hop with an African flavor. Senegal’s Positive Black Soul updated a classic Orchestre Baobab rumba with skittering beats, reggae-inflected flows, and spicy Mandingo-style guitar sound on Boul Ma Mine. Similarly, South African rappers have their own style known as “kwaito,” a thumping hybrid that draws from hip-hop, house music, and dance hall reggae, alongside a mixture of local traditions, including Zulu praise poetry. They rap in a Sowetobred form of slang some people call “tsotsi taal,” which draws from Zulu, Afrikaans, English, and other languages. In Abidjan, hip-hop has become really important: the youth listen to the rap sound and dress in baggy jeans. Many rap groups have emerged, including 1549, Parlement Supreme Posse, M.A.M., Negromuffin, and R.A.S., claiming they were influenced

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by the music of Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, M. C. Solaar, Youssou N’Dour, and Alpha Blondy. Starting at the end of the nineties, a modern dazzling rap based on the multitude of Benin’s traditional rhythms and melodies was created. Benin’s most popular rappers, Sakpata Boys, have incorporated chants, dances, and practices of the Voodoo religion into their performance. H2O Assouka’s production is an excellent combination of local instruments and rhythms, which are interweaved with smooth rap. Ardiess started out in 1997 as a purely modern rap group. The based their music on American rap they heard on the radio and saw on television, but later added some traditional instruments, rhythms, and melodies. Many of these groups have adopted American names: DaBrains of Senegal: Da Fugitivz of Gambia; Big Daddy Kane, K-Solo, Biz Markie, Gangstarr, Alasko Deejay, and Ras Goody Brown of Cote D’Ivoire; and Big Melody, Dave II, Fuzajay, Magic, L’Archange, Melcky, S II B, R. Man, and Surah of Benin. A confirmation of the extent of the influence of American hip-hop on the African musical scene was the Pan African Hip-Hop Festival held in Cotonou, Benin, in 1999. American musicians continue to exert an enormous influence on African musicians even today. Contemporary African popular music is a synthesis of cultures (high and low), moods (upbeat, ecstatic, melancholy, spiritual), genres (folk, electronic, jazz, classical, psychedelic), formats (song, symphony, suite, jam), and lifestyles (Western and Eastern). African polyrhythms, Jamaican reggae and dub, Brazilian pop music, and other forms have all fully integrated. These developments, made possible by the contacts that black www.abc-clio.com

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Africans have maintained with African American societies in North and South America and in the Caribbean, demonstrate that African musical traditions are viable and flexible, and by no means in danger of imminent extinction. However, given the social and cultural importance of traditional music and dance, many African countries are working hard to preserve and protect them from undue American influences. Indeed, as Ali Mazrui has stated, Africa’s openness to new cultures is both its strength and its weakness, demonstrating its ability to learn from others and also suggesting the danger of becoming dependent and intellectually imitative. Philip Ojo References Barber, Karin, ed. Readings in African Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Collins, Edmund John. “Jazz Feedback to Africa.” American Music 5, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 176–193. Collins, Edmund John. “Musical Feedback: African America’s Music in Africa.” A Journal of Opinion 24, no. 2 (1996): 26–27. Kerr, David. “Theatre and Social Issues in Malawi: Performers, Audiences, Aesthetics.” In The Performance Arts in Africa: A Reader. Edited by Frances Harding. New York: Routledge, 2002. Mazrui, Ali A. “Africa and Other Civilizations: Conquest and Counter-Conquest.” In Africa in World Politics: The African State System in Flux. Edited by John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000. Nettl, Bruno. “The Western Impact on World Music: Africa and the American Indians.” In Contemporary Music and Music Cultures. Edited by Charles Hamm, Bruno Nettle, and Ronald Byrnside. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Tenaille, Frank. Music Is the Weapon of the Future: Fifty Years of African Popular Music. Translated by Stephen Toussaint and Hope Sandrine. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002. Originally published as

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894 PORTUGUESE EMPIRE Le swing du caméléon, musiques et chansons africaines 1950–2000. Arles, France: Actes Sud, 2000. Young, Richard A. Music, Popular Culture, Identities. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

PORTUGUESE EMPIRE As the first modern global empire, and the last of the western European empires to withdraw from its colonies, the Portuguese empire established extensive connections between Africa and the Americas based on the slave trade. Portugal’s role in the Transatlantic World, in terms of slavery and colonialism, centered around its major colonies of Angola, Brazil, and Mozambique. After decolonization, Angola and Mozambique became important sites of cold war conflict, with their communist governments supported by communist governments in the Americas, particularly Cuba, and insurgencies supported by the United States. The establishment of sugarcane plantations in Brazil created a large demand for African slave labor. This demand initiated a lengthy, and brutal, connection between Brazil and Portugal’s main African colony, Angola, via the slave trade. Due to this dependence on the Angolan slave trade, Portugal abolished the slave trade in 1836, quite late compared to other European nations. For several decades the prohibition against the slave trade was not enforced. Portugal’s reliance on Angolan revenues meant that there was little incentive to end slavery. Initially, the continuation of the slave trade in Portuguese colonies was tied to ongoing trade with Brazil, which was a Portuguese colony until 1822. In Brazil, the demand for slaves remained high into the late 1800s. Although the Brazilian slave www.abc-clio.com

trade was abolished in 1850, slavery remained legal until the so-called “Golden Law” of 1888 abolished slavery itself, making Brazil the last country in the Western Hemisphere to do so officially. Portuguese and Brazilian slave ships traveled unhindered from African coastal settlements until as late as 1845. Despite the passage of an 1842 treaty with Britain that declare the trade to be piracy, the slave trade from Angola was continued with shipments going to Brazil until around 1853 and to Cuba into the 1860s. An estimated 2 million slaves were transported from the western coasts of Africa in the decades just before and after 1850. Lacking local naval bases, the British Royal Navy was ineffective in interdicting slave ships and rescued only around 3,000 slaves per year. Slave shipments from the ports of Luanda and Benguela on the Angolan coast continued until the late 1860s, with Portuguese, Brazilian, and Cuban slave traders replacing British and French merchants. The slave trade began to decline with the closure of Brazilian slave markets. However, the trade continued from Angola to the islands of Sao Tome and Principe. These shipments continued for decades, disguised as contract labor to elude external pressure against the trade. Slavery was finally abolished officially in 1878. Nonetheless, many Africans continued to suffer as slaves under ongoing programs of contract and forced labor. Many freed slaves had few options but to remain with their former owners under the same working conditions. Others who attempted to maintain small farms were pushed into forced labor, especially through the use of taxes. Many labor contractors and local authorities were former slave traders. Vagrancy laws made it

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possible for Africans not regularly employed to be drafted into labor without remuneration. In effect, slavery and the slave trade continued into the twentieth century in Portuguese Africa. After World War II, Portugal violently resisted decolonization and African independence. Beginning most forcefully in 1961, guerrilla movements in Portuguese Africa, especially Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea (now GuineaBissau) took a heavy toll on Portuguese forces in the colonies and encouraged domestic resistance in Portugal. When the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal fell in 1974, newly independent Angola and Mozambique soon fell into protracted civil wars. Their postindependence communist governments became caught up in the proxy wars being fought between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. In addition to outright invasions by the South African apartheid armies, communist governments in Angola and Mozambique faced internal insurgent groups supported by the United States and its allies, including South Africa and Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. During the cold war important connections were created between newly independent African countries and countries in the Americas. Nominally communist governments in the Americas, most importantly Cuba, provided military, civil, and technical support against what was perceived as Western and U.S. imperialism. Jeff Shantz See also: Abolitionism; Cold War; Colonialism References Lloyd-Jones, Stewart, and Antonio Costa Pinto, eds. The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2003.

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Russell-Wood, A. J. R. The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: A World on the Move. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES Postcolonial studies is a theoretical term for the analysis of the consequences of colonialism, including but not limited to economics, culture, and politics. Postcolonial studies can only be defined with an understanding of the term colonialism. The strict definition of colonialism is the direct or indirect rule of a country or region over another by the means of political, military, and economic institutions. The ruling country or region is called the colonizer or the metropolis, and the region being ruled is called the colony. Critical studies of the strict definition of colonialism show how the intricate relationship shared by the metropolis and its colonies is based on bilateral but unbalanced economic exchanges and the displacement and marginalization of local populations. However, colonialism can also be understood in a broader sense. The broad definition of colonialism is the unequal cultural influence of a region over another by its education, literature, or means of communication. For instance, this definition would identify the taste of Africa’s elite for French literature or British poetry as a consequence of colonialism, in which the culture of the colonizer has had a strong influence on the culture of the colonized. In relationship to colonialism, then, postcolonial studies is the analysis of the consequences of this colonialist system, such as economic exploitation, cultural marginalization, and political exclusion. Postcolonial studies are intrinsically linked with the global process of reevaluating the relationship

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between the metropolis and the colonies. Postcolonial studies consist of three main fields of work. The first involves studies of literature and poetry, such as the work of Nigerian critic and poet Onwuchekwa Jemie Chinweizu. The second involves studies based on a variety of theories from philosophy and social sciences, such as political science, history, and sociology. This includes the work of the Indian-Trinidadian writer Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. The third involves studies of works by visual and performance artists, such as the work of IndianSouth African historian and art critic Sarat Maharaj. Much of postcolonial studies, especially those of the twentieth century, focus on how countries in Africa and the Americas have “decolonized” themselves, since many of these countries achieved governmental self-determination in this era. Selfdetermination is a process in which colonized nations give themselves power over their territories by the creation of their own political institutions that are distinct from those of the colonizer. The ways by which these countries have acquired independence can be classified in one of three broad categories. The first are countries whose populations are mostly from the metropolis, such as Argentina and, to some extent, the United States. The second are countries whose populations are of mixed ethnic backgrounds, some from the colony and some from the metropolis, such as Brazil and South Africa. The third are countries whose populations consist of mostly indigenous people that have either evacuated their elite (who are from the metropolis) from their land, or have ensured that the political influence of the elite has declined to almost none; this is the case for Congo or Senegal. www.abc-clio.com

Postcolonial studies are also interested in structuration, a theory that implies that the culture of colony, such as its literature, food, and popular cinema, has a significant effect on the metropolis. More recently, postcolonial studies have considered the effects of structuration on Western Europe and North America through the adoption of exotic cultural products. Theorists such as Edward Said have been very critical toward this tendency. In fact, postcolonial theorists argue that this interest for exotic culture is only oriented around the advantages it can bring to Western countries. Postcolonial studies owe much to authors of political science and philosophy. In fact, the concepts of ideology, hegemony, and imperialism developed during the twentieth century by political philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs have been very influential. These two European authors have been critical of the role Western countries have had on the regions of their empire. Ideology is an ensemble of beliefs that determine the acts of a government or a society. For postcolonial theorists, it means that many actions from the agents of the metropolis are influenced by the ideology of colonialism. Hegemony is the ideological and cultural domination of the metropolis over the colonies. Imperialism is defined by Gramsci, Lukacs, and other postcolonial theorists in a way very similar to colonialism, having both a strict and a broad sense. Indeed, the concepts of imperialism and colonialism can be seen as interchangeable. Imperialism is the result of the actions taken by the metropolis—the effects of colonialism on the metropolis. For instance, the effects of imperialism can be measured by the existence of a powerful and authoritarian transportation industry in the cities of the Northern Hemisphere

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or the broad availability of exotic fruits in most groceries of countries of North America and Western Europe. Colonialism, on the other hand, is the result of this power on the colonies—the effects of colonialism on the colony. For example, the noted presence of farmers of European descent in South Africa remind people from the former colonies the effects the metropolis had on their countries during the colonial period. Since the end of World War II, the works and actions of anticolonialist political authors such as the Guinean theorist and political activist Amilcar Cabral, the Martiniquan poet and politician Aimé Césaire, the Martiriquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh have changed the relationships between countries from North America and Western Europe and former colonies from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Their works and actions have therefore been very influential on postcolonial theories and studies. Their work typically involves stirring descriptions of the struggles of the people from the colonies. Some wrote against the terrible living conditions in the colonies. Others were more radical by staging political coups or revolutionary movements against the occupation of the colonies by Western countries. These anticolonialist political authors and their followers were important forces in the self-determination of colonies and serve as inspirational examples to many natives from former colonies throughout the world. In the 1960s, poststructural philosophers such as the French Michel Foucault and literary critics like Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin built new theories that www.abc-clio.com

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connected written or spoken discourses to the dynamics of power. These theories that see discourse as a constructed conscious or unconscious extension of politics have been very instrumental for postcolonial studies. For example, some scholars compare the British writer Rudyard Kipling’s literature to the interests of the British Empire in India. Even if the theoretical sources of postcolonial studies owe a lot to international philosophy and critical studies, currently, postcolonial studies are overwhelmingly dominated by English-speaking scholars or by studies widely distributed among English-speaking scholars. This is especially true for postcolonial studies covering Latin America. For instance, authors like Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano and the Mexicans Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz criticize both the colonial past of Spain and the influence of the United States over Latin America, but their works are rarely considered postcolonial. There are two possible explanations for this fact. The first explanation is biographical: Their ancestors were part of the elite ruling over the local indigenous people. However, postcolonial studies challenge this fact. The second, more likely explanation, is cultural: Postcolonial studies are associated with the former British Empire more than any other colonizing country. As a matter of fact, most of the important postcolonial scholars, such as the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said, the South Asian feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and the Jamaican-British sociologist Stuart Hall, are from countries or regions linked to the British Empire. In addition, several authors do not consider themselves as postcolonialists because they feel that the category is too restrictive for their work. This is

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true for Spivak, who has rejected the label “postcolonial” because she finds it inadequate to refer to the contemporary situation of globalization. One of the most significant criticisms against postcolonial studies is that it leads to the general fragmentation of scholarly knowledge. Marxist theorists claim that most postcolonial studies focus on microhistorical biographies, which are too specific, and, as a result, are unable to be inserted in the larger picture of colonial history. Other theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have criticized postcolonial studies for focusing too much on the opposition against the colonizer by the colonized. In other words, postcolonial studies tend to describe the colonized with specific features while simplifying the colonizer. Despite all the criticisms raised against postcolonial studies, it is remarkable that postcolonial theorists have been instrumental in the processes of decolonization and emancipation after the second part of the twentieth century. Postcolonial theorists have also been influential not only in decentralizing the centers of study and knowledge from Western countries to the former colonies but in giving a voice to the most marginalized scholars—the indigenous and women—from the former colonies of European countries. Dmitri della Faille de Leverghem See also: Colonialism; Decolonization, African; Fanon, Frantz References Ashcroft, Bill. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. New York: Routledge, 1989. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 1998.

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Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

PRE-COLUMBIAN AMERICA Despite some technological limitations, a few Native American civilizations had achieved a high level of development before the arrival of European explorers. Long isolated from outside influences, however, local inhabitants suffered a demographic catastrophe when European and African diseases were introduced in the late fifteenth century.

Human Settlement The Americas were the last major continents to be settled by humans. There is ample archeological evidence proving that humans were present in the Americas by the end of the Pleistocene epoch 11,000 years ago. How and when humans entered the continents, however, remain a matter of debate. The prevailing theory holds that Clovis hunters arrived in North America c. 10,000 BCE using a land bridge then linking Alaska to Siberia. The theory is supported by the dearth of human remains prior to that date, and physical and genetic similarities between Native Americans and East Asians. It is based on the assumption that humans settled the entire North America continent very quickly after they moved into Alaska to account for skeletal remains found in South America. A rival theory, based on the discovery of skeletons in Chile and Peru dated prior to 10,000 BCE, holds that humans entered the Western Hemisphere earlier, or followed

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a different route. Some scholars believe that humans crossed the Bering Strait before the formation of a continental ice sheet in Canada in 20,000 BCE. Others hold that Pacific Islanders could have reached the Pacific coast of South America by boat, thus explaining the early presence of human remains in that area.

North America Despite their common ancestry, preColumbian civilizations were marked by remarkable cultural and linguistic diversity. In North America, where 2 to 10 million people lived by 1500, scholars have identified six major geographic groupings. The subarctic area covering much of Canada was too cold to sustain agriculture, so it was home to nomadic hunters, gatherers, and fishermen who followed herds of caribou. Farther south, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, inhabitants supplemented deer hunting with the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash. They built permanent, fortified villages and burial mounds. In the Great Plains, Native Americans were divided between sedentary farmers growing corn and living in earthen houses and buffalo-hunting nomads traveling by foot (horses were not introduced until the Spanish voyages of exploration). Neighboring tribes in the Rocky Mountains area, such as the Nez Percé and the Shoshone, were limited by the dry, harsh environment they lived in. In the Pacific Northwest, abundant wildlife and high rainfall supported a large population, such as the Kwakiutl and the Nootka, who lived off fishing (salmon) and hunting (deer, seals) and produced elaborate art. The American Southwest is best remembered for the presence of Pueblo Indians living in communal www.abc-clio.com

cliff dwellings, but their numbers dwindled before 1500 due to climate change and external attacks.

Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean With the exception of the Incas, the most advanced Native American civilizations were found in Mexico and Central America. The city of Teotihuacán outside Mexico City shows that a major urban center flourished around 300 to 900 CE. The city’s large streets and market squares suggests that it was at the center of a significant trade network. Teotihuacán’s massive buildings, most notably the pyramids of the Sun and of the Moon, also prove that the city was home to an elaborate social organization and religion. This civilization was followed by the Toltecs (tenth to thirteenth centuries). Skilled in metal and stonework, the Toltecs shared many characteristics with their Aztec successors, including human sacrifice, a 52-year calendar, and worship of the sun and of the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. The Aztecs were the most powerful entity when Spaniards, led by Hernán Cortés, entered Mexico in 1519. They were relative newcomers who had settled in a swamp of Lake Texcoco (under present-day Mexico City) c. 1325. According to the tradition, they chose the site because they had seen an eagle devouring a snake on a cactus and had interpreted it as a divine omen. The area was already settled by more powerful groups, so the Aztecs most likely contented themselves with the least appealing plot. Despite such inauspicious beginnings, the Aztecs built a large capital (Tenochtitlán), which by the early sixteenth century numbered a quarter million inhabitants and was remarkable for its large

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pyramids, markets, raised fields (chinampas), canals, and causeways linking the island city to the shores of Lake Texcoco. They allied themselves with neighboring cities, then subdued them and created an empire stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico that encompassed five million subjects by 1500. Aztec culture, which incorporated many local traditions inherited from Teotihuacán and the Toltecs, was warlike and religious. The Aztecs worshiped a variety of gods; Quetzalcoatl was particularly popular with the lower class as a redeemer god whose return would bring an era of justice. Most gods required human sacrifice, particularly the god of war and of the sun, Huitzilopochtli. The Aztecs were afraid that the sun might not return, particularly at the end of the 52-year calendar cycle, so they sacrificed dozens of thousands of victims in the hope that blood offerings would convince the sun to rise again. Preferably, such victims were chosen among prisoners captured during the conquest of neighboring cities or during battle reenactments staged with already subdued cities (Flower Wars). Farther south in southern Mexico and Central America, the Olmecs (1200–400 BCE) were renowned for their pyramids and colossal statues made of basalt. Much of the Olmec culture survived under the Maya, whose classic period dates from 300 to 900 CE. Organized around independent city-states such as Palenque, Tikal, and Uxmal, the Mayas built steep stone pyramids and magnificent carvings. Agricultural production was intensive, allowing for high density of settlement in the classical period and the use of cocoa beans as a form of currency. The Mayas also had advanced mathematics, a calendar, and a complex www.abc-clio.com

writing system. The Mayas survived until the Spanish conquest, though by the fifteenth century large city centers had given way to small villages. With the exception of the Guanatahabey, a people of western Cuba about which little is known, Caribbean islands were home to two major groups: the Tainos and the Caribs. The Tainos, who inhabited the Greater Antilles (Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico), relied on fishing and the cultivation of yams and cassava to sustain a large population of maybe 500,000 on Hispaniola alone. They were organized in chiefdoms led by caciques, practiced a ballgame in courts called batey, and worshipped fetishes of spirits and ancestors (zemis). The Caribs, who occupied smaller islands such as Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles, were more warlike. Using canoes and bows, they organized raids to Taino islands to seize female captives.

South America Diversity also marked the human settlement of South America. The area west of the Andes, temperate and dry, hosted civilizations far more advanced than those found in the low-lying, humid basin of the Amazon. The Arawak inhabitants of Guiana and Venezuela were closely related to the Caribs of the Antilles. The Amazon basin itself was home to the Jivaros and the Tupi-Guarani, who lived off subsistence agriculture and hunting in the difficult rainforest environment. First described by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, the Tehuelches of Patagonia (Argentina) were known as tall warriors and hunters. The inhospitable area around Cape Horn harbored Fuegian people surviving on small-scale hunting and fishing.

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The Andean mountains of Peru and Bolivia were home to the most advanced civilizations of South America, including the Chimu, the Mochica, the Nazca, and most notably the Incas, who by the fifteenth century had built an empire stretching from Colombia to Chile and numbered ten million people, including the dominant Quechua. Like many other Native American civilizations, the Incas suffered from key technological drawbacks. They pounded gold but did not smelt iron; they lacked large draft animals (except llamas and alpacas); they did not use the wheel and gunpowder. Contrary to the Aztecs and the Mayas, the Incas were illiterate and had to content themselves with a memory aid (quipu). Despite these limitations, the empire was noted for its extensive hierarchy, ranging from the emperor himself (also called the Inca and claiming to be a direct descendant of the sun-god Inti) to provincial governors and village leaders. Dead Incas were mummified, given living quarters and servants, and consulted on state matters. The imperial bureaucracy financed an army, an extensive network of roads, state granaries, and public temples. The empire’s organizational skills were useful in transporting food when some provinces experienced famine. They also allowed the Inca to levy a labor tax, or mita, which compelled peasants to work on the Inca’s fields and on public monuments. The Incas are famous for architectural masterpieces such as the palaces in the capital Cuzco, the fortress at Sacsahuamán, and the mountain retreat in Machu Pichu. The Incas also developed various strains of corn and potatoes adapted to the many ecosystems encountered in the empire. www.abc-clio.com

Contacts with the Outside World Human interaction with the American continents began long before Christopher Columbus “discovered” the New World. As explained above, East Asians, and possibly Pacific Islanders, entered Alaska and Peru over 10,000 years ago. Viking sailors, who colonized Iceland and Greenland from Scandinavia, claimed in their sagas that Leif Ericsson visited Vineland (present-day Newfoundland) c. 1000 CE. The story has since been corroborated by archeological evidence. European fishermen routinely fished cod in the Grand Banks off the Canadian coast in the fifteenth century. A few scholars, such as Gavin Menzies in 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2002) and Louise Levathes in When China Ruled the Seas (1997), suggest that Chinese navigators may have sailed to the Americas before Columbus did, but evidence for this latter claim remains sketchy. Western exploration of the Americas took off following Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola. Columbus undertook an additional three voyages that reconnoitered the Caribbean Sea and the coast of Central America. He was followed in the first three decades of the sixteenth century by numerous European explorers. Juan Ponce de León explored Florida. Amerigo Vespucci sailed down the coast of Brazil. Ferdinand Magellan stopped in Argentina and southern Chile on his way to the Pacific Ocean. Vasco de Balboa walked across the Isthmus of Panama. Cortés conquered southern Mexico. Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca empire. Hernando de Soto and Francisco de Coronado explored the North American South and Southwest. John and Sebastian Cabot sailed up the

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Atlantic coast of North America looking for a Northwest Passage to Asia. European interaction with preColumbian civilizations proved generally disastrous to the latter. Spanish explorers, most notably Columbus in Hispaniola, Cortés in Mexico, and Pizarro in Peru, imposed Spanish rule by force and destroyed local elites who refused to cooperate. Awarded gifts of land and native labor (encomienda and repartimiento), Spanish conquistadors forced their subjects to work for free in mines and on agricultural estates. Such atrocities, well documented in Bartolome de las Casas’s History of the Indies, led Spanish king Charles V to outlaw future encomiendas in his New Laws of the Indies (1542). The ban indirectly led to European reliance on white indentured labor, and, ultimately, African slave labor as a substitute for forced Native American labor. Cross-Atlantic interaction also led to the exchange of germs, crops, and animals between Europe, Africa, and America (Columbian Exchange). The introduction of smallpox, whooping cough, measles, typhus, the plague, and later yellow fever and malaria had devastating consequences among Native Americans. In North America, smallpox was occasionally transmitted on purpose by settlers desirous to rid themselves of local competitors; in Latin America, Spaniards generally had no intention of destroying a valuable labor force. Whether intentional or not, the Columbian Exchange resulted in the death of 90% of the native population. In the Caribbean, the Tainos had virtually disappeared within 50 years of the Spanish conquest. In some other countries, native populations eventually rebounded and there is a significant portion of pureblooded or mixed blood Native Americans www.abc-clio.com

(mestizos if they descend from Europeans, zambos if they descend from Africans) in Mexico (including Aztecs and Mayas), Peru (Quechua), and Paraguay (Guarani). PreColumbian populations also fared relatively well in areas devoid of precious metals and unsuited for plantation agriculture, and thus unappealing to European settlers. The Araucanians of southern Chile opposed Spanish conquerors such as Pedro de Valdivia and maintained their independence until a war in 1880–1881. Even today, Amazonian tribes continue to live independently under the Brazilian government’s supervision. Dr. Philippe R. Girard See also: Columbian Exchange References Bingham, Hiram. Lost City of the Incas. New York: Weidenfeld, 2002. Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Leon-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. New York: Beacon Press, 1962. Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005. Rouse, Irving. The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

PRICE-MARS, JEAN (1876–1969) Jean Price-Mars, who served as a teacher, ethnologist, historian, statesman, and diplomat, was the foremost apostle of a Haitian intellectual reawakening that would acknowledge the country’s African roots. Price-Mars was born on October 15, 1876, in Grande Rivière du Nord of Jean Eléomont Mars, a planter and deputy, and

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Haitian author, Jean Price-Mars. (Library of Congress)

Fortuna Delcour Michel. The name “Price” was added in deference to Hannibal Price, president of the Chamber of Deputies and author of The Rehabilitation of the Black Race by the Republic of Haiti (1900). In a country where name recognition plays a great role, Price-Mars had a distinguished heritage. On his maternal side, his grandmother, Elizabeth P. Godart, claimed that she was related to an eponymous mulatto who died with Vincent Ogé’s 1791 rebellion. Jean-Baptiste Mars, his father’s ancestor, was an African slave who bought his freedom, fought with the American revolutionaries at Savannah, then represented Haiti’s blacks at the historic February 4, 1794, French National Assembly session that abolished slavery in the French colonies. Price-Mars was also related to Tirésias Simon Sam and Vilbrun Gauillaume Sam, both of whom became www.abc-clio.com

president of Haiti during Price-Mars’ youth. At first home-schooled by his father, Price-Mars enjoyed an education few black Haitians of his era benefited from. He attended the Collège Henri Grégoire in Cap Haïtien, then the Lycée Pétion in Port-au-Prince, then studied medicine in Port-au-Prince and Paris. While in Paris, he met young nationalist Haitian intellectuals such as Windsor Bellegarde, and was appalled by the racist “science” then popular in European countries, most notably Gustave Le Bon’s Laws of the Evolution of Peoples (1894). A 1903 trip to the United States brought home the reality that Haiti had fallen technologically behind its powerful neighbor. His family ties landed him various posts in the Haitian Embassy in Paris, Berlin, and Washington, an election as deputy (1907), and a position as inspector of Haiti’s schools. Price-Mars, who had already called on fellow members of the elite to uplift themselves in the review L’Essor (founded in 1912), was pushed to greater intellectual activism by the July 28, 1915, U.S. invasion of Haiti. Price-Mars considered the U.S. occupation, lasting until 1934, to be a humiliation. The invasion’s quick military success seemed to prove the theory that whites were inherently superior to blacks; and Price-Mars’s relatives were partially responsible for the political instability that prompted the United States to intervene. In parallel to his career as a history teacher at the Lycée Pétion and as a country doctor, Price-Mars delivered a series of lectures, which, in addition to his world-famous Ainsi parla l’Oncle (1928), established his reputation as an intellectual. The Haitian elite, he argued, was responsible for the country’s decline because of its divided

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loyalties as a racially African elite looking up to European, particularly French, culture. A founder of the Society of Haitian History and Geography (1922) and the Institute of Ethnology, Price-Mars showed that much of Haiti’s popular culture, including Voodoo and Creole, were of African origin, and that this was nothing to be ashamed about. Animism shared many of Christianity’s core values; Voodoo was not a satanic cult, but a syncretism reflecting Africans’ respect for their ancestors and natural powers. The African race’s alleged inferiority was a myth. Aside from Thus Spoke the Uncle, Price-Mars published La vocation de l’élite (1919), Une étape de l’évolution haïtienne (1929), Formation ethnique, folklore et culture du peuple haïtien (1939), Jean-Pierre Boyer Bazelais et le drame de Miragoâne (1948), La République d’Haïti et la République Dominicaine (1953), De Saint-Domingue à Haïti (1959), Silhouettes de nègres et de négrophiles (1960), and De la préhistoire d’Afrique à l’histoire d’Haïti (1961). The mulatto elite was offended by Price-Mars’s prodding, but young intellectuals, especially black ones, were responsive. Two of his students, François Duvalier and Dumarsais Estimé, later became presidents. Writer Jacques Roumain (author of Gouverneurs de la rosée, 1944) was one of his protégés. Abroad, personalities as diverse as Stokely Carmichael, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor recognized Price-Mars as a pioneer of Negritude. In 1956, admirers published a collection of essays entitled Témoignages sur l’oeuvre et la vie du Dr. Jean Price-Mars. Price-Mars’s acclaim as an intellectual was not matched in the political arena. Failing several times to be elected president, he had to content www.abc-clio.com

himself with being a senator, foreign minister, minister of education, and ambassador to the Dominican Republic and France. Jean Price-Mars died on March 1, 1969, in Pétionville. He had married Clara Perez in 1930; their daughter Marie-Madeleine was born in 1932 (Price-Mars had also fathered a son, Louis, in 1907). Dr. Philippe R. Girard See also: Duvalier, François; Haiti; Noirisme; Péralte, Charlemagne Masséna References Antoine, Jacques C. Jean Price-Mars and Haiti. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1981. Shannon, Magdaline. Jean Price-Mars, the Haitian Elite, and the American Occupation, 1915–1935. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.

PRINCE, MARY (1788–?) Mary Prince was the Bermuda-born author of The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831), a slave narrative that was a bestseller and influential to British abolitionism. Most of the biographical and historical information known about Mary Prince comes from this account. Published by the Anti-Slavery Society in London and Edinburgh, it ran to three editions that year alone and was crucial in rousing public support for the abolitionist cause. In 1829 Prince had presented a petition to Parliament appealing for manumission from her owner James Wood of Antigua. Lord Stowell’s judgment in 1828 on the case of Grace Jones meant that slave owners were not obliged to manumit slaves brought to Britain. Accompanied by a proposed bill for the emancipation of all British slaves, Prince’s petition was unsuccessful but was part of a multipronged and powerful

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campaign that was to culminate in the passing of the Emancipation Act in 1833. Mary Prince’s History remains unique, being the only account published in Britain by a female slave relating in first-person narrative the experience of West Indian slavery. Her history was written while Prince was a servant to Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. Susanna Strickland, later Susanna Moodie, transcribed the narrative and Pringle, who was also a poet, edited the transcription. The History is therefore a collaborative and literary enterprise, crafted as a sentimental yet highly effective piece of writing. Prince details the emotional suffering of slavery, physical and sexual abuse, as well as her many resistances, thus exploiting the roles of both the “good slave” and the “noble rebel.” Written in the mode of Romantic abolitionist discourse, the History achieves the effect of sounding like the unmediated voice of Prince directly appealing to the British public. She is represented as a truthful eyewitness and spokesperson for all slaves, whose task is to inform the public of slave suffering and of the moral turpitude of the plantocracy. Prince was born in Bermuda in the Devonshire parish in 1788 into the ownership of a farmer, Charles Myners. Her mother was a household slave, her father was a sawyer, and she had siblings. When Myners died Prince passed into the possession of Captain Williams. Until the age of twelve Mary was a companion to Williams’s daughter. When the estate was sold off, the Prince family was dispersed. She was bought by Captain Ingham of Spanish Point. After five years of severe abuse, Prince was sold at her own request to a Mr. D—. He owned land on the remote Turk’s Island where the salt industry supplied Bermuda with its main income. www.abc-clio.com

For about ten years Prince labored in the grueling salt ponds until D—returned to Bermuda. At around the age of thirty, Prince asked to be sold to the Woods family, who took her to Antigua, a relatively liberal environment for British slaves. The Woods’s household was another violent regime, yet Prince took steps toward freedom. She saved money through huckstering and hints at a relationship she had with a white man, Captain Abbot, who tried to buy her freedom. Prince never mentions having any children. She later joined the Moravian Church, where she met her future husband, a free black named Daniel James. In her mid-forties Prince came to England with the Woods family hoping they would free her. However, the Woodses were intransigent. Prince was forced to leave them and came under the direction of the Moravians and Anti-Slavery Society. Having sustained many injuries incurred by her masters’ violence, by her middle age Prince had arthritis, was lame and going blind. She is described in a court transcript of 1833, in which the Woods family won a case of libel against Thomas Pringle over the History’s content. After this date there are no further records of Mary Prince. It is uncertain whether she was able to rejoin her husband as a free woman in Antigua. Still, she remains a key figure of slave resistance. Kerry Sinanan See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Slave Narratives; Slave Revolts/Maronnage References Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834. London: Routledge, 1992. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. Edited by Moira Ferguson. 1831. Reprint. London: Pandora Press, 1986.

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PUERTO RICO Like most of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is a racially mixed island whose populace is descended from African, European, and indigenous peoples. As a result, Puerto Ricans acknowledge this tri-part past by referring to the “three roots” of Puerto Rican culture, each of which is imagined to have contributed something unique to the historical and contemporary fabric of Puerto Rican culture. From the African root comes associations with labor, food, and dance; from the Spanish, high culture, learning, and Catholicism; from the indigenous, associations with folk traditions, nature, and a pre-Columbian spirituality. A brief consideration of these associations reveals the vast differences between the races in Puerto Rico in terms of power and social position, with the Spanish component occupying the highest position, the indigenous the middle, and the African the bottom. Though contemporary Puerto Rican culture asserts a universal sharing of these racial components (all Puerto Ricans being some combination of all three roots) and a color-blind social structure, both history and recent scholarship calls this into question. Some scholars have argued that Puerto Rico’s overlapping history of colonialism, migration, and slavery up to the nineteenth century resulted in a popular and national culture that is fundamentally Afro-Mestizo in character, not white-Creole as dominant iconography would suggest. As Jose Luis González points out in his text Puerto Rico: The Four Storeyed Country, by the nineteenth century the colonial bourgeoisie of Puerto Rico was not made up of native born Puerto Ricans, but actually consisted of first generation immigrants from Corsica, Mallorca, the Canary Islands, and www.abc-clio.com

other Caribbean and European locations. As a result, González argues that the first Puerto Ricans—that is the first people to imagine themselves as being from Puerto Rico—were not white-Creoles, they were Afro-Mestizo Puerto Ricans. Part of the reason for this, González argues, is that Afro-Puerto Ricans were tied to the land in a way that the foreign-born elite were not: they were slaves, and they were the one group of people who could not conceive of home outside of the island. Since Puerto Rico has a dual colonial past as both a former colony of Spain and a current Free Associated Commonwealth of the United States, the issue of national identity is one that is fraught and troublesome. The complications of a foreign-born bourgeoisie and elite in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (whose cultural identity and allegiance were tied to their places of origin, as the continued use of their native languages suggests) gave way in the twentieth century to the implications of U.S. citizenship. Consequently, the question of Puerto Rican identity as a national identity was left unanswered and in crisis. As the United States exerted political authority over the island in the twentieth century, the issue of race and identity came to the forefront. On the one hand, the United States’s racial black/white binary, delineated by one drop rules, had limited if any applicability for the racially mixed island. On the other hand, Puerto Rico and its population came to be popularly represented and imagined as a white population. In distinction to Cuba, for example, which was often depicted as a dark, unruly, and savage figure in the popular political cartoons of the early twentieth century, Puerto Rico was depicted as a white and domicile figure, often taking the form of a white

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child or woman in need of Uncle Sam’s help and tutelage. What this use of imagery suggested was that in order for Puerto Rico to be part of the United States, the issue of race needed to be resolved (or at least imagined) in such a way that it could be a part of the United States while remaining apart from it, a move that the Supreme Court called “foreign in a domestic sense.” This resolution was accomplished by imagining Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans as a whiteCreole population, effectively obfuscating African contributions by privileging the indigenous and Spanish. Though the official distance from the African heritage of Puerto Rico is deeply troubling, this is not to say that black Puerto Rican identity is nonexistent. Jose Luis González argues that though black Puerto Ricans may be excluded from discourses of high culture, the popular culture of Puerto Rico is deeply indebted to its African roots. Everyday examples of this abound, but the most analyzed African-influenced contributions to Puerto Rican culture are tied to the (stereotypically) sensual: food, dance, and music. For example, Puerto Rican cuisine popularly utilizes foods like yucca, which have traditional African roots and were an important part of the slave diet, while rhythms and beats like bomba are heavily indebted to African traditions. Another important aspect of AfroPuerto Rican identity occurs within the Puerto Rican Diaspora, in large urban centers within the United States like New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The major waves of Puerto Rican migration took place between 1940 and 1970, when nearly a third of the entire Puerto Rican population migrated. This time also coincided with a major crisis and shift in American racial classification and separation (typified by Jim www.abc-clio.com

Crow laws). Since many Puerto Rican families consist of individuals who physically demonstrate a wide range of racial characteristics, some appearing white, others trigueno (wheat colored), and others black, the question of racial belonging becomes a major issue in Puerto Rican identity. In his classic memoir Down These Mean Streets (1967), writer Piri Thomas deals with this conflict by traveling through the Deep South during Jim Crow as a black man who is passing for white. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the culture syncreticism and exchange between African American and Puerto Rican cultures found a voice in both literary production and popular culture. The creation and popularity of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, featuring writers like Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, and Miguel Algarín, further underscored this link between African American and Puerto Rican cultures by emphasizing the racial and social similarities of both groups. The works of the Nuyorican (a term blending New York and Puerto Rican) poets are gritty urban postcards, concerned with issues like poverty, racism, oppression, drugs, cultural alienation, and violence, which characterize urban American ghettos. By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, scholars like Juan Flores emphasized the cultural connection between the two groups through popular urban art forms like salsa, hip-hop, bomba, rap, and spoken word poetry. Scholars have noted that while the two major Latino groups in the United States—Puerto Ricans and Chicanos/Mexicanos—share many cultural similarities, an important point of departure is the notable influence of African culture in relation to Puerto Ricans and indigenous culture in relation to Chicanos/Mexicanos.

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Though the history of Afro-Puerto Rican culture, both in terms of the Spanish colonial past and the current political association with the United States, is profoundly marked by the violence of slavery and racism, it is nonetheless a vibrant if oftentimes unacknowledged part of Puerto Rican identity, both on the island and in the mainland United States. Lorna Pérez References Duany, Jorge. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Flores, Juan. Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. Houston, TX: Arté Publico Press, 1993.

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Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. González, Jose Luis. Puerto Rico: The Four Storyed Country. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Weiner, 1993. Grosfoguel, Frances Negron-Muntaner, and Ramon Grosfoguel, eds. Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Convergences: Inventories of the Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Santiago, Esmeralda. When I Was Puerto Rican. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1993. Thomas, Piri. Down These Mean Streets. New York: Vintage, 1997.

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Q QADDAFI, MUAMMAR AL- (1942–) Muammar al-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya since September 1, 1969, was a supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) who subsequently renounced terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Born in Sirte as the son of a Bedouin tribesman, Qaddafi attended Sebha Preparatory before attending the University of Libya and Military Academy in Benghazi. During his academic career, Qaddafi desired to emulate Gamal Abdul Nasser, who orchestrated the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy in 1952. It was the principles of Arab socialism that would drive Qaddafi to imitate him. Qaddafi would also develop friendships with students from Sebha, who would eventually assist him in his own coup against King Idris I of Libya. In 1966 Qaddafi was commissioned a Libyan Signal Corps officer. On September 1, 1969, Qaddafi led a group of officers in overthrowing Idris I and establishing the Revolutionary Command Council, which still rules Libya. For 35 years after coming to power, Qaddafi promoted Pan-Arabism throughout the Middle East. Qaddafi would also earn the disdain of the United States because of his support for the PLO, which was responsible for the Black

September massacre at the 1972 Olympics. Tensions with the United States came to a boiling point with Libya’s involvement in the April 5, 1986, bombing of a German nightclub that was a popular spot for U.S. servicemen. The United States would retaliate with Operation El Dorado Canyon, in which U.S. warplanes destroyed several key military targets and inadvertently killed Qaddafi’s adopted daughter. Following the 1986 air strike, Qaddafi avoided the international spotlight and focused on efforts by Libya to work cooperatively with other African states. He has been a prominent figure in African organizations such as the African Union. In 1988, belief in Libyan involvement in the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 passengers, would lead to the isolation of Qaddafi from the West. Qadaffi’s responses to the claims of the involvement of the Libyan intelligence services and of the indictment of Libyan citizens as suspects were complicated, across the course of the investigation, trial, and appeals process, which lasted some 11 years. Qaddafi denied involvement at the time, although in 2000 he indicated that he would accept the decision of the international court convened to try the suspects involved in the flight’s destruction.

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Muammar Al-Qaddafi, revolutionary leader of Libya since September 1, 1969. Considered a terrorist by many in the West, Qaddafi’s nationalist supporters credit him with increasing Libya’s importance in international affairs. (UPI-Bettmann/Corbis)

However, he would, in 2002, refuse to acknowledge the court’s indictments. As the trial proceeded, and following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, Qaddafi appeared more willing to engage with Western powers, and denounced the September 11 terrorist attacks. In 2003, Libya agreed to pay compensation to the families involved in the Lockerbie incident. In 2004 Qaddafi would renounce his support for terror groups and dismantle his country’s attempts at developing weapons of mass destruction, thus prompting a restoration of relations between the United States and www.abc-clio.com

Libya. Qaddafi, however, denies the involvement of his government in the Lockerbie incident. Ojan Aryanfard See also: African Union; Libya; Terrorism Reference Stanik, Joseph T. El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared War with Qaddafi. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002.

QUAKERS The Quakers are a religious and political reform group that originated in England, whose American branch was influential in the abolition of slavery. The Quakers, or

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English Quaker William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania. Following his faith, he regarded the colony as a holy experiment in which religious and civil liberties could flourish. The Quakers were the first Christian denomination to abolish slavery in their midst. (Library of Congress)

the Religious Society of Friends, developed in England during the seventeenth century. George Fox founded Quakerism on the notion that the Inner Light of God exists in the hearts of the bourgeoisie. Only those who followed higher law principles were capable of receiving God’s Inner Light. George Fox began preaching in 1647 to English civilians that sought peace during British political turmoil. An English judge, who referred to Fox as a shivering coward when Fox advised the judge to tremble at the Word of God, coined the term “Quaker.” Fox’s statement suggested that the British Empire’s disobedience of God’s law was the origin of the political strife in England. Instead of practicing specific creeds, the Quakers advocated that a renewed spiritualism between God and Humanity www.abc-clio.com

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would inherently revamp forms of worship and trade. Humanity was therefore to place its trust in God and the clergy. The clergy were believed to conduct the purest manner of commerce because their goal was to better the human condition. The Quakers preached against the moneyed class and advocated that humanity abolish slavery across Africa and America immediately without violence. William Penn introduced Quakerism to America in 1682. The colony of Pennsylvania was established by Penn to serve as an asylum for prosecuted English Quakers to enter the New World. The constitution of Pennsylvania safeguarded the religious freedom of its citizens. Quaker laws maintained a placid community that from 1682 to 1756 required no military and had only a small police force. Low crime rates in Quaker settlements proved, they believed, that the world could prosper ideally where there was no tyrannical ruler present. By the 1700s, abolitionism was a fullscale movement in Pennsylvania. Quaker activists Anthony Benezet and John Woolman pressured slaveholders to emancipate their slaves on religious, moral, and economic grounds. The Quaker message was to spread internationally to convince all slaveholding nations to disband their colonies. Moreover, the message was that a world without slavery would enhance the individual talent of every nation. Congress received various petitions from the Quakers to end human bondage. The petitions noted the hypocrisy of practicing slavery in a country that had recently rejected oppressive British rule. The main argument advanced by the Quakers was that America was imposing the same tyranny on Africa that Britain had placed

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on America. Delegates published tracts that urged Americans that it was their humanitarian and benevolent responsibility to aid Africans whether they were free or enslaved. Quaker settlements still exist in the United States, Africa, and various other nations. The Religious Society of Friends maintains that although life is sacramental, observing special sacraments is not necessary in practicing one’s faith. Contemporary Quakers conduct business and worship in monthly and yearly meetings. Seventeenth-century Quakers practiced their beliefs in camps that convened in any location that offered periods of silence. Long intervals of quiet were required in order to have God’s Light bestowed upon its supporters to have them comprehend their responsibility to respond to international suffering. Long periods of silence were supposed to have large groups reach a collective understanding of the human condition. Gerry Del Guercio See also: Slavery (History) References Hamm, Thomas D. The Transformation American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907. Leicester, UK: Midland Publishing, 1992. Larson, Rebecca. Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775. New York: Knopf, 1993. Lippard, George. The Quaker City or the Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime. Edited by David J. Reynolds. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. The Religious Society of Friends. www.Quaker.org (accessed November 14, 2007). Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life among the Lowly. Edited by Ann Douglas. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986.

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QUAQUE, PHILIP (1741–1816) Taken from the Gold Coast enclave of Cape Coast, in modern Ghana, to London as a youth, Philip Quaque returned home in 1766 to establish a mission and a school for the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). While his mission did not prove successful, he is remembered for laying the foundation for the development of the nineteenthcentury Gold Coast educational system. Quaque was most likely a student of the Reverend Thomas Thompson, also a SPG missionary, whose lack of success and failing health caused Thompson to create a plan to send several Cape Coast youth, including Quaque, back to England to be educated and converted. Thompson believed that an African missionary would be more successful than a European missionary because of their ability to relate to the local peoples. Thompson, in consultation with Cudjoe Caboceer the local de facto leader, sent three boys to London; only one, Quaque, survived his stay and returned home. Cudjoe, whose son Frederick Adoy had received an English education, saw the benefits of local boys obtaining new knowledge within the context of the transAtlantic slave trade. An English education ensured them of company employment along with the social, economic, and political power that came from being a crosscultural broker. Of the three boys, Quaque exceeded all expectations in his ability to learn and in his conversion to Christianity. In 1765, he was ordained into the Anglican Church and then accepted positions with both the SPG and the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. In the spring of 1766, he arrived at Cape Coast with his English wife and her female companion.

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Quaque, who was very eager to begin, believed that the enthusiastic response of the local peoples to his return marked their desire to learn what he had to offer. He quickly worked to establish his mission and, like his predecessor Thompson, focused on converting the local elite in the belief that if they converted the others would follow. Quaque quickly found that the company, because of its involvement in the slave trade, supported education over proselytization. The same was true of the local people. Quaque reacted by integrating religion into the educational process by teaching students to read and write from various Anglican tracts. The problem was that while the local people were initially enthusiastic about the educational opportunity, and the resulting economic opportunities, the children and parents quickly lost interest when they understood the long-term commitment required. Quaque made many efforts to permanently establish his school and mission, with his brightest moment arising in the early 1790s when a group of European officials joined together and formed the Torridzonian Society. This gentleman’s society pooled resources to create a boarding school for local children, many of whom were their offspring, and placed Quaque in charge of educating and converting them. As the slave trade came under challenge from the abolitionist movement, the society soon dissolved and with it Quaque’s last hope for success. Quaque lived out the rest of his life at Cape Coast in relative obscurity. While both his mission and school were failures in that very few children or adults were educated or converted, Philip Quaque laid the foundations for the educational and missionary activity in Ghana of the nineteenth century. Ty M. Reese www.abc-clio.com

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See also: Company of Merchants Trading to Africa; Cudjoe; Ghana References Curtin, Philip D. Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Priestly, Margaret. West African Trade & Coast Society: A Family Study. West African History Series. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

QUILOMBO The word quilombo comes from the African Bantu linguistic root, where, written with k, it means “settlement” and “union,” and connotes slave communities formed in resistance to slavery. In colonial Portuguese, when it acquired the meaning of “fortress” or “camp,” it referred to the place runaway slaves would gather and to the resulting community thus formed. The term is equivalent to the English maroon, and corresponds to the palenque or cume in Spanish America. Quilombos and their inhabitants, called quilombolas, were one of the most important forms of resistance to slavery in Brazil. Today they represent a salutary reminder that slaves did not accept passively their plight but revolted when they could do so. Successful quilombos (i.e., those that were not very soon destroyed by white slave owners) gave birth to settlements, which could prove to be so well organized, both in terms of administration and internal hierarchy, that they would resemble villages, in some cases even establishing commercial ties with peddlers and neighboring farms. Their population was mixed, because in addition to black slaves, native Brazilians and Mestizos of all sorts could also be found there. It is interesting to note that quilombos were present

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in all periods of Brazilian history prior to the abolition, and in all regions of the country. Their size could range from a few tens of people to the astounding 20,000 of the Palmares quilombo. In the quilombos ex-slaves reproduced many of the social practices of their native Africa. Work was highly collaborative, agriculture was varied, the land was commonly worked on, and livestock were not considered private property, but owned by families or the collectivity. Settlements in forests and places of difficult access were called “breaking-away quilombos” (quilombos de rompimento); there were, however, two other kinds of quilombos in Brazil: the urban and the abolitionist quilombos. Already in the seventeenth century, there were cities like Salvador or Rio de Janeiro that were big enough to conceal black people in the crowds, but still small enough to have somewhat dense vegetation surrounding them. Urban quilombos were hiding places where runaway slaves could stay when not in the city. Relying on the solidarity of freed slaves, as well as that of small shop owners, who exploited their labor, runaways managed to survive in a hostile environment. Abolitionist quilombos flourished in

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the nineteenth century. They were unhidden sites of confrontation supported by abolitionists, both black and white, who welcomed runaway slaves at a time when slavery was already in decline. After abolition, quilombos became important centers of Afro-Brazilian culture. Even though repression was relentless and all quilombos destroyed by slave owners, their militias, or the government, there are still as many as 750 communities in Brazil, totaling 3 million people, which are made of former quilombolas. These quilombo-descended populations are now struggling to keep alive their heritage and cultural identity as well as to have full rights over the land their ancestors invested so much hope in. Fabio Durao

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See also: Brazil; Brazilian Culture; Slave Revolts/Maronnage References Moura, Clóvis. Rebeliões da Senzala: Quilombos, insurreições, guerrilhas. 4th edition. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Mercado Aberto, 1988. Moura, Clóvis. Quilombos: Resistência ao Escravismo. São Paulo, Brazil: Ática, 1993. Schwartz, Stuart B. Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

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R RACE, HISTORY OF The history of race as it applies to humans is the history of a largely Euro-American (Western) idea that declares the existence of a hierarchy of Homo sapiens races that, although reflecting a geographical distribution (for example, Europe, Africa, Asia), is ultimately biologically based. The creation and development of this idea into the theories (or stories) of race that continue to have an impact on how many twentyfirst-century people see themselves and others, is the creation and development of an idea responding to many influences, but especially capitalism. Racialism can be defined as the idea that the creation of human races occurs from the biological transmission of not only distinguishing physical but also intellectual, moral, and spiritual characteristics. Racism adds to racialism the idea that one race of humans is superior to others, and this superiority justifies the superior race’s domination of those inferiors. In Western thought, racism posits a race of white/Caucasian purity superior to impure, nonwhite races. Current genetic research indicates that today’s humans have descended from a common father who lived approximately 60,000 years ago—a mere 2,000 generations. The human migration out of Africa

that resulted in the variety of skin colors that exist today occurred only 40,000 years ago. Although these exact dates may change with future research, they indicate that skin color is a superficial adaptation whose variations do not distinguish human races. Human skin color is an ever-changing epidermal adaptation to sunlight. Skin must balance between being light enough to allow sufficient production of vitamin D (vital for strong bones) and dark enough to prevent the destruction of folate (important to fertility and fetal development). Increased exposure to sunlight increases the skin’s production of melanin, and this darkens the skin. The production of melanin thus can vary both in individuals over a lifetime, and in populations over generations. Not only are skin colors a recent development in human evolution, but the idea of categorizing humans by skin color is also a recent development. Humans have long categorized others, and groups tend to evaluate “others” as inferior. The supposed inferiority of other groups, however, has traditionally been based on such characteristics as language, religion, and customs. Although skin color has been an element of, for instance, the caste system of India, skin color as the primary basis for ranking groups (and ranking all groups throughout the world) is

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a European invention that began during Europe’s so-called Age of Discovery. Europe’s exploration of the world began in earnest in the fifteenth century. Early European travelers to Africa saw Africans more as trading partners than as inferiors. Europe’s usurpation of the Americas, however, resulted in the importation of enslaved Africans, and this dramatically different relationship with Africans required a new “story”—the story of dark-skinned (especially African) inferiority. By the ca. 1603 production of Shakespeare’s Othello, skin color had, for Europeans, become a marker of difference. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rise of European imperialisms increased the need for this new story, and the increasingly important field of science served this need with plant and animal classification systems, for example, Carolus Linnaeus in 1735 and Charles Darwin in 1871, that included humans. During the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century, a profusion of scientific studies as well as philosophical and eugenicist arguments strengthened European theories of race (and racism) by interconnecting race and skin color with both phenotypical variations (e.g., craniology) and with such elements as geography, nation, language, and degree of development as measured by material productivity, for example, Immanuel Kant in 1775; G. W. F. Hegel in 1830; and Arthur de Gobineau in 1853. Europeans generally saw Africa as a “dark” continent of childish, uncivilized peoples whose limited potentials could be approached only through the firm hand of an enlightened “parental Europe.” The “parental firmness” of slavery would bring order and the “light” of Christianity to Africans, and this would result in a more www.abc-clio.com

productive and civil “African race.” This parental firmness was eventually transformed into such social interventions as colonization, Jim Crow separation in the United States (ca. 1877–1964), apartheid in South Africa (1948–1994), and harsher prison sentences for blacks vis-à-vis whites with equal records. Although diminishing since the 1960s, the belief that skin color indicates important differences continues to exist throughout the Americas, and during times of perceived threat, race remains perhaps the most powerful trope for producing fear and anxiety among U.S. Americans. The emotional power of race is particularly strong in the United States because of that country’s long maintenance of binary ideas about race coupled with spatial segregation. This segregation (e.g., ghetto from suburb) has not only inhibited interactions and mutual understandings but has also helped maintain economic inequalities that produce differences that are then taken as results not of economic but of racial differences. How Africana peoples have responded to Western ideas about race has varied. During the eighteenth century, for instance, the writers Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano generally worked within the dominant white logic of race, maintaining the fiction of African inferiority but with the admonition that Africans—contrary to thinking at the time—could approach equality with whites under proper tutelage. Although white abolitionists and postbellum reconstructionists were politically nearest to African Americans, even this end of the white political spectrum adhered to what is probably the essential aspect of the discourse of race, its foundation on a binary logic that excludes African Americans from the normativity of whites (an idea rooted in

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the limpieza de sangre—purity of blood— doctrine of fifteenth-century Spain). This is the logic of the hypodescent, or “one drop,” theory of race—one drop of black blood (i.e., one nonwhite ancestor) makes a person black. Hypodescent produced such gradations as half black is mulatto, one-quarter is quadroon, one-eighth is octoroon, one-sixteenth is mustafina, and one-thirty-second is a whitewash. That white has no gradations indicates its purity, and purity by definition is unattainable for any lineage once contaminated. The extreme nature of this binary logic is that it maintains eternal separation. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the definition of race began to strain as it expanded to address the complexities of a more global scope. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the division of races between white and black was also a division internal to African Americans in that the sense of being fully human is continually disrupted by the binary logic that posits the African American as lacking, as not human but merely black human, not American but Negro American. This Du Bois called “double consciousness.” The 1930s saw the development of a Marxist (class-based) understanding that race is a story used in capitalist systems to divide and exploit workers. During the 1950s and early 1960s, such people as James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. promoted the belief that the arts, religion, and political coalitions could erase skin color from the equation of human relations. With the violence of white responses to the Civil Rights Movement, this integrationist vision of race was overtaken by a return to more racialist thinking. During the 1960s, Black Nationalism, Black Power, Afrocentrism, and the Black Arts www.abc-clio.com

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Movement expressed a black pride promoting a politics of racial separation and competition. This binary understanding of race, however, diminished by 1970 when Africana identities became increasingly complicated by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion, and “black” no longer equaled “heterosexual black male.” Thus since around 1970, U.S. ideas about race have become more complex and flexible and thus more like the ideas held elsewhere in the Americas. Space does not allow distinguishing differences in concepts of race among Caribbean nations, American nations with prominent indigenous populations, Euro-Latin nations, Canada, or African nations—particularly South Africa and its Black Consciousness Movement. But in Brazil, to provide one example, race is not understood as an immutable biological category but a classification that includes both appearance and class; thus phenotypic variations can result in different racial categories for siblings from identical parents (impossible under the genotypic definitions that have dominated in the United States), and changes in wealth over a person’s life can change that person’s race. Also, many Caribbean nations maintain highly complex systems that rank multiple nonwhite groups of not only African but also Asian and various mixed ancestries using such terms as Creole, métissage, métisse, mestizaje, and noiriste. Since the 1960s, Africana scholars (e.g., Cornell West, Paul Gilroy, Anthony Appiah) have become prominent voices discussing (and thus defining) race as a sociohistorical construction—a fiction. This rejection of a biological basis to race, however, does not deny the existence of black epistemological, social, musical, spiritual, and other heritages and experiences from

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which come outstanding examples of the humanist tradition and vital resources for everyone. Kevin M. Hickey References Bernasconi, Robert, and Tommy L. Lott, eds. The Idea of Race. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2000. Brace, C. Loring. “Race” Is a Four-Letter Word: The Genesis of the Concept. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Cornel West. The Future of the Race. New York: Knopf, 1996. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. London: Allen Lane, 2000. Jackson, John P., and Nadine M. Weidman. Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Malik, Kenan. The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

RADIO MARTÍ Radio Martí is the most recent of several U.S. government radio projects created specifically to broadcast to Cuba. The first was Radio Swan, financed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which began broadcasting after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Radio Swan, later renamed Radio Americas, ceased operations in the 1970s. Voice of America (VOA), a U.S. government-funded program that broadcasts news and entertainment to many countries of the world, also began broadcasting to Cuba in 1959. Radio Martí was created in 1985 as a specific program within VOA, and broadcasts a variety of programming including news, sports, and entertainment programs. No official figures are available, but some observers believe it is the most-listened-to radio station in Cuba. The station was www.abc-clio.com

named after Jose Martí, a leader in the fight for Cuban independence. Although Radio Martí considers itself to be unbiased, the Cuban government considers it to be propaganda, and has at times “jammed” the signal, that is, broadcast noise at the same frequency so the Radio Martí broadcast could not be heard. Many Americans have also raised issues of news bias; their charges were supported in 1995 when a federal government investigation disclosed that chairman Jose Mas Canosa and director Rolando Bonachea had encouraged slanted news reporting and punished employees who complained about it. With the growing availability of commercial radio broadcasting, Radio Martí has attracted fewer listeners in Cuba. For instance, it is estimated that in the 1990s almost three-quarters of the Cuban population listened to Radio Martí, while in 2005 a U.S. government survey revealed that less than 2 percent of Cubans had listened to Radio Martí in the previous week. Sarah Boslaugh References Alexandre, Laurien. The Voice of America: From Détente to the Reagan Doctrine. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1988. Greenhouse, Steven. “U.S. Inquiry Said to Fault Radio Marti.” The New York Times, July 27, 1995, section A, p. 10, column 1. Maggs, John. “Air War over Cuba Escalates.” National Journal 37, no. 8: 543, February 19, 2005.

RASTAFARI The Rastafari movement is a cultural, religious, and political movement that began in the early 1930s among the descendants of African slaves in the Caribbean nation of Jamaica. Its central tenets are liberation from white oppression, black supremacy,

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and the doctrine of repatriation to Africa for the Diaspora, as well as the divinity of Haile Selassie, the former Ethiopian emperor. While the Rastafari tradition is not a form of Christianity, and is in some cases hostile to that faith, it incorporates some Christian elements—for instance, the world outside Africa is viewed as “Babylon,” Africa is “Zion,” and God is “Jah” (from “Jehovah”). The movement grew out of longstanding traditions in Jamaica—particularly black resistance to oppression, which gave rise to numerous revolts against colonialists, and “Ethiopianism,” which traced black Africans’ lineage to the rulers of the ancient Egyptian and Ethiopian dynasties and viewed Africa as the promised land of the Bible. Ethiopianism found its greatest spokesman in Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican union leader and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey was a proponent of Pan-Africanism, the goal of which was to unite people of color against imperialism, and he launched the Back to Africa movement in the 1920s. He quoted Psalm 68 (“Princes shall come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall stretch forth its hands unto God”) to emphasize the noble destiny of Africans and their descendants. He is also believed to have said “Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black King; he shall be the Redeemer.” The crowning of Haile Selassie I as the emperor of Ethiopia in 1930 was seen as the fulfillment of Garvey’s prophecy, though Garvey himself was critical of him. The early Rastafari preachers declared Selassie to be the messiah, the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Further evidence of the African king’s divinity was his biblically inspired title, which put him in the line of descent from King Solomon: “King of Kings, Lord www.abc-clio.com

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of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.” Rastafari is derived from the emperor’s precoronation name, Tafari Makonnen, and the Ethiopian (Amharic) word for duke—ras. Leonard Howell was the most prominent of a handful of preachers who began preaching the new religion. After traveling in Africa and America, he returned to Jamaica to spread his message of repatriation and resistance in “street meetings” in the slums of Kingston. The area was home to many urban poor, mostly peasants who had migrated from Jamaica’s rural areas over the decades since emancipation (in 1834). He and other ministers quickly gained followings—as well as attention from the government for their revolutionary views. Howell was convicted for sedition in 1933 for abusing the government and sentenced to jail, along with the three other major Rastafari leaders of the time. Following his release, Howell retreated to the hills above Kingston, where he oversaw Pinnacle—a community of believers numbering about 1,000, by some estimates—from 1940 until 1954. Various principles of the Rastafari movement crystallized here, including the use of ganja, or cannabis, as a religious sacrament. Ganja was said to have grown on the grave of King Solomon and was a major cash crop for Howell’s group. He also preached resistance to the established order, and Pinnacle became the target of raids and arrests until it was destroyed by the government in 1954 and its followers dispersed in the Shanty-Town or Back-O-Wall area of Kingston. Howell was later committed to Kingston Mental Hospital. Other fundamental principles of the tradition to emerge in its early years were a vegetarian diet known as “i-tal” (which

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means the “essence” or “nature of things”); the prohibition of alcohol; the use of the red, gold, and green colors (from the Ethiopian flag); and the long, matted dreadlock hairstyle, a custom that is dictated by the biblical verse Leviticus 21:5 (“they shall not make baldness upon their head”) and which also connotes a rejection of social norms. Other traditions include “reasonings,” or philosophical discussion sessions, and celebrations known as “nyabingi” that involve dance, drumming, and ganja. A distinctive vocabulary known as “i-talk” is another hallmark of the movement. The words “me” and “you” are never used, for instance; instead, “I and I” expresses the concept of oneness. “Irie” is another special term that denotes positivity. After the destruction of Pinnacle, a new phase of Rastafari movement began. Its adherents advocated militant resistance to the establishment and the destruction of “Babylon.” A series of violent clashes with the government ensued in which Rastas were sometimes killed, and often arrested and forced to submit to having their locks cut off. In 1958, hundreds of Rastas tried to capture the city of Kingston in the name of Haile Selassie. In 1959, an armed encampment was raided and its leader, the Rev. Claudius Henry, arrested. In 1966, with the Rastafari widely seen as a revolutionary threat, the government bulldozed Back-O-Wall, an area it had targeted for development—resulting in the destruction of several Rasta camps. At the same time, while the Rastafari displayed a general distrust of organized politics, there were efforts made by some members to bring about reforms. In 1960, a government report was issued urging that Rasta concerns be taken seriously, and in 1961, an unofficial delegation was www.abc-clio.com

dispatched to Africa to explore repatriation. Ras Sam Brown, the first Rastafari to foray into politics with an unsuccessful run in 1961 at a Parliament seat, wrote up a manifesto containing twenty-one points. In it, he proposed that the movement take power with the goal of “uplift[ing] . . . the poor and oppressed,” and that a government be set up under the “Repatriation and Power” banner. This focus on empowerment at home was reinforced by the historic visit to Jamaica in 1966 by Emperor Haile Selassie I—his first and only trip to the island nation. Selassie himself was a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and strongly discouraged ideas of his divinity. He also earned a reputation as a despot, especially after the Ethiopian famine of the 1970s, when he made sure to keep his pet lions fed while people were starving. He was deposed by the army in 1974. Still, he continued to be seen as divine by the Rastafari, even more so after his death in 1975. On the 1966 visit, the anniversary of which is still celebrated by Rastafari, he brought a message to the enthusiastic crowds that came to greet him—that the Rastafari should not seek to be repatriated before they had succeeded in liberating the people of Jamaica. In the latter half of the twentieth century, various waves of migration brought the Rastafari movement (if not its substance, then its style) to Central America, Cuba, England, Canada, and the United States. The movement entered pop culture in the 1970s with the emergence of Bob Marley and the spread of reggae, which touches on Rastafari themes and is inspired by the Nyabinghi music. The Rastafari movement’s adherents are now believed to number about 1 million worldwide.

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Currently, the movement includes three major groups, which are known as “houses” or “mansions”: the House of Nyabinghi; the Twelve Tribes of Israel; and the Bobo Ashanti. The House of Nyahbinghi is an ascetic sect whose motto is “Death to black and white downpressors.” The Twelve Tribes of Israel, which took hold among middleclass Jamaicans in the 1970s, revere their late founder, Vernon Carrington, as a prophet. (He was known as Prophet Gad.) The group is the most doctrinaire of the three and places a strong emphasis on the Bible. It also has a stated policy of including all races. The fundamentalist Bobo (pronounced Bob-bo) Ashanti sect members wear turbans and robes, and live in a utopian community called Bobo Hill in Jamaica, where they raise money by selling handmade brooms. Charles Edwards, also known as Prince Edward Emmanuel Charles VII, founded the group in the 1950s and is seen as part of a Holy Trinity that includes Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey. Wendy Blake References Barrett, Leonard S. Sr. The Rastafarians. 3rd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Chevannes, Barry. Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994.

REGGAE Reggae was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1960s from the melding of musical genres such as jazz, blues, rocksteady, ska, calypso, and rapsodie. In 1968, Frederick “Toots” Herbert, of Toots and the Maytals, coined the term “reggae” in his first album entitled Do the Reggay. Yet the word reggae may have derived from either “rega,” the name of a Bantu-speaking people on Lake www.abc-clio.com

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Tanganyika in former Zaire; from the Kingston slang term “streggae,” used to identify a sex worker; or from the term “rege,” which means “danse” in the Soninke language of West Africa. The development of reggae was the masterpiece of three men: Robert (Bob) Nesta Marley, Bunny Livingston (later known as Bunny Wailer), and Peter Tosh. These three pioneers of reggae were the original members of the Wailers band, which crafted a new music that combined traditional rhythms stemming from mento, calypso, and ska with the new sound of American blues and jazz, and rocksteady. The synthesis of these musical genres was heavily influenced by the cultures that enslaved Africans brought to the Americas centuries ago. Despite its multiple origins, reggae is primarily a music coming from the people. In a June 1976 interview, Bob Marley, the legendary singer who popularized reggae, said, “Reggae say[s] something. But it can only mean something if it mean[s] something to the people who make it and the people who listen.” Marley’s statement shows that reggae is the property of the masses, since its meaning is shaped by the people who hear it, feel it, and live it. In this sense, reggae is a universal music that has a message that reaches people from all over the globe. Yet, despite its universality, reggae is primarily a product of African-Jamaican identity, because it evolved from the local resistance of black Jamaicans against racial, economic, social, and cultural oppressions since slavery. This message of resistance against domination reaches out to black people from the Americas, Africa, and other parts of the world who continue to suffer from the legacy of slavery and colonialism. Reggae teaches the message of liberation, resistance, respect, brotherly and

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sisterly love, and hard work that black people have learned from centuries of hardships in “Babylon,” a word that identifies the West and every other place where black people continue to suffer. Following on the footsteps of their pioneers, reggae artists from Jamaica and around the globe travel across the world on a regular basis, spreading the message and wisdom of Rastafarianism, which is a term that refers to the philosophical and religious teachings of Haile Selassie (of Ethiopia) and Marcus Garvey (of Jamaica). Babacar M’Baye See also: Calypso; Garvey, Marcus; Jamaica; Jazz and the Blues; Marley, Robert Nesta; Popular Music, American Influences on African; Selassie I, Haile References Baker, Christopher. Jamaica. Hawthorn, Australia: Lonely Planet, 1996. McCann, Ian. Bob Marley: In His Own Words. London: Omnibus Press, 1993. Thompson, Dave. Reggae and Caribbean Music. San Francisco, CA: Backbeat, 2002.

REGGAE, AFRICAN Reggae music in Africa owes its birth and evolution to the African Diaspora, and to the influence of Jamaican reggae. Just as Africa impacted the music of the New World in the aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade, the Americas and Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, introduced reggae to Africa. Africans were receptive to this music style because they could easily relate to the historical experience of Jamaicans. The beats and rhythms of reggae music are an aesthetic link between Africa and Jamaica. Reggae made its initial impact in Africa during the mid-1970s, and since that time it has served as a major force in urban pop music scenes of numerous African nations, www.abc-clio.com

especially Anglophone countries. The reasons for the popularity of reggae in Africa range from the structural and functional affinities that exist between indigenous African musical forms and reggae, the eclectic background and purpose of reggae, the potent appeal of the music’s religiously inspired and sociopolitically charged lyrics, and the eagerness on the part of young people in Africa to identify with a black transnational pop music idiom. Some have argued that the popularity of reggae among West African youth developed out of their growing dissatisfaction with both the overproduced, high-tech Western disco/rap/funk pervasive in urban nightclubs and the perceived stuffiness and rigidity of traditional music in the 1970s. Africans can easily relate to the socioeconomic and political conditions in the black Diaspora. African territories had to fight for freedom, and today the independent states are fighting against neocolonialism, oppression, exploitation, corruption, and material deprivation. The messages and philosophies of reggae music are a means of protest. As a result of the similarities between the historical and contemporary realities of Africa and Jamaica, the images and tribulations found in the lyrics of reggae make it very attractive to the African people. As with Jamaican reggae, African reggae became a medium for telling about the struggle of the oppressed peoples of Africa—their stories and their trials and tribulations. Soon the music began to blossom in most parts of Africa, including Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa. Like everywhere across the globe, Bob Marley served as the foremost apostle of reggae on the African continent. African reggae musicians frequently cite Marley as

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their earliest and most enduring musical as well as ideological influence, as evidenced by the immense popularity he continues to enjoy in African countries. The impact of Bob Marley’s music and his mediagenerated image on youth in Africa, and on African Rastas in particular, cannot be underestimated. Many African pop musicians have either played reggae music at one point in their careers or incorporated reggae rhythms and/or Rasta-inspired lyrics in their songs. Throughout the continent one can find recordings by Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, and others, and recordings of African reggae artists are on sale in record shops and market stalls in both urban and rural marketplaces. Reggae is also frequently heard on local radio stations, in taxis, bars, discos, on street corners, and everywhere young people congregate. In fact, since the mid-to-late 1970s, Africa has served as a major international market for reggae music. It is claimed that Marley is one of the best-selling musical artists on the continent. Prominent African reggae musicians include Ivorian artist Alpha Blondy, an African Rasta who creates Jah-centered anthems and became the first African star of reggae with Jah Glory (1983); Ivorian Tiken Jah Fakoly, who has established himself as one of the leading artists of the new reggae scene in Côte d’Ivoire and had a series of concerts in 1999 in New York and Philadelphia with a Jamaican backing band; and South African Ermelo “Lucky” Dube, who became the first reggae star of South Africa with Rastas Never Die (1985). Another popular artist is Kush, a singer, songwriter, arranger, and roots reggae and African jazz musician from Côte d’Ivoire. His music is a beautiful combination of www.abc-clio.com

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traditional roots reggae rhythms mingled with African and jazz undertones. His work contains poetic expression of Rastafarian faith and wisdom as they relate to the current sociopolitical crises. Many African artists have also undertaken pilgrimages to Jamaica, home of many excellent recording studios. For instance, Alpha Blondy made a pilgrimage in 1983 to Tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, where he recorded his phenomenal Jerusalem album with the Wailers. Tiken Jah Fakoly’s Cours d’Histoire and Françafrique (2000) were mixed in the legendary Tuff Gong Studios in Jamaica and fused reggae beat with hard-hitting lyrics. The decor of the stage and the dress style of most African reggae artists also reflect the three symbolic colors of the black race represented in the Ethiopian flag and used by Jamaican reggae stars: red, which signifies the memory of the spilt blood of black peoples in defending themselves and their ways; yellow, which stands for African riches stolen by the imperialists; and green, which represents the fertility of African green ancestral land. These colors are often used in conjunction with black, the color that identifies the African race. Many Africans have adopted the Rastafari way of life, including refusing to cut their hair and wearing Rastafarian accoutrements, such as the tam, a hat similar to a beret but large enough to cover dreadlocks. Marley’s dreadlocked profile stares out from T-shirts and wall posters in African market stalls, homes, and restaurants. Along with Muhammad Ali, James Brown, and Michael Jackson, Bob Marley ranks among the most popular and influential Pan-African heroes of all time—widely known, listened to, admired, and idolized by young people in Africa.

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Overall, the most noticeable PanAmerican influences on reggae in Africa are the creation of syncretic styles that fuse Jamaican reggae and other American music traditions, such as rumba, jazz, gospel, funk, and rock, with African traditional rhythms. For instance, in the 1970s, highlife music, the Ghanaian and Nigerian ballroom music that resulted from an adaptation of American soul and rock music to West Africa realities, absorbed many elements of reggae to produce a faster and louder highlife style. Manu Dibango, Africa’s bestknown jazz saxophonist, fused African rhythms and melodies with reggae, most notably on Gone Clear (1979) with American artists Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar. In 1983, Congolese musicologist Ray Lema released Kinshasa-Washington DC-Paris, an album that reflects a mixture of influences: reggae, rumba, rock, funk, jazz, tradition, and modernity. Benin’s Angélique Kidjo mixed reggae, Afro-punk, samba, salsa, jazz, rumba, zouk, and makossa. Sudanese singer-songwriter Rasha invented a mishmash of reggae, jazz, pop, and American dance music in Sudaniyat (1997). Even today, new styles of reggae are emerging and becoming popular in Africa. These include dancehall and raga, also known as raggamuffin. African reggae music is a beautiful synthesis of moods (upbeat, ecstatic, melancholy, spiritual), formats (song, symphony, suite, jam), and lifestyles (Western and Eastern), African polyrhythms, and Jamaican reggae, all of which are fully integrated. Philip A. Ojo See also: Marley, Robert Nesta; Music, African; Music, African Popular; Reggae References Bradley, Lloyd. When Reggae Was King. London: Penguin Books, 2001.

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Collins, Edmund John. “Musical Feedback: African America’s Music in Africa.” A Journal of Opinion 24, no. 2 (1996): 26–27. Ewens, Graeme. “A Cultural Cash Crop.” West Africa (December 25–January 7, 1990): 2136. Nettl, Bruno. “The Western Impact on World Music: Africa and the American Indians.” In Contemporary Music and Music Cultures, edited by Charles Hamm, Bruno Nettl, and Ronald Byrnside. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975. Savishinsky, Neil J. “Rastafari in the Promised Land: The Spread of a Jamaican Socioreligious Movement among the Youth of West Africa.” African Studies Review 37, no. 3 (December 1994): 19–50. Young, Richard A. Music, Popular Culture, Identities. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

RELIGION (AFRICA) John S. Mbiti, the renowned scholar of African religion, put it best when he described Africans as notoriously religious. Ever since the first humans originated from Africa, the continent has been home to diverse religious beliefs and attitudes. From ancient Nubian religions, to pharaonic Egypt, to precolonial times, religion has permeated every aspect of African life. Africa was home to the major Western religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism even before European contact. The histories of these three religions clearly support this fact. The Bible states that the Jews migrated from Egypt to the promised land of Israel. Before spreading to Europe, Islam first arrived in northern Africa in the seventh century. Also, Bilal, a black African, was Islam’s first muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Early Christianity spread from the Arabian Peninsula and southern Mediterranean on its way to Europe. Moreover, Africans such as Saint Augustine were among the pillars of the early Christian church.

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As recently as a hundred years ago, European colonizers and Western scholars, out of cultural arrogance, racism, and ignorance, tended to describe African religions as nothing more than primitive mumbojumbo. For example, the term fetishism was often used to describe religion on the continent of Africa. This term is derived from Portuguese feitiço, for a “made thing,” something factitious or artificial. Used by the Portuguese during their encounter with Africans in the fifteenth century, it described the charms and amulets worn by Africans. Thus, African religion was regarded as childish or primitive. For the Europeans, it was either the lowest form of religion or the absence of any spirituality at all. Recent works by African scholars of religion have contributed immensely in dispelling the simplistic, and negative, presentation of African religions as proof of African backwardness. This current in scholarly thought is partly the result of African scholars, who, as both participants and experts in their own cultures, bring their unique perspectives into their writings about African religions. Furthermore, Western scholars have become more culturally sensitive in their discussion of African religion. Technological advances have also helped anthropologists to understand and explain that African religions and religious symbols can be considered on their own as elaborate systems of theology. Thus, in structure, content, and purpose African religions are comparable to any in Western civilization. It is simply the mode and idiom by which these are propagated that makes them different from but not inferior to Western belief systems. Today, modern African religion, in the broadest sense of the term, continues to influence and shape Africans and African cultures. Even the most modern and www.abc-clio.com

atheistic African—who may profess no religious affiliation—is religious in outlook, especially in the manner in which they relate to their environment, community, and the world in general. For the African, everything in the world—both visible and invisible—is interconnected and imbued with the sacred. Religion is too narrow a concept to describe Africans’ notion of ultimate reality. In discussing or studying African religious belief, cosmology would be a more appropriate term. For Africans, the concepts of God, nature, community, family, life, birth, death, ancestors, good, evil, soul, spirits, symbols, religion, worship, ritual, rites of passage, behavior, character, morality, ethics, and language are all parts of an intricate and interconnected reality. Most Africans know that this reality is rooted in the constantly expanding networks of attitudes, concepts, and symbols that influence their religious beliefs, which are the foundation of all African cultures. They also influence the daily lives of most Africans. That is why the terms “religion” and “theology” will not have the same resonance for the average African as they would for the average Westerner. But that does not mean that African religions cannot be studied or discussed, or even understood as complete belief systems that have governed the hearts and minds of Africans for centuries before the arrival of Islam and Christianity on the continent. In short, African religions indicate that there is an African worldview which the Westerner has to first understand in order to really know the Bantu-speaking peoples of the African continent. In modern times, Christianity and Islam have become the dominant religions in Africa. In most of north and West Africa, Islam is the predominant religion, while

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Christianity is a very close second. Countries like Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco have majority Moslem populations. In spite of this, African traditional religion is still practiced. For example, the Berbers of Morocco practice a form of shamanism called gnaoua, or gnawa, in which dance and trances are used for healing. In the western, central, and eastern African countries of Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, Christianity seems to be in ascendancy, even though these nations do have sizable Moslem populations. In Nigeria, the average Yoruba, Moslem or Christian, will still consult or honor the family’s orisha, or guardian deity, in times of crisis. Also before any major undertaking, the Yoruba will often consult the babalawo, or seer—in addition to the spiritual support of their local bishop or imam. In Ghana, the Ashanti will invoke the ancestors and pour libation during an oathmaking ceremony. In southern Africa, where Christianity has held sway for centuries, people still practice their indigenous religions. For example, in Lesotho, the sangoma, or traditional priest and healer, is often consulted by the people. European colonization has been an obvious factor in the spread of Christianity in Africa. Early European settlers, while seeking new territories, natural resources, and raw materials, also sought to spread their religion in Africa out of the belief that Africans needed to be converted. Many schools were opened by European missionaries as part of their bid to convert and “civilize” Africans. Some of these schools still exist today. In Africa both Christianity and Islam have taken on distinctive local flavors. They have incorporated elements of African culture and traditional religion to produce www.abc-clio.com

hybrid forms that differ greatly from their original versions. The Mouride brotherhood of Senegal is one good example. It is a uniquely African adaptation of the Islamic faith. It arose out of an eclectic combination of Wolof nationalism, Sufi Islam, and African traditional religion during the French colonial domination of Senegal. It is a vibrant religion which has grown from a membership of less than half to over 90 percent of Senegal’s population in recent years. Almost all Senegalese belong to one of the three major Sufi brotherhoods: the Tijaniyya, the Mouride, or the Qadiriyya. Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam. It shifts from the external rituals of Islam to a spiritual focus that is more intensely emotional, personal, and closer to the heart. God is not regarded as a distant ruler but a close friend. He is to be found through submission to a guide, or marabout, who is deemed to have supernatural powers. The Mouride sect was founded in the late nineteenth century by a charismatic Islamic and Wolof leader, Sheikh Amadou Bamba, who led the native resistance against the Christian onslaught that accompanied French colonization of Senegal. The founding of the sect was also a response to the rise of militant Islam in nineteenth-century Senegal. Outside of Senegal there are over a million followers today, scattered all over the globe, especially in the United States, where they actively engage in commerce. A big portion of their proceeds are sent to Touba, Senegal, the world headquarters of the brotherhood. The Senegalese immigrant community in Harlem is comprised mainly of Mourides. The continuing success of the movement is largely due to the belief in supernatural powers attributed to the founder, Amadou Bamba. He is the great source of baraka, or blessing, which

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eternally flows to followers from one generation to the next. The sheikh is therefore a guarantor of redemption for his followers. Herein lies the comparison to ancestor worship in traditional African religion. The Mouride brotherhood requires total submission to a religious guide. The disciple, or talibe, declares his total submission to a sheikh, who in turn undertakes to intercede for his followers. A disciple can be attached to only one sheikh at a time. During an initiation ceremony, known as njebbel, the disciple comes before the sheikh, on his knees, and swears this oath: “I submit my body and my soul to you. I will do everything you order me, and abstain from anything you forbid me.” A blessing is given to the new follower, and the sheikh becomes the guarantor of the spiritual welfare of the person, on condition of the disciple’s unquestioning obedience and loyalty. Legend has it that Amadou Bamba promised that “whosoever he may be, he who becomes my disciple shall be saved in this world and the next. Any Mouride who seeks refuge with me shall go to paradise and shall not know the burning embers of hell.” This complete submission to his will is generally seen as being the only certain path to paradise. Every year Amadou Bamba’s burial site in Touba attracts hundreds of thousands of followers who gather for a weeklong pilgrimage. There are likewise Africanized versions of the Christian religion. One of the best examples can be found in West Africa. The Celestial Church of Christ, headquartered in Nigeria, was founded by S. B. J. Oshoffa. Oshoffa, a Methodist layman, reported receiving a vision of an angel who instructed him to teach people to trust in Jesus. According to the church’s Web site, the church “came into the world from heaven www.abc-clio.com

by DIVINE ORDER on the 29th of September, 1947 in Porto Novo, Republic of Benin.” The church has branches (organized into parishes and dioceses) all over the world. The church holds that the Bible is perfect and without errors. Members are taught that prayer can effect physical healing and that they can prophesy under divine inspiration. The church derives its hymns from the words of those who have been so inspired. It claims to have between five and six million followers worldwide, including in the United States. Some of their rituals, such as cleansing baths in flowing rivers and streams, fasting, incense burning to purify surroundings, the wearing of cassocks, and sacrificial offerings of symbolic items clearly point to a blending of elements of African traditional religion and Roman Catholicism. The Celestial Church of Christ embraces the priesthood of women, who have the same opportunities to be ordained as men. However, women are required to respect the Old Testament prescriptions about purity; this means that they are not allowed to approach the Holy Altar during their monthly menstruation. The Celestial Church of Christ is one of what are called “African-instituted churches,” or AICs. These are Christian sects without any direct historical ties to the European missionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Celestial Church of Christ has five ministries: pastor, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher. Prophecy is especially important, and some members of this ministry are seers, dreamers, or “hearers of divine voices.” Their role is clearly shamanistic. The mode of worship is almost like that of the Catholic Church because it is liturgical. It consists of prayers, hymns, Bible readings and sermons, offerings, and sacraments.

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Unlike in orthodox Christian denominations, exorcisms, and miracles are common and regular features in the Celestial Church. These are not unconnected with the African belief in witchcraft. Upon entering the church, adherents take off their shoes and bow their heads three times, touching the floor with their forehead. They wear white garments (this symbolizes priesthood for all believers) and palm fronds, while the clergy wear colorful garments. Holy water, incense, and crosses are used during the service and the Eucharist is celebrated occasionally. The other two sacraments of the church are baptism and marriage. Polygamy, clearly an important element in African culture, is accepted by the church. The church does not oblige polygamous new members to divorce their wives. Clergy can also remain polygamous. Indeed, the church frowns upon divorce. There is a special ritual for new members. They kneel down before a bucket of water, holding a candlestick, which is lighted by a priest who says prayers of forgiveness and sanctification. Next, the new members take a ritual cleansing bath with the water, after which they receive what the church calls “Christian education.” All members must be baptized at an appropriate time. People coming from other denominations undergo a second baptism because they are believed to have been polluted. The Celestial Church’s founder, S. B. J. Oshoffa, died in 1985. After several years of battles for succession, his son, Emmanuel Oshoffa, was chosen as worldwide leader of the church in 2002. Religion in Africa also has a darker, sinister side. It has been a great source of discord in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, and Egypt. For example, in Nigeria riots have broken out between Muslims and Christians since www.abc-clio.com

1999, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of citizens. In Sudan, for several decades civil war has ravaged the population because an Islamic government has sought forcibly to convert and rule the southern half of the country—which is majority Christian or animist. Together with ethnicity, religion has been used by some of Africa’s politicians to further their goals. The results have usually been horrendous. In the Americas, African traditional religions have been implanted thanks to slavery and immigration. Over four centuries of slavery resulted in the creation of new and hybrid forms of African and Christian religion in Brazil, Cuba, the United States, and Jamaica and other Caribbean nations. African slaves and their descendants created new belief systems from African and Christian religions. Today, Afro-Caribbean religions like Candomble, Macumba, Obeah, Rastafari, Orisha, and Santeria coexist with mainstream Christian sects in the New World. ’BioDun J. Ogundayo

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See also: American Missionary Association; Bakhita, Josephine, Saint; Burial, African Practices in the Americas; Diaspora, Demography of; Islam, African American; Nigeria; Obeah; Ogun; Orisha; Sudan (Darfur Region); Voodoo References Barrett, David B., ed. World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Brandon, George. Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. Olupona, Jacob, ed. African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1991. Page, Willie F., ed. Encyclopedia of African History and Culture. 5 vols. Revised edition

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RELIGION IN AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS, DEMOGRAPHY OF edited by R. Hunt Davis Jr. New York: Facts-on-File, 2005. Peel, J. D. Y. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. van Beek, Walter E. A. Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression. London: Heinemann, 1994.

RELIGION IN AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS, DEMOGRAPHY OF The demography of religion in Africa and the Americas is the study of peoples and their religious affiliations in these regions.

Africa: An Overview Christianity and Islam are the two largest religions in the world, with large populations in both Africa and the Americas. These two world religions, both of which originated in the Middle East, have deep roots in Africa. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, Christians and Muslims comprised over 50 percent of the world’s population. Of the 6.2 billion people in the world, Christians comprised 2,038,905,000 (32.9 percent), Muslims comprised 1,226,403,000 (19.8 percent), and Hindus comprised 828,130,000 (13.3 percent). Africa has been a big contributor to the large numbers of Christians and Muslims in the world. In the past half century, while the populations of Christians and Muslims in Africa have increased substantially, the total number of Africans who practice indigenous religions has increased in absolute numbers but declined in proportion to the continent’s total population: “Between 1931 and 1951 the number of Muslims in the whole of Africa had risen from 40 million to 80 million in www.abc-clio.com

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comparison with a Roman Catholic rise from 5 million to 15 million. . . . Of the total Black population estimated at the time as being 130 million in Africa south of the Sahara, 28 million were Muslim, 13 million were Catholics, 4 million were Protestants, and 85 million still followed their own indigenous religions, even though some of these traditionalists were nominally Muslim or Christian. Islam in Africa as a whole, including Arab Africa, commanded the allegiance of approximately 40 percent of the continent’s population” (Mazrui, 1986, pp. 135– 136). Within the continent, of the estimated 823.4 million Africans in 2001, those who practiced traditional or indigenous religions were 137.8 million (16.7 percent). Christianity has been very successful in converting Africans. As of 2001, there were an estimated 304.3 million (36.9 percent) Christians in Africa. Statistics show that there were as many Catholics in Africa as of 2004 as there were Africans who practiced traditional religions in 2001. There are an estimated 130 million Catholics in Africa, comprising 16 percent of the continent’s population. As for the total estimates of Muslims in Africa in 2001, they comprised 371.4 million (45.1 percent) of the total 823.4 million people, thus making Africa the only continent in the world where proportionally Islam has the largest number of followers. Other religious groups comprised 9.8 million (1.2 percent).

North Africa Muslims are the majority in North Africa. Of the estimated 182.9 million North Africans in 2001, Muslims accounted for 166.9 million (91.2 percent). Some 9 million (4.9 percent) of the North African

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population, all from Sudan, practiced indigenous religions. Christians comprised 6.4 million (3.5 percent) of the total population, and the religious group classified as other made up 632,920 (0.34 percent).

Africa was 59.1 million (23.4 percent). An estimated 52.1 million (21 percent) East Africans practiced indigenous African religions. The estimated total number of people in East Africa who practiced other religions was 6 million (2.3 percent).

West Africa In West Africa, Muslims also comprised the majority, although their proportion was not as high as that of North Africa. In the 17 countries and territories that comprised West Africa, Muslims accounted for 131 million (54.4 percent) of the estimated 240.7 million people in 2001. The Christian population was estimated at 66.7 million (27.7 percent) of the total population of West Africa. Africans who practiced traditional religions comprised 41.6 million (17.3 percent). The people in that region of the continent who practiced other religions made up 1.6 million (0.6 percent) of the total population.

Central Africa In Central Africa, Christians constituted the highest proportion in 2001. Of the estimated 96.8 million people in Central Africa, 61.8 million (64 percent) were Christians. Africans who practiced indigenous religions comprised 21 million (21.6 percent). The estimated number of Central Africans who practiced Islam was 13.5 million (14 percent). The people with other religious beliefs made up 437,688 (0.4 percent).

East Africa Christians comprised the highest proportion of the total population of East Africa (18 nations). Of the 252.4 million people in East Africa in 2001, an estimated 135.1 million (53.5 percent) were Christians. The total Muslim population in East www.abc-clio.com

Southern Africa Christians accounted for the highest proportion of the total population of Southern Africa. Of the total population of 50.25 million Southern Africans, an estimated 34.2 million (68 percent) were Christians. Southern Africans who practiced indigenous religions comprised 14.1 million (27.9 percent). In Southern Africa, the Muslim population was 871,722 million (1.7 percent). Southern Africans who practiced other religions comprised 1.09 million (2.1 percent).

Caribbean The Caribbean, made up of 24 nations, had a total population of nearly 37 million in 2001. No less than 65 percent of the people are of black African descent. The region is overwhelmingly Christian (90.38 percent of the total population). Approximately 8.25 percent of the total population practiced other religions in 2001.

Latin America Like the Caribbean, Christians in Latin America represent the overwhelming majority. Of the estimated 490 million people in Latin America in 2001, people of black African descent accounted for 19 percent. Almost 9 out of every 10 (89.14 percent) people in Latin America in 2001 were Christians. Another 5.65 percent of the total population during that same year practiced other religions.

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North America Bermuda, Canada, and the United States are three nations classified under North America, with a combined black population of nearly 40 million by 2004. Blacks in these three nations comprise at least the national average within religious groups. Like both the Caribbean and Latin America, Christians account for the majority of people in North America. For example, as of 2000 in Bermuda, Christians accounted for 85 percent; unspecified 1 percent; and those with no religion accounted for 14 percent. In Canada, as of 2001, Christians comprised 70.3 percent; Muslims 1.9 percent; other and unspecified, 11.8 percent; and those with no religion accounted for 16 percent. In the United States in 2002, Christians accounted for 78 percent; Jews, 1 percent; Muslims, 1 percent; other, 10 percent; and those with no religion accounted for 10 percent. African Americans accounted for 42 percent of the estimated 5 million Muslims in the United States, with another 5.2 percent comprising African Muslims, including Africans of any racial background. For blacks in these three nations, within their populations, they comprised at least the national average of the religious groups.

Christianity and Islam in Africa Today Christianity and Islam have grown rapidly in numbers in Africa in the post–World War II era. Both religions have been successful in spreading all across the continent. That impact is due to the fact that both Christianity and Islam require a convert to abandon most or all of his or her traditional beliefs or cultural practices. For example, Muslim missionaries spread forms of restrained behavior. In addition, political www.abc-clio.com

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leaders and governments influence prevailing religions. Islam is now the official religion of several African nations. President Frederick Chiluba of Zambia says that his country is “a Christian Nation that will seek to be governed by the righteous principles of the word of God.” In Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, the late president Felix HouphouetBoigny spent $360 million to build in the political capital, Yamoussoukro, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, the tallest church in the world. It boasts a huge gold dome and bears a resemblance to St. Peter’s in Rome. As Christianity and Islam grow in Africa, the number of Africans who practice indigenous religions will probably continue to decline, even though many African Christians and Muslims will continue to incorporate some of their traditional and philosophical beliefs in their religious practices. Amadu J. Kaba See also: Christianity (African American); Diaspora, Demography of; Islam, African American; Rastafari; Religion (Africa) References Abdus-Sabur, Qadir. “Developing a Culturally Inviting Collection: Reaching the Muslim Population.” Paper presented at the Virginia Library Association 2005 Annual Conference, Williamsburg, VA. Goody, Jack. “The ‘Civilizing Process’ in Ghana.” European Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (2003): 61–76. Kaba, Amadu J. “The Spread of Christianity and Islam in Africa.” In Africa’s Islamic Experience: History, Culture and Politics, edited by Ali A. Mazrui and Patrick M. Dikrr, et al. Elgin, IL: New Dawn Press, 2008. Mazrui, Ali A. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Boston: Little, Brown, 1986. Pawson, Lara. “The Highs and the Lows.” BBC Focus on Africa 15, no. 3 (July-September 2004). Vasquez, Manuel A. “Tracking Global Evangelical Christianity.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 1 (2003): 157–173.

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REPARATIONS (SLAVERY AND COLONIALISM) Reparations refers to movements in the United States and other nations with slavery and colonial histories that call for monetary and nonmonetary compensation to individuals or groups that are victims, or the descendants of victims, of slavery, racial segregation, and colonialism. Long considered an outrageous ideological concept, reparations has in recent years emerged as a legitimate, though still highly controversial, political and social cause that can be linked with global struggles for human rights. On April 2, 1998, President Bill Clinton ended his tour of six African countries by delivering a speech at Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal, from which millions of Africans were forced to embark on voyages of no return to the Americas. Recalling the historical links between this former slave trading post and the United States, President Clinton said that “America’s struggle to overcome slavery and its legacy forms one of the most difficult chapters” of that shared history. Although earlier on the trip he had acknowledged that European Americans were “wrong” in receiving “the fruits of the slave trade,” Clinton failed to make a formal apology for his nation’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. This failure was disappointing to many African Americans, whose hopes for public redress for slavery, if only in the symbolic form of an apology, had been fueled ten years earlier by a similar gesture to Japanese Americans. In the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the U.S. Congress officially apologized for the violations of the civil liberties and constitutional rights of Americans of Japanese descent who had been relocated and interned during World War II. Furthermore, federal funds were allocated for www.abc-clio.com

financial compensation to interned individuals and for public education on the internment. The virulent criticism Clinton received from conservative Republicans such as Pat Buchanan and Tom DeLay for even his moderate expressions of regret during his tour of Africa made it clear, however, that the cause of black reparations was highly controversial. Nevertheless, in the years following his visit to Africa, the movement for slave redress gained momentum, sparking a flurry of debate on reparations in the United States. Contemporary reparations demands in the United States have historical roots in the post–Civil War era. Some previously enslaved individuals, pressed by economic hardship, lodged claims with former masters for unpaid slave labor. Invoking the federal government’s broken promise to give the freedmen “forty acres and a mule,” more than half a million African Americans petitioned Congress between 1890 and 1916 for slave pensions. Neither the individual redress claims nor the collective appeals to the government were successful, however. The modern black reparations movement in the United States may be said to begin with civil rights activist James Forman’s interruption of a Sunday service in New York City’s Riverside Church in 1969 to read a “Black Manifesto,” demanding that white Christian churches and synagogues pay $500 million as a “beginning of the reparations due us as people who have been exploited and degraded, brutalized, killed and persecuted.” Although a few white clergymen admitted the church’s guilt and endorsed expressions of repentance, Forman’s tactics were widely denounced in the press and the manifesto trivialized. However, the manifesto’s term

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“reparations” would be adopted by later activists as was the idea that the money be used to develop black communities. The most important link with the later movement was the manifesto’s implicit idea that recompense was due to African Americans not just for slavery but also for the Jim Crow system that replaced it in the American South. Institutionalizing racial segregation and black disfranchisement, Jim Crow perpetuated and institutionalized social injustice and inequality and sanctioned racial violence. In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court declared that it was not unconstitutional to offer separate facilities for people of different races, provided these facilities were equal in quality—the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine. While the majority opinion in this landmark ruling was that the U.S. Constitution did not have the power to enforce social equality and eradicate racial prejudice, in a dissenting opinion Justice John Marshall Harlan insisted that the Constitution is “color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Arbitrary “separation of the citizens, on the basis of race,” Justice Harlan argued, “is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution.” It was precisely the latter line of reasoning that the Supreme Court was to follow unanimously in 1954, in another landmark decision. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Court ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” producing in black children a feeling of inferiority and depriving them of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The 1954 Brown decision implicitly overruled the Supreme www.abc-clio.com

Court’s infamous decision of 1896, but it took almost two more decades and a long civil rights struggle before the Jim Crow system was completely dismantled. For more than a century after the abolition of slavery, then, Americans of African descent suffered the burden of social and political inequality, which, combined with their often bleak economic prospects, severely restricted their opportunities to enjoy the privileges of U.S. citizenship. This long history of racial injustice, both during and after slavery, and particularly the fact that it was legally and constitutionally authorized, became the basis for “The Case for Black Reparations” made by Yale law professor Boris I. Bittker in 1973. Prompted by a question posed by a black student, Bittker, a prominent white legal scholar, tried to establish legal grounds for reparations. Bittker’s study of existing law designed to compensate groups for injustices imposed on them led him to conclude that, far from being an outrageous proposal, black reparations is a concept that is susceptible to ordinary legal analysis. Raising important questions about individual versus group compensation, the problem of racial classification to determine eligibility for reparations, and the selection criteria for black organizations that were to administer reparation programs, Bittker did not offer easy answers to what he describes as a “second American dilemma,” but merely aimed to open a national debate on these questions. Ironically, however, Bittker’s book was largely ignored and little debate ensued, though the analysis it offered and the questions it raised still influences and challenges reparations advocates today. Significantly, Bittker’s book was first published in 1973 by Toni Morrison, then

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an editor for the New York publisher Random House and only at the beginning of a literary career that 20 years later would make her the first African American author to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Morrison’s internationally acclaimed novel Beloved (1987) was to make a major contribution to breaking the silence over slavery’s past. The heightened consciousness of the shameful history of slavery, coupled with an increasing awareness that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s had failed to remedy entrenched patterns of racial inequality in the United States, helped to reenergize the black reparations movement in the 1990s. The first important event was Congressman John Conyers’s attempt to put reparations on the political agenda in 1989. Inspired by the government’s formal apology and reparation payments to Japanese Americans in 1988, Conyers, a black Democrat from Michigan, introduced a bill to establish a commission to study reparation proposals for African Americans. Naming his bill “H.R. 40,” as a reminder of the government’s unfulfilled promise of “forty acres and a mule” to the freed slaves, Conyers first of all asked, as he writes on his official Web site, that the federal government acknowledge “the fundamental injustice and inhumanity of slavery.” His bill further proposed to establish a commission to study slavery and subsequent racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, as well as the impact of those forces on African Americans living today. On the basis of this official study, the commission would then “make recommendations to Congress on appropriate remedies to redress the harm inflicted on living African Americans.” Couched in moderate terms, Conyers’s bill aimed to launch “a national www.abc-clio.com

discussion” on black reparations without allowing the issue to polarize the Democratic Party or the nation. But even though he has reintroduced the bill to every Congress since 1989, it has remained stalled on the subcommittee level and as a result has never yet come before Congress itself. Founded in the late 1980s, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) has developed into the largest grassroots organization of slave descendants in the United States that exclusively focuses on the issue. Besides supporting Conyers’s bill, the organization engages in education campaigns aiming to put pressure on state and municipal legislators to support reparations and is involved in legal action on reparations. Demanding reparations from the U.S. and state governments for the “500 years’ holocaust of Africans in America,” N’COBRA employs a much more strident rhetoric than any of the previously discussed reparations advocates and its black nationalist leanings have prevented it from receiving mass support in the African American community. Internationally, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) took up the issue at the initiative of Nigerian president Ibrahim Babangia. In 1993, the first Pan-African Conference on Reparations, held in Abuja, Nigeria, under the auspices of the OAU, issued a proclamation that perhaps for the first time put the issue of reparations in an international perspective, explicitly linking slavery and colonialism. The Abuja Proclamation calls upon “states and nations whose economic evolution once depended on slave labor and colonialism” to recognize the “unique and unprecedented moral debt owed to the African peoples which has yet to be paid.” The views on reparations articulated in the proclamation are

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rather diffuse, presenting the cause both as an important learning experience in selfdiscovery for continental and diasporic Africans and as a means to build “bridges of conciliation,” as well as calling for compensation to African nations through both monetary payments and debt cancellation. The role Africans played in the slave trade is left unmentioned. More important and influential was the establishment in South Africa of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1995. By allowing both the victims and the perpetrators of violence during the apartheid regime from 1960 to 1994 to tell their stories before the TRC, the new South African government aimed to bring about reconciliation between the various ethnic groups in the nation and make possible the transition to a truly free and democratic government. Appearing before the TRC in 1996, the last white president of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, begged forgiveness for the years of apartheid rule, but former president P. W. Botha ignored a summons to appear before the commission. After more than two years of hearings and investigations into human rights violations, the TRC published a report of its findings in 1998. The report deemed the South African government, the civil service, and its security forces the primary perpetrators of gross violations against human rights, but also held the ANC and other liberation movements accountable for human rights violations. President Nelson Mandela addressed the issue of reparations in the speech he delivered upon receiving the report: “It is for those who have the means to contribute to the efforts to repair the damage brought by the past. It is for those who have suffered losses of different kinds and magnitudes to www.abc-clio.com

be afforded reparation, proceeding from the premise that freedom and dignity are the real prize that our sacrifices were meant to attain.” It was only in 2003 and under pressure from reparations activists, however, that President Thabo Mbeki announced that about 19,000 apartheid victims who testified before the TRC would receive a reparations grant of R30,000 (US$4,200), substantially less than the amount of reparations the TRC had recommended. In the United States, the reparations movement gained small successes on the state level in the 1990s. In 1993, a group of nine survivors of the 1923 race riot of the all-black town of Rosewood, Florida, filed a claim with the state legislature of Florida to compensate them for damages resulting from the destruction of their community. Having ordered an academic investigation of the events of 1923, the Florida legislature in 1994 acknowledged that government officials had been responsible for “some of the damages sustained by the claimants,” and concluded that “a moral obligation exists to redress [survivors’] injuries.” The state of Florida paid $150,000 to each of the survivors in compensation for emotional trauma suffered during the event and awarded compensation to families in Rosewood that could demonstrate property loss. Building on the success of the Rosewood reparations claim, similar claims were filed in other cities, most notably in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where at least 40 and perhaps hundreds of African Americans were killed and thousands of black homes and businesses were burned or looted by white mobs in 1921. In its 170page report, published in 2001, the stateappointed Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 recommended that survivors and their descendants be paid

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reparations for damages sustained during the uprising. Unlike Florida, however, the Oklahoma legislature has not yet acted on this recommendation, and a public action suit filed against the state in 2003 for reparations was dismissed a year later by the court because the two-year statute of limitations had long expired. The 2003 lawsuit against the State of Oklahoma was prepared by the Reparations Coordinating Committee (RCC), an organization founded in 2000 by Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor, and Randall Robinson, former president of TransAfrica, an African American think tank, and author of The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks (2000). Since 2002 the Reparations Coordinating Committee has been involved in a number of lawsuits against public institutions and private corporations. The most widely publicized of these legal actions was a class-action suit filed in New York by a group of lawyers on behalf of Deadria Farmer-Paellmann and millions of slave descendants against a number of major private corporations, whose predecessor companies had profited from slavery. It was subsequently consolidated with similar reparations lawsuits prepared by the RCC and brought before the U.S. District Court in Chicago. Ruling against the plaintiffs, the judge in the Chicago case suggested that slavery reparations claims should be directed at the legislative and executive branches of government rather than be addressed in court. Although reparations activism has so far had few concrete positive results on the political and juridical levels in the United States, the cause has gained both in visibility and credibility in the years since President Clinton’s failed apology in Africa. African American activist Deadria Farmer-Paellmann’s www.abc-clio.com

research into private corporations’ historical links with slavery caused insurance company Aetna in 2000 to offer a public apology for selling insurance policies on slaves to antebellum slave holders. Moreover, Aetna, based in Hartford, Connecticut, created a minority internship program and invested in other initiatives serving the African American community as forms of reparations for its financial gains from slavery. Aetna’s apology made enough of an impact to receive international media coverage. Aetna’s apology prompted the Hartford Courant, the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States, to investigate its history, leading to a front-page article in which the Courant apologized for having published advertisements in its pages for the sale of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a result, many major national and international corporations based or active in the United States are now looking into their predecessor companies’ involvement with slavery, if only because a number of states and cities (California, Illinois, Chicago, and others) require all companies doing business there to disclose links with slavery. An important effect of these disclosures and apologies is that they underscore the complicity of the entire American nation in slavery. Slavery was not simply an institution peculiar to the American South, thus supporting U.S. reparations activists in their claim that reparations should be addressed on a national or even international level. Reparations advocates from various parts of the world tried to put the reparations issue on the international agenda during the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001. Unfortunately,

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this United Nations-sponsored conference was overshadowed first by conflicts over resolutions directed against Israel, and then by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that occurred a few days after the conference ended. Although the conference did not produce a resolution in support of reparations, at least one government representative, the Dutch minister of Integration and Urban Affairs, Roger van Boxtel, officially expressed during the conference his government’s “deep remorse” over the Netherlands’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery. Asked by a journalist if the Dutch government was prepared to pay monetary reparations to its former colonies in the West Indies, Minister van Boxtel rejected the proposition. Yet, it was clear that by supporting and financing a national slavery monument (unveiled in Amsterdam in 2002) as well as by funding a national slavery documentation center and a number of public history projects on slavery in the Netherlands, the Dutch government has sought to make reparations for the nation’s slavery past. As a result of these national and international developments, the public debate on reparations Bittker and Conyers had called for finally started in the United States. Public opinion polls taken around the time of the lawsuit against Aetna and other corporations in 2001 and 2002 show that an overwhelming majority of white Americans are opposed to reparations for slavery, while a substantial majority of African Americans support it. The most controversial issue is the idea of cash reparations payments. A CNN/USA Today Gallup Poll taken in 2002 found that 90 percent of white respondents were opposed to cash payments by the government to slave descendants, while 55 percent of black www.abc-clio.com

Americans were in favor of it. Somewhat less controversial are other forms of reparations: the same poll found that 34 percent of whites and 68 percent of blacks supported the idea that companies that profited from slavery apologize, while 35 percent of whites and 75 percent of blacks felt these companies should set up scholarship funds for American slave descendants. Among the ten reasons against reparations for slavery listed by conservative publicist David Horowitz in his book Uncivil Wars (2002) are ones most often given by opponents— that only a minority of white Americans owned slaves and that most living Americans have no connection to slavery, particularly those who themselves or whose ancestors immigrated to the United States after the Civil War. Though the reparations issue has received little media attention since 2002, in academic circles it is widely debated. While the public debate in the media focused on reparations for slavery alone, legal scholars and political theorists who support black reparations agree with Bittker and Conyers that reparations should be made also for the era of racial segregation, whose damaging effects can more easily be traced to the problems that African American communities face today. On the one hand, some liberal theorists, such as Wendy Brown, warn against political organizing around historically “injured” or marginalized group identities because a preoccupation with past injuries tends to obstruct emancipatory aspirations and foster racial and political divisiveness. Political theorist Lawrie Balfour argues, however, that people can effectively be mobilized politically around the identity-based issue of reparations if they move beyond a feeling of racial resentment and group interest.

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What is at stake is not so much black resentment about racial injustice; rather, white opposition to the idea of black reparations seems to be fed by resentment about constraints imposed on white privilege. Rather than dwelling in the past, Balfour argues, reparation politics can redeem the past by offering an avenue for social change from which not only African Americans can benefit. In the past few years, reparations for slavery and segregation, though still marginal in the public discourse, has emerged as a legitimate issue of social justice. In Atonement and Forgiveness, Roy L. Brooks emphasizes that “black redress” should be forward-looking and directed toward racial reconciliation. Proposing a model of reparations that focuses on atonement rather than on compensation, Brooks argues that the U.S. government must first acknowledge its responsibility and apologize and then provide slave redress in the form of asset-building reparations such as an atonement trust fund, a museum of slavery, and other forms of community rehabilitation. Only then can black America forgive the wrongs suffered and can the nation as a whole move forward toward racial reconciliation. Johanna C. Kardux References Balfour, Lawrie. “Reparations after Identity Politics.” Political Theory 33, no. 6 (December 2005): 786–811. Bittker, Boris I. The Case for Black Reparations. 1973. Rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Brooks, Roy L. Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Henry, Charles. “The Politics of Racial Reparations.” Journal of Black Studies 34, 2 (2003): 131–152.

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Horowitz, David. Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery. San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2002. McCarthy, Thomas. “Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II: On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery.” Political Theory 32, no. 6 (December 2004): 750–772. Ogletree, Charles J. “Repairing the Past: New Efforts in the Reparations Debate in America.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 38 (Summer 2003): 279–320. Robinson, Randall. The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks. New York: Dutton, 2000.

REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND FAMILY PLANNING IN AFRICA, U.S. INFLUENCE ON The United States has been a leading donor in funding family planning and reproductive health in Africa since the late 1950s. These activities have led to a tremendous decrease in the prevailing high population growth rate in Africa. However, recent cuts, restrictions, and the reimposition of the “Mexico City Policy” likely will lead to a significant increase in unplanned pregnancies, abortions, and death, which will ultimately lead to an increase in the population growth rate in the continent. World population growth accelerated after World War II, when the population of less developed countries began to increase dramatically. By the year 2000, half the world’s poor were in Africa, and it is the only continent to have become poorer in the past 25 years. By 2100, Africa is expected to capture the greatest share of the world population. Throughout the region, population has outstripped economic growth since the mid-1970s. Population growth is particularly rapid in Africa, where women average anywhere from five to eight children each. Africa’s current growth rate

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of 2.9 percent means that, if this rate continues unchanged, the continent will double its population every 24 years. Fertility rates in the countries of Africa remain at high levels for traditional and cultural reasons. Patterns of childbearing vary across Africa, whose population accounted for 10 percent of the world population in mid1992. Despite much variation in language, customs, and taboos, a common preference for large families runs through much of Africa; this tradition is fed by the perceived economic benefits families receive from their children. For a long time, barriers to family planning acceptance included high illiteracy rates, high infant mortality rates, the high economic and social value placed on children in developing countries, and religious beliefs. Rapid population growth is also having a serious effect on the natural environment in Africa. Some 500 million hectares of land have been affected by soil degradation during the last half century, including as much as 65 percent of agricultural land. This degradation has been a major factor in constraining food production in Africa to only a 2 percent annual increase, well below the rate of population increase. In many regions, particularly the Sahel, population growth has exceeded carrying capacity and thus denied the development and security that would encourage a fall in childbearing. The number of undernourished people in Africa has more than doubled and projections indicate that the region will be able to feed only 40 percent of its population by 2025. The varied socioeconomic development and the government policies of subSaharan African countries did not lend themselves to a straightforward assessment of the prospects for fertility decline. Family www.abc-clio.com

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planning was perceived by Africans as a means of attaining accelerated development. This emphasis on development benefits led some Africans and their governments to suspect the intentions of the family planning initiative’s advocates, both nongovernmental and governmental, and prevented African governments from adopting population policy. However, economic stagnation during the 1980s prompted many national governments to recognize that rapid population growth was hindering their socioeconomic development. Realizing that rapid population growth not only threatens the future welfare of society as a whole but also impedes economic development, these sub-Saharan countries began to give active consideration to population policies to reduce fertility and high rates of population growth by expanding family planning services, raising the age of marriage, improving the status of women, providing family-life education, and incorporating economic incentives for smaller families into the provision of social services. African governments have increasingly taken steps to address these social problems and some have adopted vigorous family planning programs. In an unprecedented move, African leaders collectively endorsed family planning and the need to integrate it into maternal and child health programs in the 1984 Kilimanjaro Action Program. According to Africa’s Population Challenge, about two-thirds of the region’s countries now have active family planning programs. There has also been a fundamental shift in people’s attitudes toward childbearing. This shift is partly explained by the increasing economic hardship for poor families who, given government budget cuts, find it harder to afford the costs of educating more

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children. The use of family planning methods, though still at a low 18 percent for the region, has risen sharply in some states, particularly in southern and eastern Africa. In recent years, most African governments, already burdened by rapid population growth, forced to cut budgets to pay their foreign debt and keep their economies afloat, and nudged by global advocacy efforts and their family planning associations, have come to accept that fewer, betterspaced births lead to healthier children and lower maternal mortality and morbidity. By the time of the Third African Population Conference, held in Dakar in December 1992 as part of the preparations for the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994, delegates were speaking almost unanimously about the importance of family planning, both as a human right and as a development issue. Many international conferences on population and development have also focused on the crucial importance of people’s reproductive health needs, including their access to services that enable them to plan their families, ensure healthy childbirth, and prevent HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. Important conferences and the initiation of these debates began with the 1968 Teheran Conference on Human Rights, the World Population Plan of Action in 1974, the International Conference on Population in 1984, the Amsterdam Declaration of 1989, and the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. These conferences addressed women’s needs and rights in a holistic and integrated way by ensuring male involvement and responsibility in reproductive health and attending to adolescent sexual and reproductive needs. www.abc-clio.com

International human rights treaties affirm that reproductive rights, including the right to health, the right to family planning, the right to reproductive self-determination, and the principle of nondiscrimination, are human rights and that lack of access to reproductive health services and information constitutes a violation of these basic human rights principles. The rights to family planning and health were first articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and were refined in subsequent human rights treaties adopted by the international community. The first World Population Conference (Bucharest, 1974) was a landmark in the debate on population and development and the Plan of Action that resulted emphasizes the key role of fertility reduction in economic development. Since then, directives and linkages to development have placed population and family planning services within primary health care programs, or within community development programs, with a focus on quality services and the need for better services for those being served. Issues such as high maternal mortality rates and contraceptive acceptability have also become factors critical to the delivery and distribution of contraceptives. The second International Conference on Population and Development (Mexico City, 1984) was marked by the conservative position of the United States, which, echoing the policy of free markets, emphasized “sound economic policies” as the key to development and challenged the view that rapid population increase was not an obstacle to economic growth. Hence, international development agencies began to broaden their focus from reproductive health to a more encompassing concept that included not only fertility regulation

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and maternal child health but also sexually transmitted diseases. The World Conference on Women and Empowerment held in Beijing in 1995 emphasized new attitudes toward family planning, reproductive health and rights, and also put family planning, reproductive and sexual health care, and women’s empowerment squarely in the context of development, underlining their critical importance to any social and economic progress. The Program of Action highlighted the importance of gender equity to achieving reproductive health and reproductive rights, and broadened the mandate of reproductive health programs to include customary laws; traditional, cultural, and religious practices; and policies and legislation. The international conferences called on governments to recognize that reproductive health eludes many due to inadequate levels of knowledge about human sexuality and appropriate or poor quality reproductive health information and services, the prevalence of high-risk sexual behavior, discriminatory social practices, negative attitudes toward women and girls, and the limited power many women have over their sexual reproductive lives. Hence, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) included in its programs reproductive health and family planning, population policy and advocacy, along with its commitment toward human rights. It has the goals of providing universal access to a full range of safe and reliable family planning methods and reproductive health services; reducing infant, child, and maternal mortality; and providing universal access to primary education. For people in African countries, especially women, the greatest risks to reproductive health include sexually transmitted www.abc-clio.com

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diseases, early motherhood, and unwanted pregnancy. Many, especially those in rural areas, do not have access to risk-reducing information related to reproductive health and health services because health care is inaccessible, inadequate, and unavailable to large numbers of rural populations. They have few choices about where and from whom they receive health care. One of the major factors affecting most Africans’ health status is low income. Poverty increases health problems and is associated with poor nutrition, inadequate housing, and unsafe living conditions. Thus, poverty not only increases their health care needs, it also decreases their ability to have access to health care. The international communities, including the United States, agreed to fund family planning in developing countries including those in Africa based on the premise that when couples can choose the number, timing, and spacing of their children, they are better able to ensure there are enough resources for each family member to prosper and thrive, and as a result, their children do not repeat the cycle of poverty of their parents, communities thrive, and in turn, countries fare better. Realizing that the greatest deficits in access to health services can be found in the poorest segments of the population, the international communities decided that channeling resources for family planning activities would save lives, stabilize population growth, slow the spread of AIDS, reduce poverty, and improve women’s position in society. It is believed that family planning can expand life choices for women and girls. Postponing early marriage and childbirth among girls and young brides by offering family planning choices increases their

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chances of receiving a good education, which is vital not only to women’s individual development but to that of their children as well as to the social, political, and economic growth of their community. International family planning and reproductive health programs funded by the United States through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) population program and UNFPA provide health care choices that assist women in realizing their right to health, including reproductive health care, and the right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of one’s children. The United States began its population assistance programs in 1965 with the announcement that technical assistance in family planning would be available to countries requesting it. By 1968, the United States was the primary source of funding for international population and family planning activities, with a budget of nearly $35 million representing over 66 percent of the total international assistance; by 1994, the USAID budget had reached $463 million, providing assistance to over 60 countries. USAID’s family planning program is one of the most successful components of U.S. foreign assistance. Since the agency began providing family planning services in 1965, the use of modern family planning in the developing world has more than quadrupled, going from less than 10 percent to more than 40 percent. In the countries with the largest USAIDsponsored family planning programs, the average number of children per family has declined by one-third, from more than six to less than four. The need to stabilize the rapid population growth rate is the primary objective of USAID family planning programs in www.abc-clio.com

Africa and grew out of concern that if the continent’s growth rate continued unabated, problems of conflict, corruption, and competition for limited resources would be exacerbated. The programs are based on the premises that when people can control the size of their families, resources will be available at the household, national, and global levels for enduring improvements in quality of life and that improved health status of women can play a critical role in family welfare, economic productivity, and population stability. USAID has therefore focused its efforts on interventions that contribute to stabilizing population and improving health care, which are essential for sustainable development. The rationale for U.S. government support was coupled with a strong concern about rapid population growth as a destabilizing factor in international order and a threat to U.S. security, in part prompted by the cold war atmosphere of the period. U.S. interest in population assistance stemmed from a combination of strategic and humanitarian concerns, including promoting a better life for people in developing countries and enabling couples and individuals to decide freely on the size of their families. USAID is the lead donor in supporting Africa’s efforts in increasing the use of voluntary family planning services and contraceptive prevalence. The agency has contributed significantly to increasing the use of modern contraceptive methods, which have helped to reduce high-risk pregnancies and abortions and saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of women. USAID’s family planning programs involve a range of programs, from health to social to technical interventions and

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assistance. USAID supports programs in more than 60 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union at the host government’s request. The agency’s strategies for family planning are to provide high quality, voluntary health care services that are easily available to many people. Essential elements of the programs include counseling and services, training of health workers, contraceptive supplies and their distribution, financial management, public education and marketing, and biomedical and contraceptive research and development. USAID support is based on a broad reproductive health approach, which emphasizes choice among a wide range of contraceptives, improved quality of care, and client-centered services. USAID family planning programs are increasingly integrated with other community-based efforts to improve maternal and child health, enhance women’s status, and prevent HIV transmission and other infectious diseases. USAID’s reproductive health programs in Africa include training, capacity building, contraceptive logistics, contraceptive social marketing, and behavior change communication, with the objectives of contributing to sustained and broad-based economic growth by reducing the rapid rate of population growth through sustainable reduction in unintended pregnancies, increasing use by women of voluntary practices that contribute to reducing fertility, and improving maternal and child health by enabling women to space between births and to limit family size. These activities are all designed to improve the demand for and access to quality family planning and reproductive health services. In addition, USAID supports awareness raising and www.abc-clio.com

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advocacy activities concerning the impact of rapid population growth on all sectors of society and on maternal and child health. Working with private voluntary organizations (PVOs), local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), women’s groups and networks, community-based organizations, and private sectors, USAID supports the integration of family planning into existing NGO health services and establishes networks for community-based distribution of contraceptives and contraceptive social marketing programs using radio advertisements, flyers, billboards, and peer educators to spread family planning information in communities. USAID works with community NGOs to provide safe, affordable, and quality family planning services in African countries through community-based distributors and clinics and also provides training to traditional birth attendants and patent medicine dealers who sell family planning products. In spite of USAID’s successes in the area of population reduction in African countries, many feminist researchers assert that concerns about high fertility and low contraceptive prevalence in Africa have stimulated policy and program efforts at promoting family planning in the region because health-related conditions impinge on population policy. According to the feminist researchers, relative failure of family planning programs is in part a measure of the programs’ failure both to see women’s lives in a cultural context and to approach women as whole individuals beyond their childbearing roles. Feminists therefore advocate for family planning efforts that would take into account existing sexual practices, patterns, and partnership arrangement of the populations they serve.

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Though the United States has been a supporter of international family planning and population assistance since the late 1950s, in 1984, the Reagan administration imposed restrictions on U.S. funding for international family planning, and in January 2001, President George W. Bush reimposed the Global Gag Rule, or what is popularly known as “Mexico City Policy,” on USAID population programs. This policy restricts foreign nongovernmental organizations that receive USAID family planning funds from using their own, non-U.S. funds to provide legal abortion services, or even provide accurate medical counseling or referrals regarding abortion even where a woman’s physical or mental health is endangered (the only exceptions are in cases of rape, incest, or where the woman’s life is endangered), lobby their own governments to legalize abortion, or conduct public education campaigns regarding abortion. In addition, even the provision of services that are “permitted” on paper, such as lifesaving abortions and postabortion care, are often curtailed because NGOs fear jeopardizing their funding through any association with abortion. Providers may even be reluctant to dispense emergency contraception because of the Global Gag Rule. By stifling public debate and the ability of foreign NGOs to lobby their governments, the Global Gag Rule undermines NGOs’s right to exercise freedom of speech. The Global Gag Rule also forces health care organizations to make an immoral choice: either give up desperately needed funds for family planning and other reproductive health care services, or give up their right to free speech and to provide patients with full and accurate medical information. The Global Gag Rule also erects barriers to the development of the democratic www.abc-clio.com

process in other countries, the promotion of civil society and development of NGOs abroad, and the enhancement of women’s equality and participation in the political process. Furthermore, it inappropriately challenges foreign governments’ sovereignty by constraining their implementation of national health care policy decisions. It will decrease women’s ability to access pregnancy-related care, family planning, and services for HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmissible infections, and will lead to higher rates of unintended pregnancy and higher rates of abortion. Because of its size and wealth, the United States remains one of the largest bilateral donors to international family planning programs. However, the United States’s continued insufficient funding levels and restrictions on family planning contravene a principal goal of the foreign policy of the United States in providing humanitarian assistance and a better future for all. In addition, these limitations severely curtail the ability of low-income nations to ensure their citizens’ rights to health, family planning, and reproductive health. The United States has also been a leader in funding the United Nations Population Fund, which works in over 140 countries to provide crucially needed funding for reproductive health services. However, in 2002, President Bush eliminated funding for UNFPA due to pressure from extreme anti-choice legislators who claimed that the program was involved with coercive abortion in China. Despite U.S. support for desperately needed programs in developing countries, especially in African countries, to ensure reproductive rights, the nation’s participation has been inconsistent, insufficient, and mired with burdensome restrictions. Many

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NGOs and the majority of nations receiving assistance feel that there is need for U.S. leadership to revitalize international reproductive rights through an increase in funding for family planning and reproductive health assistance. These nations and NGOs believe that because family planning and reproductive health programs are so important for both health and demographic reasons, it is essential that more, not fewer, resources be invested in this area, especially because the numbers of women in the reproductive age groups are increasing, as are the proportions of those women who want to use contraception. According to Nicole Itano, there are nearly 1 billion women of reproductive age in the third world (projected to rise to over 1.2 billion by 2010). Unfortunately, with the laudable exception of a few (mainly Scandinavian) countries, most donor contributions have stagnated or even decreased. Moreover, there are other causes competing for international funding, most notably AIDS. At the time of the Cairo Conference, 20 million people were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Just over ten years later, that number has doubled. Indeed, AIDS threatens to derail the ICPD strategy. For, although billions of dollars are now pouring in to fight the disease, much of this money is going into AIDS-specific programs that do not address reproductive health more broadly. Nafis Sadik, a former head of UNFPA and now the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for HIV in Asia, has observed often that as few as ten years ago, those working in family planning shied away from the field of HIV with its heavy burden of social stigma. The roles have since reversed as reproductive health is engulfed in a storm of religious and political controversy. One www.abc-clio.com

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consequence is that organizations concerned with fighting AIDS are failing to make use of valuable infrastructure and expertise already on the ground in places where the disease hits hardest. Given that more than half of HIV infections in Africa are among women, and that for many African women family planning services are their main contact with the formal health care system, such services need to be drafted into the wider battle against HIV. Many family planning clinics already offer HIV testing and counseling, as well as condoms for protection against unwanted pregnancy and HIV infection, and also provide a broad-based message of sexual health. Esther F. Ojo References Adedeji, Adebayo. “The Prospects of Family Planning in Africa.” In Family Welfare and Development in Africa: Proceedings of the IPPF Africa Regional Conference, Ibadan, Nigeria, August 29–September 3, 1976. Charlton, Sue Ellen. Women in Third World Development. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984. Datta, Rekha, and Judith Kornberg. Women in Developing Countries: Assessing Strategies for Empowerment. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Dixon-Mueller, Ruth. “Female Empowerment and Demographic Processes: Moving beyond Cairo.” Policy and Research Papers, No 13. International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, 1998. Goliber, T. J. “Africa’s Expanding Population: Old Problems, New Policies.” Population Bulletin 44, no. 3 (1989), p. 39. Hartmann, Betsy. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Itano, Nicole. “Africa’s Family-Planning Funding Drought.” Christian Science Monitor, November 5, 2003. Sai, Frederick T. “Population, Family Planning, and the Future of Africa.” World Watch 17, no. 5 (September/October 2004).

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946 RESTAVEK Seltzer, Judith R. The Origins and Evolution of Family Planning Programs in Developing Countries. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2002. Suggs, Sherry. “USAID Receives NCWS Award on Health Care Delivery.” Crossroads 8, no. 10 (December 2002). UNFPA. “Working to Empower Women: UNFPA’s Experience in Implementing the Beijing Platform for Action.” New York: UNFPA, 2000. USAID. “Foreign Aid in the National Interest: Promoting Freedom, Security, and Opportunity: Overview.” Washington, DC: USAID, 2002. USAID. “Program in Population, Health and Nutrition.” Washington, DC: Center for Population, Health and Nutrition, 2000.

RESTAVEK The restavek, a Creole word derived from the French reste avec, or “stays with,” is a contemporary form of child slavery on the Caribbean island of Haiti. Slavery has a long history in Haiti, and by the 1780s, half a million slaves lived in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). A successful slave revolt and war of independence (1791–1804) led to the abolition of slavery (temporarily in 1793, permanently with the declaration of independence in January 1804), but forms of slavery lingered on. Haitian rulers Toussaint l’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe forced former slaves to remain on plantations under a system known as fermage. In 1863, a law legalized the corvée, thus requiring local residents to provide free labor to help keep up the road system; seldom applied initially, the corvée was revived extensively during the early part of the first U.S. occupation of Haiti (1916–1918). Various twentieth-century Haitian presidents, François Duvalier most famously, received a per capita allowance for each worker sent to the Dominican www.abc-clio.com

Republic to help with the sugarcane harvest, or zafra (many Haitian workers were then sent back to Haiti without receiving the salaries they were promised). Restaveks frequently originate as sons and daughters (girls predominate) of poor peasant families in Haiti’s rural areas who are given away to an urban family in Port-auPrince (primarily), Jacmel, Les Cayes, or Cap Haïtien in exchange for the promise that they will be well taken care of and educated. In reality, restaveks often end up as household slaves. Households employing a restavek are better off than the families the children come from, though by no means well off. Various reports estimate that there are between 100,000 and 300,000 restaveks in Haiti. Charged with menial chores such as mopping, babysitting, cooking, fetching water, and cleaning, restaveks rarely receive the education they were promised (salaries are nonexistent). Cases of malnutrition, verbal abuse, and medical neglect are frequent. Many also play a central role in the sexual initiation of young men of the household. Those who complain are typically beaten by their owners. When they become pregnant or sick, or when they reach their teenage years, restaveks usually flee (or are chased) from the household. On August 15, 2002, Haiti signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits economic exploitation of children (article 32). Under Haitian law, no child under 12 may be employed as a household servant. They must be fed, clad, and provided medical attention. Families hosting a restavek should receive prior authorization from social services. These legal provisions, like many others in Haiti, are widely ignored. Popular and official contempt for restaveks, along with widespread hardships and poverty in

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Haiti, mean that many Haitians do not even condemn child servitude. Despite President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s declarations of sympathy for Haiti’s children, nongovernmental organizations remain the only ones to actively combat restavek slavery. Although restaveks seem to have existed for at least a century, they first received international attention in the 1990s with the publication of several reports, including the UNICEF’s Les enfants en situation spécialement difficile en Haïti (1993), as well as Jean-Robert Cadet’s Restavec: From Haitian Slave-Child to Middle-Class American (1998). Cadet, a former restavek, recounted in his autobiography how he was abandoned by his father after his mother’s death, raised as a restavek, then fled to the United States. Dr. Philippe R. Girard See also: Aristide, Jean-Bertrand; Code Noir; Duvalier, François; Haiti Reference Cadet, Jean-Robert, and Cynthia Cadet. Restavec: From Haitian Slave-Child to Middle-Class American. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

RICE IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA The African agricultural contribution of rice to the New World shaped patterns of subsistence and identity throughout the Americas. One of the enduring legacies of the Atlantic slave trade is the failure to recognize the accomplishments of the enslaved in the agricultural history of the Americas. African slaves provided considerably more than brawn to the New World, shaping landscape and diet around subsistence preferences. Nowhere is the African agricultural www.abc-clio.com

contribution to the Americas more evident than in the development of rice as a plantation crop in late seventeenth-century colonial South Carolina. Rice was first introduced to South Carolina shortly after the colony’s establishment in 1670. It initially appeared as a crop Africans grew for food. They planted it with the rains but also in wetland environments, such as inland swamps, along river floodplains, and in estuaries. Its potential as a plantation crop soon became evident, and by the eighteenth century, rice was exported from Carolina plantations to Europe. Decades later, the cereal’s cultivation on the fertile floodplains of tidal rivers made South Carolina the wealthiest plantation economy in North America, long before cotton became “king.” The transformation of South Carolina’s coastal plains to irrigated rice fields in such a short period of time revealed a remarkable grasp of tidal flow and saltwater-freshwater dynamics. Until the 1970s scholars credited the original English and French Huguenot settlers with this stunning achievement. In mastering the complexities of paddy rice farming without any prior familiarity with its cultivation, Carolina’s founding fathers metamorphosed into ingenious planters. Such views on rice history as a product of European initiative began to change when historians Peter Wood and Daniel Littlefield revealed that other migrants to the colony already possessed considerable experience growing rice. These were Africans enslaved from the broad region of West Africa where the cereal had been cultivated for centuries. With prior expertise growing rice in West Africa, the enslaved capitalized on a body of knowledge that guided rice’s establishment as a preferred dietary staple in the Americas. They transferred crucial cultivation,

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processing, and cooking methods to the New World. In South Carolina rice was directly sown as in West Africa, and not transplanted as in Asia. The irrigated rice systems along the West African coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone served as the prototype for the tidal plantations established in South Carolina and later Georgia. The wholesale African export of rice culture to the Americas involved centuries-old practices of cultivation as well as consumption, which became evident in the grain’s trajectory from field to kitchen and across the Atlantic. From where did Africans develop rice culture? Until the twentieth century, scholars believed the crop a recent introduction to West Africa, brought by Portuguese mariners after the return voyage of explorer Vasco da Gama from India in 1498. Thanks to Portuguese intercession, the cereal’s cultivation was formally established along Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast. But Africa’s colonization at the end of the nineteenth century caused such views to be questioned. French colonial botanists in West Africa began documenting distinctive characteristics of the rice grown there, notably its red color, upright growth pattern, and tolerance of saltwater flooding and drought. In the early twentieth century, they advanced the proposition that the rice found in West Africa originated there, and its presence long antedated the arrival of the Portuguese. Research additionally showed that the African rice did not diffuse across the continent from Asia. It was already established when Asian rice arrived in East Africa following the eighth-century expansion of Islam. The international scientific community had accepted the conclusion that the rice grown in West Africa was truly indigenous to the region. The www.abc-clio.com

scientific name, Oryza glaberrima, distinguishes the African species from the domesticated Asian cereal, Oryza sativa. In the years since Wood’s groundbreaking research, archaeologists Roderick and Susan McIntosh found African glaberrima present in one site along the floodplain of the Niger River in Mali some 2,000 years ago. Further, work in historical linguistics supports a date of domestication for African rice between 4,000 and 4,500 years ago, probably by speakers of Mande languages, who possibly responded to drier climatic conditions by domesticating the cereal and sowing the grain in lowland swamps. The cereal then diffused south to the Guinean highlands, where ample rainfall permitted its cultivation as a rain-fed crop, and westward to speakers of WestAtlantic languages settled near the Atlantic coast. Long before the arrival of Europeans, West Africa’s indigenous rice region reached along the Atlantic coast from Senegal to Côte d’Ivoire and inland for more than one thousand miles to the country of Chad. Over this geographic expanse, African societies grew rice within sight of Saharan sand dunes, Atlantic waters, and highland redoubts, adapting the crop to enormous ecological variability. Wherever rice is grown in West Africa, it is associated with women. For centuries the cereal has remained a crop principally grown by women, or one with a distinct division of labor, where women carry out the sowing, weeding, and seed selection. The experience of cultivating rice in distinctly different environments made the cereal a valued food crop throughout the region. Rice, along with millet and sorghum (two other African domesticates), sustained the successive African empires that formed between the Senegal and Niger Rivers in the

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millennium prior to the fatal dislocations of the transatlantic slave trade. In the midfourteenth century, one Muslim visitor, Ibn Battuta, noted the importance of rice and its availability in regional markets. Africa’s red rice did not go unnoticed by Europeans. The arrival of Portuguese caravels along the Upper Guinea Coast in the mid-fifteenth century initiated commentaries on the cereal’s widespread cultivation, the diverse places where it was grown, and the role of women in growing, processing, and marketing the crop. Throughout the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, Europeans relied upon rice and the other cereals grown by African societies to provision the slave ships that sailed across the Middle Passage to the Americas. In this way, rice was introduced to the New World. Archival records reveal that slave ships principally purchased rice “in the husk,” meaning with the indigestible hulls still attached to the grains. Any rice grain left unmilled on a slave ship could serve as seed rice. The African mortar and pestle proved the only way to remove the hulls, a necessary step to the cereal’s consumption. Unlike wheat, oats, and barley, the cereals then known to Europeans, rice demands a different milling method. The objective is not to crush the grains into flour but to leave the grain intact while removing the hulls. The hollowed out log and handheld wooden pestle, traditionally used by African women to process all cereals, was the only way to mill rice without breakage. This method was alien to European agricultural practices. Records in European archives reveal that African females aboard slave ships were put to this task, milling rice with their traditional technology, which remained the only way to prepare and polish rice for consumption. Mortar-and-pestle processing www.abc-clio.com

remained ubiquitous until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when a successful mechanical mill was developed. The mortar-and-pestle milling performed by African women was crucial for establishing rice culture in the Americas, for without a way to remove the hulls, rice could not be eaten. The diffusion of the mortar and pestle throughout the black Atlantic provides additional testimony to the importance of African women for establishing rice culture in the Americas. The earliest introduced rice to the Americas was likely African glaberrima. Archival records in South Carolina report a delivery of rice from a Portuguese slave ship in the 1680s. Rice of a red color was also remembered as among the first types planted in the colony, even though higher-yielding Asian rice replaced them as the rice plantation economy consolidated. Rice of a red color is also featured among the earliest types described in Brazil. Shortly after its colonization in the sixteenth century, and one hundred years before South Carolina was made a colony of England, rice was introduced to Brazil from the Cape Verde Islands near the coast of Senegal. The cereal’s initial appearance is associated with slavery, as slaves grew the cereal for subsistence in the food fields of Brazilian sugar plantations. While its establishment is unquestionably attributed to Portuguese initiative, rice was not grown in Portugal until the late eighteenth century, centuries after its introduction to Brazil. From the 1750s, Portugal developed rice plantations in the eastern Amazon region, centered on Maranhão, located south of the estuary. Modeled on the successful Carolina system, the region’s rice plantations developed on tidal rivers and imported the high-yielding “Carolina gold” seed variety (a sativa rice). Africans with

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expertise growing rice along the Upper Guinea Coast were enslaved and brought directly to the region. Rice also shaped patterns of subsistence, resistance, and identity throughout northeastern South America. It was planted as a food crop in the former Guianas and by runaways from plantation slavery (maroons) who fled to the rainforest to escape a life of bondage. To this day maroon descendants grow rice, and the cereal retains its African identity as a woman’s crop. It was in this region that French botanists found African rice in the 1940s and 1950s. Female maroons in Guyane (French Guiana) were still planting the seeds in the decade following World War II. African rice was also discovered growing wild on the margins of a former sugar plantation in El Salvador during the 1950s. Botanical collections in Latin America may hold other examples of African rice, but they have yet to be analyzed for its presence. It is thus unsurprising that the role of enslaved African women in rice agriculture is not forgotten in the historical memory of slavery retained in some remote hamlets of northeastern South America. From the Guianas to Amazonic Brazil, maroon descendants tell a legend about rice origins. They recount the story of a female ancestor who hides grains of rice in her hair during the long, harrowing journey aboard a slave ship. The precious seeds escape detection. When she flees the plantation that holds her captive, she smuggles the rice grains in her hair. She then plants them for food as a maroon. This, say her descendants, is how they came to grow rice. The maroon narrative is faithful to African women’s historic role in seed selection and rice cultivation, but it remains significant for additional reasons. The oral www.abc-clio.com

history of rice introduction challenges the longstanding view that European ingenuity and initiative pioneered rice cultivation in the Americas. While high-yielding Asian varieties guided the transformation of rice as an important and profitable crop in the eighteenth-century colonial system, the maroons make claim to the prior knowledge and agency of Africans in establishing seeds from Africa. This oral history contrasts sharply with written accounts that claim transoceanic seed transfers were solely the outcome of European efforts to disperse them. In the maroon narrative, the usual agents of seed dispersal celebrated in Western accounts—European navigators, colonists, and men of science—are replaced by an enslaved African woman whose deliberate effort to sequester grains of rice in her hair enabled her descendants to survive in plantation societies. The narrative provides a vivid memory of the transatlantic slave trade, African initiative, and the dietary preferences of the enslaved. One enduring signature of the African Diaspora is the manner of preparing rice in the Americas. Asians prefer a rice bowl where the grains adhere to one another. The Spanish paella and Italian risotto bear the Middle Eastern influence of the pilaf, where rice is sautéed in animal fat or oil and then cooked in a stock. The African method of rice preparation favors cooking the cereal so every grain is separate. It is sometimes also mixed with greens, okra, black-eyed or pigeon peas (additional African plant domesticates). The popular converted rice marketed globally (including under the brand name Uncle Ben’s) is actually parboiled rice, a method of steaming newly harvested rice that is not yet dry. Parboiling the rice concentrates the nutrients, eases removal of the husk, and reduces

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spoilage from microbes. Even the ubiquitous image of Uncle Ben speaks to the social memory of the African rice heritage in the Americas. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the American, Asian, African, and European continents experienced botanical and ecological exchanges that were nothing short of revolutionary. The intensity and richness of these interchanges, among societies made unequal by the process of conquest and colonization, is revealed in a body of literature known among scholars as the Columbian Exchange. The name refers to the intercontinental plant exchanges during the centuries following the maritime voyages of Columbus to the New World. While improving historical understanding of the role of plants in shaping global food systems and societies, there is little attention to crops of African origin. Emphasis remains on the role of plants (the potato, tomato, maize) domesticated by America’s native peoples, or those domesticated in Asia, such as sugar cane and rice, on societies elsewhere. Africa—home to more than 2,000 native grains, roots, and fruits utilized as food staples—receives little or no commentary except as a recipient of introduced crops. In part, this omission results from the fact that many of its native plants are grown in the tropics and not known or considered unimportant by societies in northern temperate societies. Most people are unaware that the two most popularly consumed beverages in the West derive from African plants. Coffee originated in Africa, while cola soft drinks rely on the African kola nut. The lack of attention to African plants represents a research bias that continues to haunt the present. In the continent where human beings evolved, three important www.abc-clio.com

centers of plant domestication developed, direct products of the civilizations that developed there. That African rice was not acknowledged as native to West Africa until the second half of the twentieth century is illustrative of the enduring ignorance of African agricultural achievements. It can be said that Africans actively shaped the early modern Atlantic world. Until the third decade of the nineteenth century, they crossed the Atlantic in greater numbers than Europeans, albeit being forced to do so in chains. While Africans and their descendants were central to the economic development of the Americas for more than three centuries, their role in agricultural innovation and botanical exchanges has received little acknowledgment. Among the migrants to the Americas, they alone possessed prior experience growing crops in the tropics. Plants of African origin contributed to survival, cultural identity, and ritual. While Europeans purchased African food surpluses to provision slave ships, it was the victims themselves who took the seeds of their dietary staples and planted them in the ground for subsistence in the colonies where they were forced to labor. Futhermore, slaves deliberately established many African foods, such as black-eyed peas, okra, and sorghum, on plantation subsistence fields. The African Diaspora was one of plants as well as people. Plants came across the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships as provisions, medicinals, or for their general utility. The enslaved drew upon their botanical knowledge to establish African plants in new locales, thereby profoundly shaping the cuisines of the U.S. South, Brazil, Cuba, and other plantation economies. The history of rice in the black Atlantic provides one way to promote the

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historical recovery of the African heritage in the Americas. Judith A. Carney See also: Agriculture References Carney, Judith A. “Rice and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Atlantic Passages to Suriname.” Slavery and Abolition 26 (3): 325–347. Carney, Judith A. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Crosby, A. W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972. Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slaves. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. McIntosh, R. J., and S. K. McIntosh. “The Inland Niger Delta before the Empire of Mali: Evidence from Jenne-Jeno.” Journal of African History 22 (1981): 1–22. National Research Council. Lost Crops of Africa. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996. Portères, R. “Primary Cradles of Agriculture in the African Continent.” Papers in African Prehistory, edited by J. D. Fage and R. A. Oliver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Wood, Peter. Black Majority. New York: Knopf, 1974.

ROBINSON, JACK ROOSEVELT (1919–1972) Jackie Robinson was a Hall of Fame baseball player with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but more importantly he was a prominent civil rights pioneer. At a time when African Americans were shut out of organized white baseball and restricted to all-black leagues, Robinson was recruited by Dodgers general manager and co-owner Branch Rickey to become the first African American in modern times to play in the Major Leagues. Robinson faced www.abc-clio.com

Jack Roosevelt Robinson (Jackie Robinson) is shown in his Kansas City Monarchs uniform. Later, he would sign with the Brooklyn Dodgers and, in 1947, became the first African American to play Major League baseball. (Library of Congress)

enormous hostility from many players on other teams, and even from some of his own teammates, but he persevered, showing the courage to resist fighting back. Instead he struck back with his bat, glove, and feet, becoming an outstanding hitter and helping to bring a new type of play to Major League games. He opened the door to hundreds of other African Americans in baseball and helped open the eyes of millions of white Americans to the evils of racism. Jackie Robinson was well prepared to play his historic role. College educated, he was an outstanding athlete at the University of California, Los Angeles, starring in baseball, football, basketball, and track. During World War II, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was made a second lieutenant. There he encountered racism more directly than he had at UCLA. While stationed at Fort

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Riley, Kansas, he was not permitted to play on the football or baseball teams. Later, at Fort Hood, Texas, on a July day in 1944, Robinson boarded a bus and was ordered to the back. He refused and was courtmartialed. Vehicles on military bases, however, had officially been desegregated by then, and Robinson was acquitted. After that, fighting for equal rights became a permanent and personal crusade for him. After his military service, Robinson played Negro League baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1945. His successes at bat and on the bases, as well as his educational background and maturity (he was 28 when he played his first Major League game), led Rickey to conclude that he was the right person to break the color barrier. Rickey subjected Robinson to an exhaustive interview process before signing him to play with the Dodgers’s top Minor League team, the Montreal Royals, in 1946. Robinson’s Major League rookie season of 1947 was a stunning success despite vocal opposition, insults, and even threats by other teams not to play a Dodger team with Robinson on it. Although some teammates opposed having a black teammate, many others supported him, most importantly shortstop Pee Wee Reese, the highly respected captain of the team. Robinson won National League Rookie of the Year honors as a first baseman. He batted .297 and led the league with 29 stolen bases, introducing a style of play based heavily on speed, stolen bases (including stealing home, a Robinson trademark), hit-and-run plays, and bunting. In short, it was the type of play common in the Negro Leagues. Attendance at Dodgers games increased dramatically, as the team set attendance records at several cities. Huge numbers of African Americans came to see Robinson and applaud his accomplishwww.abc-clio.com

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ments. Robinson shifted to second base in 1948, leading National League second basemen with a .980 fielding average. He had his greatest season in 1949, leading the league in batting average at .342 and stolen bases with 37. It was the first of six consecutive seasons in which he would bat over .300. The 1949 season also brought with it the National League Most Valuable Player Award. The Dodgers proved themselves one of the best and most beloved teams ever during Robinson’s years with them. The club included such stars as Reese, center fielder Duke Snider, first baseman Gil Hodges, catcher Roy Campanella, and pitcher Don Newcombe, the latter two among many African Americans who followed Robinson to the Dodgers. Robinson, however, was widely perceived as the catalyst for the team’s success. In his ten seasons (1947–1956) with Brooklyn, the Dodgers won six pennants and the 1955 World Series, the team’s first-ever World Series Championship. In the other four years, the Dodgers finished second three times and third once. Robinson meanwhile proved to be a versatile as well as talented player, as he also spent considerable time at third base and in the outfield. Robinson’s final two seasons were less successful than the others, with Robinson batting .256 and .275. His entry into the majors delayed by his military service and the ban on African Americans, Robinson was thirty-seven years old by his tenth season. In the winter of 1956, he was traded to the New York Giants but decided to retire, finishing with a career .311 batting average. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. In later years, Robinson continued to open doors of opportunity for African Americans. As a businessman, he was an

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executive with the coffee company Chock Full o’ Nuts, which ran a chain of coffee shops featuring its own brand of coffee. He also was chairman of the board of Freedom National Bank, a new, largely black-owned bank in Harlem that Robinson helped to create. He raised money for and in other ways aided the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, especially assisting the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His commitment to America’s youth was extensive and consistent over the years. As the 1960s progressed, Robinson’s health declined. He suffered from diabetes, blindness in his right eye, legs that would have required amputation if he had lived longer, heart and lung disease, and increased physical weakness. Death came on October 24, 1972. He was praised by President Richard Nixon for his impact on not just baseball but on every area of American life where black and white work together. Fifty years after Jackie Robinson integrated Major League baseball, baseball commissioner Bud Selig ordered his uniform number 42, retired by every team. As there has been just one Jackie Robinson, so would no other player ever again wear his number. Edward J. Rielly References Rampersad, Arnold. Jackie Robinson: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Robinson, Jackie. I Never Had It Made: The Autobiography of Jackie Robinson. 1972. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1995. Robinson, Sharon. Stealing Home: An Intimate Family Portrait by the Daughter of Jackie Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. Tygiel, Jules. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

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ROSAS DE OQUENDO, MATEO (1559–?) Mateo Rosas de Oquendo’s writing reflects the African presence in colonial Peru and speaks judgmentally of the particular lustfulness of women of African descent. Compared frequently to his peninsular counterpart Francisco Quevedo, Rosas de Oquendo worked in a similar literary vein of satire. In his narrative poem Cosas que pasan en el Piru, año de 1598 (Things that Happen in Peru, 1598), he criticizes social structures and Peruvian reality in the late sixteenth century. Through double entendre, he describes a decadent, (morally) corrupt, socially pretentious Peru brimming with sexual promiscuity. This literary device forges a carnivalesque atmosphere in which charade (the ostentations of dress codes) and deception (“false” virgins) reign. His verses hint at the stereotypical complexity of the New World and the instability of the viceroyalty for tolerating such behavior. The brunt of Rosas de Oquendo’s satire is directed toward those of African descent in Lima, particularly women. There are some fourteen direct references in Cosas que pasan to negros, negras, and mulatas—members of groups that are frequently associated with dance and dalliance and comprise the bottom rung of the social ladder. Through them and those around them, Rosas de Oquendo paints a picaresque Peru comprised of adventure-seeking rogues, lascivious prostitutes, and opportunistic go-betweens. The poem, multifaceted and hybrid in form, functions as a pseudo-historical testimonial emanating from an agendaencumbered first-person narrator. But given that the poetic voice in the author’s text functions as a witness of events, it is difficult to determine allegiances, since his

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tone vacillates between admonishing the happenings—“things that happen in Peru”—and advocating them. Bonnie L. Gasior See also: Peru; Latin American Literature References Lasarte, Pedro. “La Sátira de Mateo Rosas de Oquendo: El carnaval y la transgresión.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 9 (1992): 251–65. Lasarte, Pedro. “La sátira en el virreinato del Perú.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 655 (2005): 45–52. Rosas de Oquendo, Mateo. Sátira hecho por Mateo Rosas de Oquendo a las cosas que pasan en el Pirú, año de 1598: Estudio y Edición critica. Edited by Pedro Lasarte. Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1990.

ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY Parliament established the monopolistic Royal African Company (RAC) in 1672 to expand England’s African trade and to ensure a constant flow of African slaves into its American plantations. The RAC created the foundations of England’s slave trade that would, by the eighteenth century, displace the Dutch as the primary carrier of slaves from Africa to the Americas. The RAC’s creation was a response to the growing European belief in the importance of the transatlantic slave trade not only to the American plantation system but to the development of individual state economies. The RAC was a joint-stock company designed, through its monopoly in England’s African trade, which included slaves, gold, ivory, and other African commodities, to provide dividends to its shareholders. While most of the early shareholders included the king and nobility, it did not take long for England’s www.abc-clio.com

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growing merchant population to take control of the company. As the company worked to establish itself on the Gold Coast, by expanding the number of coastal forts it possessed, the RAC quickly learned of the financial and logistical difficulties of overseeing the slave trade. This trade involved carrying a large supply of commodities from Europe to West Africa, exchanging these commodities for slaves, and then carrying the slaves to the Americas. Within this, the RAC needed to meet the demands of the American plantations for slaves. The RAC soon found it difficult to profit and, within England’s mercantile class, many were unhappy because they were denied an opportunity to participate in what they viewed as a very lucrative business venture. This growing espousal of free trade by English merchants, and the challenges it presented to mercantile thought, caused Parliament, in 1698, to pass an act that opened England’s African trade. The Act of 1698, scheduled to expire in 1714, allowed a larger segment of England’s mercantile class to participate in the slave trade. To make up for the loss of profits to the RAC, the separate traders paid a 10 percent duty on all goods that they imported into West Africa. This opening of England’s slave trade allowed it to expand and, while in the years before the act’s expiration a debate between the two sides ensued, the situation continued. The RAC continued to work to maintain its coastal presence, yet throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, its situation deteriorated. Finally, in 1750, Parliament decided to dissolve the RAC and in its place created the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa to oversee the maintenance of England’s African trade. Ty M. Reese

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956 RWANDA References Daaku, Kwame Yeboa. Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to European Trade. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Davies, K. G. The Royal African Company. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

RWANDA The Republic of Rwanda is a small and mountainous country in central Africa with a population of about 7,954,000. Most inhabitants are either members of the majority tribe, the Hutus, or the minority Tutsis. Rwanda was occupied by the Germans during the colonial era and was a part of German East Africa until World War I. During the war, the British, aided by French, Belgian, and some Portuguese soldiers, invaded the region. After the war, the region was annexed by the Belgians, who ruled it under a League of Nations mandate, and later as a United Nations Trusteeship. Rwanda was granted independence on July 1, 1962. Very few Americans went to Rwanda before independence. However, the Free Methodist Church of North Africa started missionary work in the region, called Ruanda-Urundi, in 1935. The Presbyterian Church in the United States started sending missionaries to Rwanda in the 1970s, and the U.S. Peace Corps started operating in the country in 1975. Rwanda has been the focus of important primatological studies because of its gorilla population. George B. Schaller’s The Year of the Gorilla was the first popular account of Rwanda’s mountain gorillas. The work inspired many others, including the most famous American connected with Rwanda: Dian Fossey. Born in San Francisco, she studied at San Jose State College and then www.abc-clio.com

Cambridge University, going on a safari in Africa in 1963. Fossey returned four years later to establish the Karisoke Research Center in Ruhengeri, Rwanda. She spent many years in close study of Rwanda’s mountain gorillas in the Virunga Mountains, living in close proximity to them. She served as scientific director of the Karisoke Research Center from 1967 to 1980, project coordinator from 1980 to 1983, and then scientific director again from 1983. She opposed the hunting of gorillas and was murdered by poachers in 1985. She was the author of the internationally famous book Gorillas in the Mist, which was later turned into a film of the same name. Rwanda returned to international visibility in April 1994 when growing tensions between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsis erupted from occasional massacres into wholesale genocide. Hutu leadership had, for many years, been promoting an ideology of “Hutu Power” and had been systematically organizing in preparation. While many in the U.S. media attributed the tensions and genocides to “ancient ethnic hatreds,” later scholarship noted that there had been peaceful mixing of Hutus and Tutsis well up to the colonial era. The tensions that led up to the genocide were, many argued, a consequence of the preferential treatment of Tutsis over Hutus by Belgian colonizers in the twentieth century and the resulting disparities in wealth and economic power. Despite warnings from the Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, little action was taken to prevent the massacres by international bodies or Western nations. A move to increase the number of UN peacekeepers in the country before the massacre was blocked by the U.S. government.

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Many Tutsis fled to neighboring Burundi. Reorganized under Paul Kagame’s leadership, the Tutsi-led forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front returned to Rwanda to overthrow the Hutu government and reestablish order. By July, 800,000 Rwandans, both Tutsi and Hutu, had been killed. Paul Kagame was made president in 2000 and reelected in 2003. During his presidency, Rwanda has sought to reconcile Tutsis and Hutus. Among the critical parts of the reconciliation process have been the creation of local courts, known as gacaca courts, to prosecute those responsible for the genocide. Some have proposed creating truth and reconciliation commissions along the same lines as South Africa’s postapartheid commissions, which seek to have perpetrators publicly admit and atone for their crimes in order to help communities heal. The United States’s inaction during the massacres has resulted in a national

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revisiting of the question of whether or not the United States should intervene militarily in the case of genocide. The Rwandan tragedy returned to public view in the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda. The film centered around a hotel in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, which served as one of the few sanctuaries for Tutsis, Hutus, and foreigners trapped in the midst of the genocide. Justin Corfield See also: Ethnicity; Genocide; Peacekeeping and Military Interventions; Truth and Reconciliation Commissions References Dellaire, Roméo. Shake Hands with the Devil. Toronto: Knopf, Canada, 2003. Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Picador, 1999. Mowat, Farley. Woman in the Mists: The Story of Dian Fossey and the Mountain Gorillas of Africa. New York: Warner, 1987.

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S SADAT, MUHAMMAD ANWAR EL- (1918–1981) Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat, also known as Anwar el-Sadat and Anwar al-Sadat, was president of the Arab Republic of Egypt (1970–1981) and the “architect of a new Mideast.” One of thirteen siblings, Sadat was born on December 25, 1918, in Mit AbulKum, a village in the Nile Delta north of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, to a poor Egyptian-Sudanese family. At the time, Egypt was a British Colony. He studied at the Royal Military Academy—a British military school that first opened its door to the middle class in 1936. He developed anticolonial thoughts at an early age, as demonstrated by his choice of study. Besides studying traditional subjects, students had to learn to analyze battles. Sadat chose to study the Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point in the American Civil War. After graduating from the Royal Military Academy in 1938, he was appointed to a remote government base where he met Gamal Abdel Nasser, who became Egypt’s idolized president. Sadat was to become one of Nasser’s Free Officers who overthrew the Egyptian monarchy headed by King Farouk I as well as ended British rule in the revolution of July 23, 1952.

Sadat was arrested twice by the British, who accused him of assisting the Germans during World War II. He was jailed from 1942 till 1944 and lived as a fugitive from 1944 till 1945. Having been stripped of his rank, Sadat tried to resume civil life but found himself back in anti-colonial activity. He was arrested again in January 1946 and held in solitary confinement for eighteen months. His imprisonment was to continue for another year and a half. In 1950, Sadat was reinstated into the army by Nasser, who was then in charge of the Free Officers Organization. During the 1952 revolution, Sadat was assigned the task of overseeing the official abdication of the king. He became the voice of the revolution in his capacity as the editor of the newspaper al-Gumhuriya (The Republic). From 1955 on, Sadat held various governmental positions, including serving as Nasser’s vice president in 1964–1966 and again in 1969–1970. In 1970, Sadat became the president of Egypt on Nasser’s death. Sadat’s 11-year presidency was dramatic and controversial. On the domestic front, Sadat was relatively unknown. Unlike Nasser, whom the people adored and supported unconditionally, Sadat had to prove himself worthy of his position to

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Egyptian president Anwar Sadat (left) meets with U.S. president Jimmy Carter (right) at the White House, Washington, D.C., in 1980. (Library of Congress)

secure his rule. He ordered the arrest of many rivals and potential opponents. However, to avoid infuriating the people, he ordered the release of many political prisoners. Sadat won some popularity from the relative success of the 1973 October War against Israel in which parts of the Sinai Peninsula, which was occupied by Israel in 1967, were regained. On the international stage, in 1972 Sadat ended a 15-year alliance with the Soviet Union, expelling Soviet advisers from Egypt and turning to the United States for help and friendship. Diplomatic relations between Egypt and the United States were restored when the U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, accepted Sadat’s invitation to visit Cairo in December 1973. Under Sadat’s rule, Egypt became the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world. www.abc-clio.com

Sadat took Egypt and the entire Arab world by surprise when, in 1977, he made his historic visit to Jerusalem, proclaiming his intention of making peace with the country that had been Egypt’s foe for 25 years. His visit started a process that culminated in 1978 with talks at Camp David, Maryland, hosted by the American president Jimmy Carter. Sadat, Menachem Begin (the Israeli prime minister), and Carter signed a peace accord at the end of these talks. Sadat’s initiative for peace won him and Begin the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize; it also won him international acclaim. At home, though, this initiative cost him his life. Many Arabs saw Sadat’s initiative as a sellout to the enemy. Sadat was assassinated by Muslim fundamentalists within his own army on October 6, 1981, during the annual parade celebrating the victory in 1973. Three American

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presidents—Ford, Carter, and Nixon— attended Sadat’s funeral. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley References Alterman, Jon B. Sadat and His Legacy. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998. Finklestone, Joseph. Anwar Sadat. Visionary Who Dared. London: Frank Cass, 1996.

SAILORS The African Diaspora followed shipping routes out of Africa and dispersed free and enslaved black sailors along those routes throughout the ages of European colonization of North America and American chattel slavery. In the late 1600s, England displaced the Netherlands as the dominant maritime power in the Atlantic. This power shift resulted in a corresponding shift in the national, ethnic, and racial composition of ships’ crews. England was a large and powerful nation, but rapid expansion soon nearly exhausted the supply of able-bodied men available to serve in its Royal Navy. Jails were emptied, towns and villages were required to supply quotas of men, and press gangs regularly kidnapped sailors of any allegiance, race, or nationality. Coupled with the fact that England was rapidly expanding its enslavement of Africans, this shortage made it a natural outcome that some slaves would end up serving on English ships. Slaves were taken to sea for many reasons. Sea captains often took slaves as personal assistants. Slaveholders would send slaves to sea so that they might collect their slaves’ wages and prize money, or “shares” that were paid to each sailor when his ship captured an enemy ship. Far more slaves were simply pressed into maritime slavery www.abc-clio.com

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in the way that other Africans were forced into plantation slavery—by physical duress. After they were aboard, slaves began to learn the ways of the ship. This new knowledge gave those slave-sailors a set of portable skills they could take with them to other ships. After earning, or escaping to, their freedom, many black sailors remained at sea because it provided them with a trade that they could follow. The reasons black sailors found themselves at sea were as diverse as the ships they sailed. Though initially most black sailors came into the seafaring trade through the English Royal Navy, they eventually found their way into the worldwide merchant service, onto slave ships and pirate ships, into the American whaling fleet, and into sundry maritime-related trades ashore: manual labor trades like loading and unloading ships, and skilled trades like ship’s carpentry, caulking, painting, or blacksmithing. Black sailors were themselves a diverse lot, and many became important figures in the Pan-African world. They included in their numbers Olaudah Equiano, the famous abolitionist and writer; Crispus Attucks, the American Revolutionary hero; Denmark Vesey, the slave-revolt organizer; Captain Paul Cuffe, organizer of the first black-led back-to-Africa movement; and Robert Smalls, the ex-slave who became an influential member of the U.S. Congress. In fact, among this list is one—but not the only—remarkable woman sailor “William Brown.” There were many good reasons free and enslaved blacks wanted to remain at sea. The social world of the forecastle, where the common sailors lived secluded from the officers, was organized around a sailor culture that was different from any culture that existed ashore. Politically, the

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ship was organized from the top of the social order down—not unlike the world of the shore. Sailors of all races and nations were all held captive by their captains. In some literal sense, after they left shore, they were all the slaves of their captains. The idea that sailors of all races and nations were “all in it together” had a unique effect on the social order of the ship that existed among the “people,” as the common sailors were called. This social solidarity promoted unity and racial reconciliation to a degree unseen in almost any other labor situation in which diasporic blacks might have found themselves. The physical danger of the job they had to do also contributed to unity. Ability truly meant something to sailors who directly depended upon each other for their physical safety. Because ability showed itself in the “wooden world,” as the ship was called, it was a place for social advancement for black sailors. Lacking opportunities on shore, many black sailors had long careers at sea. The skills and experience they gained in a life at sea would often grant them better wages and higher social status than they ever could have achieved ashore. Traveling the world from port to port gave black sailors worldliness and experience unavailable to people living on shore. Their mobility also granted them access to information about Africa and the branches of the African Diaspora; other blacks relied on them as a valuable conduit of this information. They regularly touched port around the Atlantic and came into contact with free and enslaved blacks who worked in the maritime trades and lived in port cities. The link they constituted back to Africa and among widely dispersed black populations made black sailors important elements in the formation of a Pan-African www.abc-clio.com

identity as well as in abolitionist movements around the Atlantic world. The decades preceding the Civil War in the United States saw a sudden and dramatic decline in the number of black sailors on American ships. Knowing that free black sailors threatened the institution of slavery in the American south, slaveholding Southerners used Denmark Vesey’s alleged conspiracy to institute severe restrictions on the rights of black sailors. In December 1822, South Carolina passed the first of a series of restrictions on African American sailors called the Negro Seamen Acts. These acts amounted to a tax on free black sailors who were taken into the South. They were designed to price them out of the labor market. The de-integration of the maritime trades was also hastened in the United States by an influx of immigrant labor, mostly Irish, which was coincident with the Negro Seaman Acts. The last refuge of large numbers of African American sailors was the Nantucket whaling trade, of which they composed, at times, as many as half of those involved in the trade. The American South’s Civil War tactic of harassing the Yankee whaling fleet, however, was the nail in the coffin of that trade, which had begun its decline with the discovery of oil in 1859 at Titusville, Pennsylvania. Shortly after the Civil War, worldwide shipping became increasingly mechanized, and with the steamship came the end of the need for large crews. By the turn of the twentieth century, people of African descent had lost almost all trace of their once-great seafaring tradition. Matthew D. Brown

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See also: Atlantic World; Attucks, Crispus; Brown, William; Cuffe, Captain Paul; Equiano, Olaudah; Kru Sailors;

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SAINT KITTS AND NEVIS 963 Pan-Africanism; Slavery (History); Smalls, Robert; Vesey, Denmark References Bolster, Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Cohn, Michael, and Michael Platzer. Black Men of the Sea. New York: Dodd, Mead Publishers, 1978. Farr, James. Black Odyssey: The Seafaring Traditions of Afro-Americans. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1989. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Putney, Martha. Black Sailors: Afro-American Merchant Seamen and Whalemen Prior to the Civil War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987.

SAINT KITTS AND NEVIS Saint Kitts and Nevis, formerly colonized by Britain and France, is a small federated twin-island nation located in the northeastern Caribbean about 1,300 miles (2,092 kilometers) southeast of Miami, Florida. Although Christopher Columbus encountered the islands in 1493, it was not until 1624 that the British, and the French a year later, permanently colonized St. Kitts (shortened form of St. Christopher). The island became both European powers’ first colony in the Caribbean. However, in 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht ceded French St. Kitts to the British. In 1628, the Caribs of Nevis were killed and driven off, like the Caribs of St. Kitts, and supplanted by English settlers from St. Kitts. The mainly European and overwhelming majority of African peoples would come to dominant the population of these islands. In St. Kitts, there were mainly English, French, and Irish settlers. However, starting in the 1620s to the early www.abc-clio.com

1800s, over 115,000 enslaved Africans were forcefully brought to the island, with large numbers coming from Nigeria and West-Central Africa areas. In fact, there was a town in St. Kitts called Angola Town because it was populated with hundreds of Africans of Central Africa origins. Additionally, there were instances where Congolese Christians from Central Africa were recognized in St. Kitts. On the other hand, in Nevis there were mainly English and Irish European settlers. More than 25,000 Africans were forcefully brought to Nevis over the span of two centuries. A large number of these individuals came from the area that is known as Nigeria today. In addition, an almost equal amount of peoples came from the present-day area of Ghana, pointing to Akan origins. The institution of slavery dominated most of the colonial history of St. Kitts and Nevis. Other than a short period of white indenture servitude, basically the small numbers of Europeans of the territories controlled the islands’ major political and economic institutions. The colonial governments, with varying degrees of subordination to the metropolis, were headed by the French and English colonists, with governors, councils, and assemblies. The control and ownership of farms of tobacco, cotton, indigo, and ginger, and the mid-seventeenth century emergence of the monoculture sugar industry, would enrich European planters and help further the development of the British, and for some time, the French Empires. In most of the eighteenth century, imports to England from Nevis was almost double that of the colonies of New York, and St. Kitts, based on its population and size, and was the single richest colony in the British Empire.

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On the other hand, besides a small number of emancipated slaves, the vast majority of the peoples, who were of African descent, were forced to perform the brunt of the labor on the farms and plantations. Many Africans found slavery to be intolerable, and there was resistance to enslavement with acts ranging from damaging property, running away, committing suicide, to revolting. For example, in Nevis, besides scores of runaways, there were reports of Africans plotting to revolt in 1725 and in the early 1760s. It was similar in St. Kitts. In 1639, a group of Africans on the French side of St. Kitts temporally established a maroon society in Mount Liamaiga (formerly Mount Misery). In 1737, at the St. Kitts harbor, about 100 newly imported enslaved Africans chose to commit mass suicide and jumped overbroad into the sea. At least 33 drowned in order to escape slavery. In 1770 and 1778, there were reported plots of Africans’ attempts to revolt. Up until near the end of the slave era, the legendary leader Markus, along with 30 other maroons, roamed the woods of St. Kitts. The intermediate phase in the development of the colonial societies comprised the emancipation and postemancipation period. Albeit, the English settlers and the metropolis still had strong influence over the political and economic institutions of the societies. Although not drawing as much wealth as it used to, the sugar industry continued to be the main economic activity of these islands up into the twentieth century. In 1871, the separate colonies of St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, British Virgin Islands, Dominica, and Montserrat became a part of the single colony of the British Leeward Islands. In 1882, St. Kitts and

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Nevis were jointed together to become the single unit of St. Kitts-Nevis. The final stage of the colonial period would bring reform and self-government for the islands. St. Kitts-Nevis continued to grow sugar, which accounted for close to 90 percent of the islands’ exports. Cotton was introduced mainly in Nevis. By the 1930s, Nevis was growing sugarcane and cotton along with large areas of subsistence crops. In spite of that, islanders continued to face adversity. In 1935, the third of a series of labor riots erupted in St. Kitts, with subsequent occurrences in other British Caribbean territories. This development gave rise to strong labor unions with members who eventually entered the government and directly influenced social, economic, and political reform. At the same time, the almost negligible population of people of European descent continued to decline. In St. Kitts-Nevis, similar to some of the other British Caribbean territories, many of the political leaders were of African descent and came from workingclass backgrounds. One of such leaders, Robert Bradshaw, a member of the Labour Party, dominated politics from the late 1940s until his death in the 1978. In 1956, the Leeward Islands Federation was dissolved. From 1958 to 1962, St. Kitts-Nevis was united with nine other British colonies to form the West Indies Federation. In 1967, St. Kitts-Nevis along with Anguilla, became an associated state with internal self-government. St. Kitts-Nevis entered the postcolonial period of its history on September 19, 1983. Thereby, the society became one of the smallest and youngest African diasporic states. Ninety-five percent of the estimated 40,000 citizens of the islands are of African

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descent; small numbers of minorities of British, Portuguese, and Lebanese descent make up the rest of the population. English and English Creole are spoken by the islanders. Most of the people are followers of Christianity, mainly Protestant and Roman Catholic denominations, with a small minority of Rastafarians. Kittitians and Nevisians’s cultural interactions with other peoples have been heightened with their historical and political ties to other islands and with present ties to intergovernmental organization such as the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Additionally, St. Kitts-Nevis has one of the strongest migratory traditions in the Caribbean, if not the world, which deepens cultural interactions, especially with other African diasporic migrants, societies, and minority communities in other lands. This migratory tradition began in the preemancipation period but the movement continued and expanded to include constant streams of substantial migratory movement. Yet, there were many returns and temporary sojourners, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, some of the more persistence cultural practices are derived from a shared African origin and a persistent stream of diasporic interactions. This is evident in many facets of the society. Kittitians and Nevisians have a strong kinship-based societal organization that has merged with the nation-state. This is similar to the organization in some other Afro-Caribbean and African societies. Similar to other diasporic societies, there are the traditional community arrangements of African-influenced shotgun houses clustered together. The connection

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to the land and agricultural practices of animal rearing and farming, more so on Nevis, parallels some traditional African and Afro-Caribbean societies. Additionally, there are some traditional utilities, such as the mortar and pestle and the yabba pot. Dietary meals eaten in Africa and the islands share such ingredients as cornmeal, okra, pigeon peas, plantains, tamarinds, tannia, sorrel sorghum, watermelon, and yams. Furthermore, there is the traditional use of herbal remedies such as jumbie beads (Abrus precatorius) and periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) for health and medical purposes. African-descended persons in the islands share with the wider African Diaspora some musical traditions, such as calypso performance and African banjo and drum usage. Additionally, there are the storytelling traditions, which include Anansi stories. Furthermore, there are the local crafts, such as the 300-year-old African-derived pottery-making and basket-making. Moreover, there is the continued tradition of African-originated Warri game-playing. Finally, the traditional festivities, referred to in the islands as Christmas Sports, share some similarities with Junkanoo festivities in other islands. These festivities include singing, dancing, acting, and storytelling for about a two-week period around Christmas time. Many aspects of these festivities have been institutionalized into the annual Carnival in St. Kitts and Culturama in Nevis. Kittitians and Nevisians, after centuries of struggle, have control of the major political, social, and some economic institutions of the islands. Kittitians and Nevisians, like other people of Africa

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and African descent, have to continuously negotiate their existence and survival after many centuries of colonialism in a world that is increasingly becoming more globalized. Mario Nisbett See also: Ananse; Colonialism; Calypso; Caribbean Community and Common Market; Postcolonial Studies; Saint Kitts and Nevis Revolt; Slave Revolts/ Maronnage; Slavery (History) References Cox, Edward L. Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1763–1833. Knoxville: Unversity of Tennessee Press, 1984. Hubbard, Vincent K. A History of St. Kitts: The Sweet Trade. Oxford: Macmillan, 2002. Hubbard, Vincent K. Swords, Ships and Sugar: History of Nevis. Corvallis, OR: Premiere Editions International, 2002. Olwig, Karen Fog. Global Culture, Island Identity: Continuity and Change in the AfroCaribbean Community of Nevis. London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993. Richardson, Bonham C. Caribbean Migrants: Environment and Human Survival on St. Kitts and Nevis. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Warner-Lewis, Maureen. Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2003.

SAINT KITTS AND NEVIS REVOLT (1639) The Saint Kitts and Nevis Revolt was an early slave uprising that set the precedent for aggressive resistance to French slavery in the Caribbean. At the birth of the French Empire in the Caribbean, Africans, mainly serving as slaves, were present. In fact, by 1626, about a year after the establishment of the first permanent French colony on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, enslaved Africans outnumbered almost by double the Frenchmen on the island. Indeed, as www.abc-clio.com

the number of enslaved Africans increased, so did their resistance to bondage. As elsewhere in the Americas, African resistance in St. Kitts varied from damaging property, committing suicide, revolting, maronnage, or a combination of all the above. Nevis, an island separated from St. Kitts by a mere two miles of narrow channel and claimed under the sovereignty of England, would develop a similar population of maroons resisting slavery. Although information on the early years of French colonial rule in the Caribbean is sparse, a reported uprising in 1639 would set the precedent for an aggressive form of resistance in the world of French slavery. This insurrection of about 60 enslaved Africans occurred in the Capesterre section of St. Kitts. These Africans, including men, women, and children, left the plantation and fled to Mount Liamaiga (formerly called Mount Misery). From Mount Liamaiga, which was strategically located close to the Anglo-French border (British and French colonizers shared the island), these Africans would raid the small number of planters on the island. Albeit the ultimate objectives of these rebels are not clear, it was nevertheless a courageous act by Africans to resist slavery. Swiftly, in response to the insurrection, Philippe, sieur de Lonvilliers de Longvilliers de Poincy, the governor of French St. Kitts, dispatched a military force of 500 men to suppress the rebellion. Many of the Africans, who were poorly armed, were killed and those that were captured were executed. However, according to scholar Nellis Crouse, there remained a sole African insurrectionist who lived apart from the other rebels in order to elude capture. If the larger group’s intention was similar to this rebel’s reported acts of defiance

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to the French, his behavior indicated a continuation of resistance through a one-man campaign against the French. Indeed, this unnamed African reportedly served as a rallying point for many enslaved Africans, who held great respect for him and helped him to evade the French. Although he often was surrounded by French soldiers who shot at him, the French were unable to kill or apprehend him. The rebel continued to successfully avoid capture. Many islanders began to believe he had supernatural powers. However, the French continued their pursuit and after three years of eluding the French, he was shot and killed by a French soldier. While many of the insurrectionists were killed, it is thought that a few of the rebels continued to roam the woods of St. Kitts even into the 1660s. Insurrection, revolts, and all forms of resistance would persist in St. Kitts and everywhere the enslavement of Africans occurred in the French Empire. However, it would be over a century later, in another realm of the French Empire—Haiti, when a long history of resistance would cumulate into fullblown revolt. The Haitian revolt, unlike the revolts in 1639, would not only cause a minor interruption of the slave system but would become the largest and most successful slave revolt ever. The revolt would eventually lead to the establishment of a republic, which earlier rebels could only dream of, founded on the principle that all men and women are free. Mario Nisbett See also: Colonialism; Saint Kitts and Nevis; Slave Revolts/Maronnage; Slavery (History) References Crouse, Nellis M. French Pioneers in the West Indies, 1624–1664. New York: Octagon Books, 1940.

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Du Bois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins. New York: Random House, Inc., 1963. Munford, Clarence J. Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the French West Indies, 1625–1715. Vol. 1, Slave Trading in Africa; Vol. 2, The Middle Passage and the Plantation Economy; Vol. 3, Culture, Terror, and Resistance. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1991.

SAMBO’S GRAVE This extraordinary gravesite located at the Lune Estuary on Sunderland Point near Lancaster is one of the earliest slave graves in Britain. It lies on unconsecrated ground on the edge of a farmer’s field. It is the grave of an adolescent brought to England from the West Indies by an unnamed captain around the year 1736. The boy was left at Sunderland Point while his master sailed on to do business in town. It is reported that after two days, when his master failed to return, the young man became profoundly distressed and died. It is more likely he died from the combination of the vigors of the voyage and sickness. The inhabitants of Sunderland decided to bury him on the point rather than in Overton churchyard because he was not baptized. In 1796 the Reverend James Watson wrote a sentimental elegy based on the story and raised funds to place a plaque at the grave with a portion of the elegy laid out. Since the early 1980s it has become a significant tourist attraction. Flowers and stones with messages are regularly laid at the grave. It memorializes a black British presence established long before the significant post-1945 migration from the West Indies. As one of the few slave graves positioned right at the

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point of entry of the slave ships, it provides a vivid reference point to the workings of the transatlantic slave trade. Alan Rice See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Museums and Transatlantic Slavery; Slavery (History) References Elder, Melinda. The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of 18th Century Lancaster. Keele: Ryburn Press, 1992. Rice, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum 2003. “Sambo’s Tomb.” The Lonsdale Magazine 3 (1822): 188–192.

lives of ordinary African American people. The unconventional oral delivery of her poetry seeks to emulate African language patterns. Sanchez has also written highly acclaimed plays (including 1970’s We a BaddDDD People) and essays. She taught at numerous colleges across the United States. Sanchez retired in 1999 as professor of English from Temple University. In 2001 she was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to the art form from the Poetry Society of America. She continues to write and perform her work, and released a CD in 2004 called Full Moon of Sonia. Kristina D. Bobo

SANCHEZ, SONIA (1934–) Sonia Sanchez is a poet and educator influential to the Black Arts Movement. She was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama. Her mother, Lena Jones Driver, died when Sanchez was a year old; she and her two siblings (Patricia and Wilson) went to live with their grandmother, who died when Sanchez was six. Her father moved the family to New York three years later. After graduating from Hunter College, Sanchez, who had been writing poetry since her youth, became involved with a new strain of black poets in the 1960s. She and others published by Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press, including Don L. Lee (later Haki Madhubuti), Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight, became known as the “Broadside Quartet,” a group of young poets deeply involved in the growing Black Arts Movement and its emphasis on Afrocentricity and Black Nationalism. Her poetry uses nontraditional structures and forms and incorporates the black vernacular tradition to make powerful statements about poverty, racism, and sexism in the www.abc-clio.com

See also: African Literature; Afrocentrism; Black Power Movement References Salaam, Kalamu ya. “Sonia Sanchez.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: AfroAmerican Poets Since 1955. Edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious Davis. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1955. Schneider, Beth. “Sonia (Driver) Sanchez (Knight).” In African American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. Sitter, Deborah Ayer. “Sonia Sanchez.” In The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

SANTOS ARRASCAETA, BEATRIZ (1947–) Beatriz Santos, songwriter, vocalist, human rights activist, culturalist, journalist, choreographer, writer, and teacher, is the niece of the poet Juan Julio Arrascaeta, the “Langston Hughes” of Afro-Uruguayan poetry. Santos’s concern for racial justice and the social and economic advancement of black Uruguayan citizens embarked her on a career as one of the most widely

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known civil rights activists in Uruguay. She is the founder and director of the Centro Cultural por La Paz y la Integración (the Cultural Center for Peace and Integration), an organization whose goal is to combat all forms of discrimination and to eradicate the multiple oppressions that black Uruguayans experience. Since 1991, she has lectured in Brazil, the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa. After writing radio scripts and serving as a writer for local newspapers, such as the black periodical Mundo afro, Santos began to write poetry and short stories to disseminate the culture and history of AfroUruguay. Subsequent to publishing her work in local periodicals, her poetry reached beyond the shores of Uruguay and was published for the first time in 1993 in the Afro Hispanic Review. English translations of her short stories appear in Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers (2003), an anthology of works and essays by and about black women in Spanish America. As of 1993, Santos has published three books and several short stories. Her first book, Historias de vida: Negros en el Uruguay (Life Stories: Blacks in Uruguay) (1994), coauthored with Teresa Porzecanski, is a collection of testimonies documenting black life in Uruguay. Santos presents for the first time the voices of Afro-Uruguayans who tell their own story. The collection of ten eyewitness accounts, from informants ranging in age from 40 to 80, recounts their experiences past and present of what it means to be black and Uruguayan. In 1994, Santos published Africa en el Río de la Plata (Africa in the River Plate) with Nene Lorriaga. A chronological summary of the Afro-Uruguayan experience, the authors trace the history of www.abc-clio.com

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Afro-Uruguayans from slavery to the 1990s. Santos’s third book, La herencia cultural africana en las Américas (African Cultural Heritage in the Americas) (1998), is a collection of essays that treat a broad range of issues such as racism, sexism, civil rights, cultural heritage, and African traditions in the black Uruguayan community. Of most significance is the chapter on black women’s creative achievements, which demonstrates a range of literary talents that explicate the politics of cultural production and the ways in which black Uruguayan women artists have formed their own literary tradition. A talented singer and dancer, Santos has performed in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. In 1995 she starred in El desalojo de la calle de los negros (The Eviction of Blacks to the Street ), a groundbreaking play of social protest by the black Uruguayan playwright Jorge Emilio Cardoso. The play brings to the public the controversial governmental removal of poor black Uruguayans from the conventillos, old colonial mansions where black citizens resided for years. As one of the lead actors, she sang songs against this racist act, the devastating impact it had on the residents of Barrio Reus al Sur, the historic cradle of AfroUruguayan culture, and the loss of community. Her performance earned her high marks from critics who praised her distinctive and eloquent voice. Motivated to change the political landscape of Uruguay, she sought election to government office in 1996. The first black Uruguayan to run for office since the 1940s, Santos was endorsed by the Colorado presidential campaign. Despite all efforts, she lost the election. However, Santos has raised both the political and social consciousness of Afro-Uruguay at home and

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abroad. Today, she continues the struggle for equality and justice in Uruguay while targeting the education of underprivileged and neglected youth. Working with Colegio Cervantes, a local high school, and the national library of Uruguay, her goal is to make sure that every child has the same educational opportunities. To that end, Santos, with her undying energy, embodies the Afro-Uruguayan experience. Caroll Mills Young See also: Uruguay References Campodonico, Miguel Ángel. Uruguayos por su nombre: Sepa quien es quien Montevideo, Uruguay: Editorial Fin de Siglo, 1995. Lewis, Marvin A. Afro-Uruguayan Literature: Post-Colonial Perspectives. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Press, 2003. Young, Caroll Mills. “Beatriz Santos Arrascaeta.” Notable Twentieth-Century Latin American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. Edited by Cynthia Margarita Thompkins and David William Foster. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Willis-DeCosta, Miriam. Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003.

SÃO TOMÉ E PRÍNCIPE The Democratic Republic of São Tomé e Príncipe is two islands in the Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of West Africa. The land is densely populated; although the population is roughly 182,000, only 2 percent of the land is arable. The island of São Tomé was first recorded by the Portuguese in 1469 and settled by them 16 years later. The nearby island of Príncipe was occupied 15 years later. Both were quickly used for sugar plantations, becoming, briefly, the largest sugar-producing area in the world and generating much revenue for Portugal. The many streams on the island proved very effective for watermills to generate power. However, there was a slave revolt in www.abc-clio.com

1530 and many plantation owners left for Brazil, where they established the plantation system on a much larger scale and set the scene for a massive increase in the slave trade. Slavery remained a cornerstone of the economy of São Tomé because, being an island, it was a convenient place for slavers from mainland Africa to bring their slaves for transshipment to Elmina, a town and slave port in present day Ghana, where they could be sold to American slavers. It was estimated that during the sixteenth century a slave ship carrying 100–120 slaves would sail from São Tomé to Elmina every 50 days. In 1553 some 500 slaves were taken directly from São Tomé to the Spanish Indies. Gradually the governors of São Tomé and of Príncipe (they were initially separately administered) established a monopoly on the slave trade from the nearby African coast. São Tomé generated massive wealth. It was captured by the Dutch in 1641 and retaken by the Portuguese seven years later. The Dutch did not, however, take Príncipe. By this time the importance of São Tomé had diminished and Angola was the main Portuguese source for slaves, with some of these then being taken to São Tomé for transshipment elsewhere. It also became common for some slaves to be taken from mainland Africa to São Tomé; after working there for a few years, they were then sold to Brazilian slavers. When the Portuguese court moved to Rio de Janeiro during the Napoleonic Wars, São Tomé had declined in prominence so that the Portuguese king felt the need to fortify the island, as was the case with Angola. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1830, there was still an illicit trade through São Tomé to Brazil, but that ended in 1888 when Brazil abolished slavery. However, the

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economy of São Tomé, through cocoa and coffee plantations, was still reliant on slaves. After the abolition of slavery in 1875, most of the ex-slaves remained on the islands but agitated for civil rights and then for independence. The main visitors to the island over the next hundred years were Portuguese civil servants and soldiers. In 1953, São Tomé was in the news after over 1,000 plantation workers were shot by Portuguese troops during a strike. Rapidly much dissatisfaction with Portuguese rule materialized, and there was some help provided to anti-Portuguese groups from some countries, including Fidel Castro’s Cuba. After the change of government in Lisbon in 1974, a transitional administration was established in São Tomé and Príncipe, and independence was granted on July 12, 1975. The United States immediately recognized the new country, and its first ambassador was Andrew L. Steigman. São Tomé remained heavily economically reliant on Angola until the 1980s. It has now begun promoting a tourist industry, and in 2000 started drilling for oil. Work was assisted by the United States, eager to end its reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Justin Corfield See also: Oil; Portuguese Empire; Slave Forts; Slavery (History) References Garfield, Robert. A History of São Tomé Island, 1470–1655. San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992. Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

SARO-WIWA, KEN (1941–1995) Ken Saro-Wiwa was a leading voice of the Nigerian people’s struggles for a just society and a founder of the nonviolent and multiethnic political pressure group Movement www.abc-clio.com

for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). He was executed by the Nigerian government in 1995. His death awoke many in the United States and around the world to the struggles of the Ogoni people and of Nigerians in the oil-rich delta, against violence and exploitation. Born Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa in 1941, Ken Saro-Wiwa grew up in the small town of Bori, near Port Harcourt, in Nigeria’s east. Acknowledged as an exceptional student, Saro-Wiwa received prestigious government scholarships that gave him the opportunity to attend Government College in Umuahia and the University of Ibadan, where he was soon to become a teacher. However, his academic career came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of Nigeria’s civil war in 1967. At the beginning of hostilities, Saro-Wiwa chose to ally himself with the unitary nationalist policies of the federal authorities of western Nigeria rather than with the secessionist aims of his home region in the east. Indeed, Saro-Wiwa became one of the first cabinet members of the newly created Rivers State region in eastern Nigeria in 1968. However, his association with the government came to a discordant end in 1973 when he left his cabinet position for reasons that are best reflected in his acclaimed set of short stories A Forest of Flowers (1986). Here Saro-Wiwa talks of the Nigerian people’s struggle against a corrupt government characterized by its greed, sloth, ignorance, and mercenary self-interest. Indeed, it was this period in the mid-1980s that saw Saro-Wiwa’s writing flourish. In addition to his two radio plays of the early 1970s, he produced more than 20 titles in all genres of literature: four novels, a poetry volume, two books of short stories, three titles concerning politics, two drama volumes, one on folklore, and nine children’s books.

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However, it was Ken Saro-Wiwa’s deep-seated passion for exposing the maltreatment and injustices suffered by Nigerians at the hands of aggressive multinational oil companies, and the dictatorial military regime that both depended on and supported the invasive activities of oil companies, that made him a most distinguished figure. His passion manifested itself in numerous political pamphlets and several addresses to the United Nations, all of which revealed the ecological and human cost of oil extraction in Nigeria’s Delta region. As a founder of MOSOP, Saro-Wiwa petitioned for the increased autonomy of the Ogoni people based on the collection of a fair share of oil revenues and remediation for the environmental damage caused by oil investigation and extraction to Ogoni lands. His outspoken criticism of the complicit relationship between government and multinational oil companies led to SaroWiwa’s arrest several times throughout the early 1990s; the dictatorial regime could not tolerate Saro-Wiwa’s kind of peaceful political activity that forced Shell to cease operations in the Ogoni region in 1993. In May 1994, he was arrested for the last time on charges of incitement to murder. The announcement that he had been executed by hanging on November 10, 1995, by a specially convened military tribunal, which Amnesty International had deemed to be politically motivated and inequitable, was met with outrage and condemnation by the international community. The United States withdrew its ambassadors while the Commonwealth of Nations suspended Nigeria’s membership. Noted Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka questioned whether such reactions were the consequence of a global conscience being finally nudged www.abc-clio.com

awake by Saro-Wiwa’s death. Such a conscience was certainly being felt by the Undergraduate Council of Harvard University, which passed a resolution on November 19, 1995, that called for a complete corporate withdrawal from Nigeria and for Harvard to divest fully from oil companies that invested in Nigeria. Given such forceful responses—which were repeated worldwide—it was apparent Ken Saro-Wiwa’s execution had not pacified oppositional voices to the government, as the Abacha regime had hoped. Rather, his premature death at the age of 54 only served to force countries like the United States to reappraise its relationship with Nigeria and seriously reconsider the moral and ethical responsibility of engaging in corporate activity on foreign soil. Grant Hamilton See also: African Literature; Nigeria; Soyinka, Wole References Okome, Onookome, ed. Before I Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Literature, Politics, and Dissent. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999. Wiwa, Ken. In the Shadow of a Saint: A Son’s Journey to Understand His Father’s Legacy. Toronto, ON: Vintage, 2001.

SCHOMBURG,ARTHUR ALFONSO (1874–1938) Arthur (Arturo) Alfonso Schomburg was a scholar and bibliophile influential to the Harlem Renaissance. He was born in Puerto Rico to a freeborn black mother and a father of German descent. He studied commercial printing at the Instituto Popular in San Juan and black literature at St. Thomas College in the Virgin Islands, where he first began collecting books. In 1891, Schomburg emigrated to New York,

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where he worked a series of jobs, including devoting several decades to Banker’s Trust, and participated in Caribbean decolonization groups such as Las Dos Antillas. Schomburg’s passionate belief that “the American Negro must rebuild his past in order to make his future” drove his distinguished work as a scholar and administrator. He cofounded with journalist John Edward Bruce the Negro Society for Historical Research in 1911 and served as president of the American Negro Academy (ANA) from 1922 until its disbandment in 1929. He wrote for publications including Crisis, Opportunity, and Survey Graphic, was associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the New Negro movement, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Schomburg was close with such writers and intellectuals as Walter Page, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay. Over the course of his life, Schomburg amassed a huge collection of rare materials including slave narratives, poetry, journals, broadsides, artwork, abolitionist sermons by ex-slaves, and the almanacs of Benjamin Banneker. Currently housed in the New York Public Library in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture contains more than 5 million items and serves as the preeminent archive of the African Diaspora. Alex Feerst See also: Crisis, The; Harlem Renaissance; McKay, Claude; Universal Negro Improvement Association, The References Sinnette, Elinor Des Verney. Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, Black Bibliophile and Collector: A Biography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.

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Wainwright, Mary Katherine. Vol. 9, Contemporary Black Biography. Edited by L. Mpho Mabunda. Detroit: Gale, 1995.

SELASSIE I, HAILE (1892–1975) His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and the Lion of Judah, was emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. He was born Tafari Mekonnen but changed his name to Haile Selassie (“Power of the Trinity”) when he was crowned emperor on November 2, 1930. Because Ethiopia was never colonized by a European power, except for a brief occupation by the Italians from 1935 to 1941, Haile Selassie was a beacon of hope for colonized countries throughout Africa and the Caribbean, as well as for African American activists in the United States. Regarded as God incarnate, he inspired the Rastafari movement (from Ras Tafari, his preimperial title and name) among working-class blacks in Jamaica. In an editorial following Selassie’s coronation, Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey suggested that Selassie was the answer to a biblical prophecy of a kingdom reaching out from the East. This essentially launched the Rastafarian movement, which has since spread worldwide. A devout Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, and therefore uneasy about the movement’s religious beliefs, Haile Selassie was nevertheless touched by Rastas’ desire to return to Africa and in the 1940s granted them a parcel of land in the town of Shashamane, 150 miles (241 kilometers) south of Addis Ababa. Some 200 Rastas, mainly of Jamaican and American origin, continue to live there. Considerable controversy surrounds Haile Selassie’s reign—he is seen by some as

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a feudal despot and by others as a force for enlightened modernization. As regent, before becoming emperor, he abolished slavery so that Ethiopia could enter the League of Nations in 1923. He toured Europe and was inspired to begin a substantial modernization program, including public education and agricultural production. The League of Nations then failed to lend support when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and he went into exile in England until he secured British assistance to oust the Italians in 1941. Haile Selassie ruled until he was deposed in a military-led Marxist coup d’état in 1974. He died a year later, still held under house arrest by the new government. Jericho Burg References Getachew, Indrias. Beyond the Throne: The Enduring Legacy of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Edited by Richard Pankhurst. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Shama Books, 2001. Haile Selassie I. My Life and Ethiopia’s Progress. Edited by Harold Marcus with Ezekiel Gebissa and Tibebe Eshete. Translated by Ezekiel Gebissa. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994. Harris, Joseph E. African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936–1941. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Schwab, Peter. Haile Selassie I: Ethiopia’s Lion of Judah. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979.

SELVON, SAMUEL DICKSON (1923–1994) Samuel Selvon was a novelist, raised in San Fernando, Trinidad, by his East Indian father and half-Indian, half-Scottish mother. He attended a local elementary school and then Naparima College, a prestigious secondary school, where his penchant for English composition and literature became obvious. Having grown up on the multiracial island www.abc-clio.com

of Trinidad, Selvon regarded himself a true Trinidadian Creole, evident in his refusal to learn Hindi despite his predominantly Indian heritage. In 1939, at age 16, he left school after his senior Cambridge exams. He took a job at a garage, but then moved on to the Trinidad oilfields where he worked as a safety inspector. During World War II, he served in the Royal Navy Reserves as a volunteer, working as a wireless operator on minesweepers and motor torpedoes. At the end of the war, he moved to Barataria, a place that serves as the setting for some of his novels and where he was a journalist with the Trinidad Guardian for five years. He began as a reporter but soon become subeditor and then the editor of The Guardian Weekly, a literary magazine in which numerous of his short stories and articles appeared. These were printed under pseudonyms, however, since employees were prohibited from using their own names. Selvon also sold some of his short stories and poems to the BBC for the radio program Caribbean Voices that was aired in the West Indies from London in the 1950s. In 1950, Selvon emigrated to England, traveling on the same ship as George Lamming. Facing difficulties to get a job as a journalist, he settled for a clerical job at India House. During his time with the company, he completed his first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952), for which he was later awarded a Book Society Recommendation and a fellowship worth about $4,800. This was the first novel in which Trinidadian dialect was used in a major work of fiction and has therefore earned Selvon an important place in the development of West Indian fiction. This novel was also important as it dealt with the creolization process that was taking place in Trinidad. Because

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the use of dialect and the predominantly West Indian themes prevented wide acceptance of his work, he consciously modified the spelling to make his work more accessible to foreign audiences. His second novel, An Island Is a World (1954), won him a fellowship from the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship gave him a year in the United States for creative writing. While at the McDowell Colony, he wrote the outline for The Lonely Londoners (1956). This novel was a major achievement, being the first Caribbean novel to employ dialect in both dialogue and narrative. The Plains of Caroni (1968), commissioned by Caroni Limited, drew Selvon back to his homeland and was the only novel that was wholly written in Trinidad. Some critics have divided Selvon’s work into three categories—the peasant novels, the middle class novels, and the immigrant novels. Roydon Salick, for example, observes that the peasant novels, including A Brighter Sun, Turn Again Tiger (1979), and The Plains of Caroni, are concerned with the relationship between the individual and the communal life of the Indo-Trinidadian peasantry; the middleclass novels, An Island Is a World and I Hear Thunder (1963), deal with bourgeois Trinidadians; and the immigrant novels, The Lonely Londoners, The Housing Lark (1965), Moses Ascending (1975), and Moses Migrating (1983), deal with the West Indian immigrants in London. This categorization might be a useful and simple organization of Selvon’s work, but each category is not exclusive of the other. Selvon is the author of a stage play, Switch, that was performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1977. He coauthored the film script for Pressure (1978), www.abc-clio.com

a motion picture that dealt with the color question in London. He has published 12 novels, children’s books, a collection of short stories, radio and television scripts, and numerous newspaper and magazine articles. He was awarded numerous awards throughout his career, including the distinction of being writer-in-residence at both the University of Winnipeg and the University of the West Indies. He was also the holder of two honorary doctoral degrees from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (1985), and the University of Warwick (1989). In 1978, Selvon moved to Canada after 28 years in England. Selvon died of a heart attack at age 70 on April 16, 1994. Gisele Ramphaul See also: BBC Caribbean Service and Caribbean Voices; Caribbean Literature; Creole/Criollo References Nasta, Susheila, ed. and comp. Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1988. Salick, Roydon. The Novels of Samuel Selvon: A Critical Study. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

SENEGAL The Republic of Senegal is the westernmost country on the African continent. Senegal’s strategic access to the Atlantic Ocean has made it a major center for the exchange of American, European, and African commerce, culture, and politics. Its borders include the Atlantic Ocean to its west, Mauritania to the north, Mali to the east, and Guinea and Guinea-Bissau to the southeast. Gambia is almost completely situated within the boundaries of Senegal. The Senegal River separates northern Senegal from Mauritania.

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The Gambia River runs inside the boundaries of Gambia. An estimated 11 million people live in Senegal. Dakar, the capital, had 230,000 inhabitants in 1950. In the 1980s, it had more than 900,000. In 2007, more than 2 million people resided in the greater metropolitan area. Some of Senegal’s historically highly populated cities have included Saint-Louis, Ziguinchor, and Thies. More recently, Touba, the headquarters of the Sunni Muslim-inspired Mouride brotherhood, has become the second largest city in Senegal. There are a number of ethnic groups in Senegal; the most prominent are the Wolof, Pulaar, Diola, and Serer. The Wolof ethnic group comprises 43 percent of the population. The second largest ethnic group is the Pulaar, who account for 24 percent of the population. Expatriate communities from France, Lebanon, Cape Verde, as well as additional parts of Africa and the Americas account for 12 percent of Senegal’s population. While French is the official administrative language, the Wolof language is the indigenous lingua franca. Senegal’s geographical position and history has aided its integration into larger networks. Its democratic model of governance has been cited as an example to neighboring countries. With a population that is 94 percent Muslim, Senegal is also a part of the Muslim Diaspora. The majority of the Senegalese population converted to Islam in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This period of Islamic conversion coincided with the expansion of colonial officials throughout Senegal. The most prominent of which were French. For centuries, Senegal was the site of local and regional precolonial political blocs. These political structures facilitated

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trade through long-established trading networks throughout much of the Sahel and sub-Saharan West Africa. Senegal also participated in various trade networks extending into the Sahara and into the northern Atlantic. Horses, cattle, salt, gold, and ironwork were among the many items traded. The introduction and expansion of the transatlantic slave trade would alter local trading dynamics. It changed the orientation, destination, and items being traded. In 1445, in addition to raw goods, the Portuguese began importing Africans to Europe. The British, Dutch, and French soon began extracting Africans from the region, and thus began a reconfiguration of local trade. As sugar, cotton, and coffee plantations expanded in the Americas, the numbers of slaves being exported increased. This transformation of the local economy had a negative impact on many local economic, social, and political relationships. The subsequent growth in European exploration and colonization would further disintegrate most of the previously existing networks. While scholars debate the number of slaves shipped from the Senegambia region, they agree that the majority were shipped during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The figures range widely from a few thousand to more than twenty thousand being shipped in a single year. Most of the slaves shipped from Senegal actually originated in the Gambia. They were transported from sites in the Gambia by land or boat to ports in Senegal. For example, ports in Gorée, Dakar, Rufisque, and Joal all became sites for transatlantic transfers. Slaves from Senegambia landed in destinations as varied as Havana, Salvador, New Orleans, and Charleston. It is estimated that

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14.5 percent of U.S. slave imports originated in Senegambia. Senegal has had a long and nuanced relationship with France. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, France became quite familiar with Senegal’s resources, cultures, and terrain. During the European “scramble for Africa,” France negotiated control for what is present-day Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, and Mali. During this era, Senegal was one of France’s most important colonies. The headquarters of l’Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) was situated in Dakar. As the regional seat of AOF, Senegal received significant development of infrastructure, such as roads, railroads, medical facilities, schools, and administrative buildings. In particular, the educational system included a series of primary and secondary schools and universities. Colonial officials and missionaries managed the schools. Modeled after the French educational system, students were sent from other French colonies to Lycée Faidherbe (Saint Louis) and Lycée Van Vollenhoven (Dakar) to pursue the baccalauréat. In 1918, one of Africa’s earliest schools of medicine opened in Dakar. This school was established in direct response to World War I. The war greatly impacted the French economy and the colonial administrators wanted to ease some of the burden on the metropole. As a result, a number of Africans could now complete higher medical degrees in Senegal. Between 1918 and 1937, 400 doctors completed the four-year program. In subsequent years, the school would expand to train pharmacists and midwives. France was directly involved in the affairs of its colonies. Citizenship was extended to persons in certain areas that

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met certain qualifications. In the four communes of Senegal—Dakar, Gorée, Rufisque, and Saint Louis—inhabitants who mastered certain educational and French cultural standards were granted French citizenship. Many of these citizens became colonial bureaucrats. Others migrated to France and some became deputies in the French parliament. Some of the deputies included Lamine Guéye and Leopold Sedar Senghor. During World War II, the role of African deputies became increasingly important. They began to demand better access to education, resources, and political autonomy for their constituents. In 1956, the loi-cadre began the initial steps toward independence. In 1960, Senegal received its independence from France. Postcolonial Senegal has been a player in regional and international politics, academic discourse, and cultural exchange. Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegal’s first president, used his ties to local and French politicians (including two-time president Charles De Gaulle) to ease the transition to nationhood. As the country progressed, he continued to negotiate political linkages. Born into a Catholic, Serer family, Senghor pursued his studies in Senegal and France. He taught French in France, became a parliamentary deputy, used his poetry to speak to the importance of African cultures, and later added “African” aspects to Senegal’s postcolonial school system. Senghor allocated huge sums of the government’s budget in support of the arts and education. Senghor was quite successful in mobilizing intellectual communities. Along with Alioune Diop and others, he helped coordinate the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, France. This major

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conference included participants from around the globe. Some of the noted guests included Frantz Fanon (Martinique), Haile Selaisse (Ethiopia), Langston Hughes (United States), and Richard Wright (United States). He also initiated the 1966 Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. This festival featured artists, writers, musicians, and entertainers from Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Some of the noteworthy American participants included Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Katherine Dunham. Abdou Diouf and Abdoulaye Wade followed Senghor as presidents of Senegal. Upon Senghor’s retirement, Abdou Diouf became president in 1981. A career bureaucrat, Diouf continued Senghor’s tradition of maintaining strong relations with the French. During the later years of his presidency, Diouf increasingly engaged other foreign powers in Western Europe and the United States. A number of official delegations made visits to the United States. In 1997, President Bill Clinton became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Africa. His trip included a visit to Senegal. In 2000, Abdoulaye Wade, a former opposition leader, became the third president of Senegal. Many members of his cabinet are Senegalese citizens who have worked or studied at universities in the United States, France, or Canada. The Senegalese minister of foreign affairs, Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, is one such example. Prior to taking this position, he held positions with a number of international agencies such as the World Bank and United Nations. Gadio received his doctorate from Ohio State University. Wade has rather successfully marketed his goals to the Senegalese expatriate communities in Europe (particularly France) and the United www.abc-clio.com

States. Since Wade has become president, he has appointed a new Senegalese ambassador to the United States, hired a U.S. lobbying firm to represent Senegal, and visited President George W. Bush on numerous occasions. In 2002, President Bush became the second American president to make an official visit to the African continent. Like Clinton, Bush visited Senegal. The relationship between the United States and Senegal has grown closer over the years. At the same time, Senegal’s perceived political and economic allegiance to France has diminished. George Bush tapped Wade as an advisor and mediator on African affairs. The Bush administration also diversified its foreign assistance to Senegal. In assisting the United States to combat terrorism, Senegal has allowed one of two West African FBI bureaus to be established in Senegal. In the 1970s and 1980s, more Senegalese began migrating abroad; members of the Mouride brotherhood are one of the largest groups of emigrants. As of 2007, about one-third of Senegal’s population are affiliated with the Mouride brotherhood. This powerful religious network has followers who trade and reinvest in the brotherhood. Found in places such as Marseille, Paris, Sydney, and Montreal, one of the more recent sites of Mouride expansion is the United States. New York City is one such site. Senegalese engage in various industries and trades throughout Manhattan, Harlem, and Brooklyn. There is presently an African-styled market in Harlem as well as numerous food shops, restaurants, hair salons, and electronics stores. Harlem has been dubbed “little Senegal”; a film with that title was released in 2001. Large numbers of Senegalese immigrants are also found in other major American cities in

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Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and Texas. However, the largest concentration is in the greater New York metropolitan area. As Senegalese citizens are bringing their culture to the Americas, they are also importing cultural aspects. Senegalese music borrows heavily from Cuban salsa, U.S. rap, and R&B. Reggae is also quite popular in Senegal. Copies of Bob Marley’s Legend are readily available and many of Senegal’s citizens are familiar with his music. A number of popular American television series and cable stations are available in Senegal. Many American business and government organizations have offices in Senegal, including Hewlett Packard, DHL, and Pfizer. In addition, Dakar is the site of one of the most active U.S. embassies in West Africa. For centuries, Senegal has been an active participant in local, regional, and international networks. Donna A. Patterson

SENGHOR, LEOPOLD SEDAR (1906–2001) African statesman, poet, and cofounder of Négritude, Leopold Sedar Senghor served as president of Senegal from 1960 until 1980. Born in Joal, Senegal, Senghor moved to Paris on a scholarship, graduating from the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in 1931. With the outbreak of World War II, Senghor joined the French army; he spent eighteen months as a prisoner of war after being captured by German forces. Following the war Senghor turned to electoral politics, winning election in 1945 to represent Senegal in the French Constituent Assembly. Between 1946 and 1958 he won continuous reelection to the French National Assembly. In August 1960, following Senegal’s separation from the Federation of Mali, Senghor was elected the first president of Senegal. He would be reelected president in

See also: French Empire; Senghor, Leopold Sedar; Slavery (History) References Barry, Boubacar. Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bolibaugh, Jerry. “French Educational Strategies for Sub-Saharan Africa: Their Intent, Derivation and Development.” PhD diss., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964. Diop, Momar-Coumba. La société sénégalaise entre le local et le global. Paris: Karthala, 2002. Geller, Sheldon. Democracy in Senegal. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Patterson, Donna A. “Pharmaceutical Pioneers: Female Pharmacists in Dakar Senegal.” In Endangered Bodies: Women, Children and Health in Africa, edited by Toyin Falola. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 2006. Republic of Senegal. Dakar la synthèse de trois continents. Dakar, Senegal: Clairafrique, 1999.

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Poet and statesman Leopold Senghor was a leader in Senegal’s movement for independence. (Mychele Daniau/AFP/Getty Images)

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each of the elections of 1963, 1968, 1973, and 1978. In addition to his position as a prominent postcolonial statesman, Senghor gained international renown as a major poet and cultural theorist. Along with Aime Cesaire and Leon Damas, Senghor developed the concept of Négritude, a widely influential perspective on art and culture that advocated cultural production based in black African experiences against pervasive colonial influences. Négritude, as expressed by Senghor, espoused values rooted in understandings of traditional African societies and upheld the greatness of African civilizations. His vision of African Unity motivated Senghor to play a large part in the formation of the Organization for African Unity in 1963. In 1974 Senghor led Senegal into the West African Economic Community. Politically, Senghor advocated a moderate form of African socialism, a materialist perspective based on local institutions and community relations rather than models borrowed from the Soviet model of state socialism. For Senghor, socialism in Africa, far from being a foreign ideology, was rooted in the communal practices of social life that characterized precolonial African societies. African and European socialism represented two halves of a coming humanist world civilization. Following his departure from politics in 1980 Senghor moved to Normandy, France, where he died in December 2001. Jeff Shantz References Kluback, William. Leopold Sedar Senghor: From Politics to Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Vaillant, Janet G. Black, French, and African: A Life of Leopold Sedar Senghor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

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Westley, David. “A Selected Bibliography of the Works of Leopold Sedar Senghor.” Research in African Literatures 33 (2002): 88–100.

SEYCHELLES Composed of 115 small islands, the Republic of Seychelles lies some 500 miles (805 kilometers) northeast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Its approximately 80,000 inhabitants live primarily on Mahe Island, with a small percentage on Praslin and La Digue islands; the remaining islands are minimally populated or uninhabited. As with many other African island-nations, Seychelles has a complex colonial history tied to maritime trade and exploration. Although the rocky islands were not valuable for agriculture, as the island of Mauritius was, Seychelles offered an important port for ships crossing the Indian Ocean. The strategic position of the islands made them, in the post–World War II era, a focus of cold war rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in the Indian Ocean. Since the end of the cold war, Seychelles has become central to international efforts to study and preserve the environments of Indian Ocean islands and waters. Already known to early Arab and Indian Ocean sailors, the islands were reached by the Portuguese in 1502. The French subsequently claimed Seychelles in 1756. However, it was not until 1770 that the first group of settlers arrived, a small group of French colonists, African slaves, and Asian laborers. The British seized control of the islands in 1794. Able to supply ships with water and food as they traveled the Indian Ocean, the islands of the Seychelles were a valuable prize in the competition between European powers. Seychelles also

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served as a transit point in the traffic of slaves from Africa across the Indian Ocean. Self-governing by the 1960s, Seychelles remained technically a British colony until independence in June 1976. Where the islands had once been the focus of rivalry between the naval powers of Britain and France, Seychelles, after independence, became the focus of rivalry between superpowers. After independence, the islands sought to remain neutral, becoming part of the Non-Aligned Movement. Seychelles found itself juggling U.S. and Soviet interests, at times to its advantage. In 1963, the U.S. Air Force began to have a presence in the country by building a radar tracking station. The nation received substantial economic aid from the United States. However, it retained friendly relations with the Soviet Union. In December 1981, two Soviet warships docked on the nation’s main island, Mahe. This event symbolized, to some international observers and the United States’s disquiet, the rising influence of the Soviet Union and communism in Seychelles and the Indian Ocean region more generally. Internally, Seychelles experienced political turmoil after independence that reflected some of the dimensions of the cold war. In 1977, Seychelles’s first postindependence elected government was overthrown by a coup. Seychelles remained a one-party state until multiparty elections were restored in 1993. In 1982, a military coup was put down with the assistance of troops from socialist-led Tanzania. In the post–cold war era, the country remains part of the Non-Aligned Movement, describing its own position as one of “positive non-alignment.” The government of the Seychelles is a supporter of what has been termed the Indian Ocean Zone of www.abc-clio.com

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Peace, a project for the demilitarization of the Indian Ocean region. Seychelles has expressed support for closing the U.S. air and naval base on Diego Garcia and for Mauritius’s claims to the island, against British ownership. With the rise of environmental awareness, Seychelles has become a central part of international, United Nations, and U.S. conservation and ecological research efforts in the Indian Ocean. As with other African islands, Seychelles is home to many unique animals, plants, and habitats. The coral reefs around the island of Aldabra, endangered by the global warming of ocean waters, have been designated a United Nations World Heritage Site. With many uninhabited islands, Seychelles has designated over 40 percent of its territory as national parks or environmentally protected areas. The nation has also sought to develop eco-tourism, whereby the flow and activities of tourists and the tourism industry are managed so as to be ecologically sustainable. Richard Juang See also: British Empire; Environmentalism; Non-Aligned Movement References Franda, Marcus. The Seychelles: Unquiet Islands. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982. Jennings, S., and S. Marshall. “Seeking Sustainability in the Seychelles.” Biologist 42, no. 5 (1995): 197–202.

SHABAZZ, BETTY (1936–1997) Born Betty Sanders on May 28, 1936, in Detroit, Michigan, Shabazz joined the Nation of Islam in 1956. Two years later, she married Malcolm X and took his Arabic surname, becoming Hajj Bahiyah

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Betty Shabazz was a community activist, nurse, and educator. She was married to Malcolm X. (Jacques M. Chenet/Corbis)

Betty Shabazz. She worked with Malcolm for the black Muslim movement and converted with him to Sunni Islam after his spiritual reawakening during his pilgrimage to Mecca. His assassination in 1965 left her to raise four daughters, while pregnant with two more. To recover from the shock of her husband’s death, she made a pilgrimage to Mecca of her own. Shabazz returned to school, completing her bachelor’s degree in public health education, a master’s degree, and a doctorate in school administration. She balanced motherhood with work as a nurse and university instructor. Shabazz was active in improving life for African Americans through work with pregnant teenagers, fundraisers for sickle-cell anemia, and as a trustee of the National Housewives League. Although she rarely spoke about herself, she hosted a www.abc-clio.com

radio talk show in New York, gave public lectures, and worked to preserve the memory of her husband as an advocate of peace. In 1995, Shabazz took in her grandson Malcolm when her daughter Qubilah was placed in counseling. Upset with the situation, Malcolm set fire to the apartment, leaving his grandmother in critical condition with burns that claimed her life on June 23, 1997. Kevin Hogg

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References Brown, Jamie Foster, ed. Betty Shabazz: A Sisterfriends’ Tribute in Words and Pictures. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Rickford, Russell John. Betty Shabazz: A Remarkable Story of Survival and Faith before and after Malcolm X. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2003. Shabazz, Betty. “Legacy of My Husband, Malcolm X.” Ebony 24 (June 1969): 172–182.

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SHAKUR, ASSATTA (1947–) Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) is an African American political activist living in exile in Cuba, who was born JoAnne Deborah Byron on July 17, 1947, in New York, the older of two girls. She spent her formative years in segregated Wilmington, North Carolina, with her mother, aunt, and maternal grandparents. Her grandparents owned and operated a restaurantwaterfront enterprise for black citizens called Freeman’s Beach where Shakur worked as a youth. Largely influenced by her mother, a schoolteacher, and her aunt, attorney Evelyn White, Shakur was educated in various schools in Wilmington, in New York, and by cultural excursions. She attended and graduated from Manhattan Community College. There she became more politically involved and began reading the works of socially conscious black writers of the late 1960s. She began wearing her hair in the “natural” style of that period, rejecting the straightened, relaxed hairstyles of African American women of past years. She also attended the City College of New York and was married briefly. She changed her name to “Assata,” which means “she who struggles,” and adopted the name “Shakur,” which means “the thankful.” Shakur joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) in New York’s Harlem community in the early 1970s, working with the Free Breakfast for Children Program, with the medical cadre, and to free the New York Panther 21, a group of BPP members from the eastern region who were charged with conspiracy. She eventually became disillusioned with decisions made by the Panther leadership in Oakland, California. In May 1973, along with former Black Panther Sundiata Acoli, Shakur, a target of U.S. www.abc-clio.com

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counterintelligence, was arrested on the New Jersey turnpike. During the arrest, New Jersey State troopers wounded her and killed former Black Panther Zayd Shakur. Officer Werner Foerster was also killed. Shakur was acquitted of criminal charges of kidnapping and bank robbery, but was convicted of the murder of the state trooper even though testimony supports that she was incapable of firing a gun after being almost fatally wounded. She gave birth to a daughter, Kakuya, while incarcerated. She escaped from Clinton Correctional Center in 1979. Often referred to as the soul of the Black Liberation Army, Shakur was given political asylum in Cuba and currently resides and remains politically active there. She has written an autobiography entitled Assata. She is the subject of Gloria Rolando’s film Eyes of the Rainbow. In 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation offered a $1 million bounty for her return to the United States. Joan McCarty See also: Black Panther Party; Black Power Movement References Jones, Charles, ed. The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered). Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998. Shakur, Assata. Assata, An Autobiography. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987.

SHAKUR,TUPAC AMARU (1971–1996) Tupac Amaru Shakur, actor and rapper, was born Lesane Parish Crooks in New York City on June 16, 1971, the son of Black Panther Party members Afeni Shakur and Billy Garland. He was renamed Tupac Amaru after the Inca chief. In 1986, the poverty-stricken family moved from New York to Baltimore,

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materialistic “thug life” celebrated in some of his songs. When Death Row Records CEO Marion “Suge” Knight posted bond for Shakur after a sexual assault conviction, he soon became the label’s most visible personality, famously feuding with former friend and Brooklyn rapper The Notorious B. I. G. On September 7, 1996, Shakur was gunned down while leaving a boxing match in Las Vegas, Nevada, with Knight. He died six days later, the victim of a stillunsolved murder. Kristina D. Bobo See also: Hip-Hop; Hip-Hop, Cuban; Hip-Hop, Women in References Dyson, Michael Eric. Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2001. Morgan, Marcyliena. “Tupac Amaru Shakur.” In African American Lives. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur. (Corbis)

Maryland. In 1988, fed up with the family’s transient lifestyle and his mother’s debilitating drug addiction, young Tupac moved to Marin City, California. He dropped out of high school to pursue a career as a dancer and rapper. During his lifetime, Shakur released four solo albums and appeared in six movies. His artistic persona embodied a sort of cultural schizophrenia that was highly attractive to his young fans: the young man who participates in a life of seemingly mindless destruction but remains aware of the social forces that encourage it. Shakur’s own life began to mirror his art; while known to family and friends as a thoughtful, articulate, and socially conscious young man, he also seemed to revel in emulating the misogynistic, www.abc-clio.com

SHANGE, NTOZAKE (1948–) Ntozake Shange is an African American poet and playwright whose most famous work, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975), was the second play by a black woman to open on Broadway. In 1976, the play opened at the Henry Street Settlement’s New Federal Theatre in New York, thrusting Shange into immediate prominence; that same year, and 17 years after the phenomenal run of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, it reached Broadway. Through this play, Shange popularized a poetic style that sought to revive and tap the nonverbal paradigms that inform what she describes as her ancestral oral

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traditions. They include music, song, dance, mime, movement, poetry, and ritual. To preserve this ceremonial ideal, she devised an avant-garde stage—the choreopoem—that integrated such nonverbal resources to overcome the limitations of dialogue and realism. In her pursuit of a vibrant theatrical form, Shange initiated a revolutionary phase in the African American quest for a functional theatre. The task Shange specified for music and dance is similar to the role of both in African traditional performance. Apart from helping to retain ties with Africa, dance, like music, served as a cathartic agent for Shange, a defense mechanism, and an instrument of audience-performer participation and interaction. To fully explore black music, dance, and other nonverbal resources, Shange endorsed the rejection of conventional theater practices and the promotion of a rich interdisciplinary form that appealed to all the physical senses. Reconstructing standard English usage, Shange used language to reinforce her theatrical liberty and further reject standard practice. Using a colloquial, metaphoric, and rhythmic style that agreed with her poetry, she deliberately distorted the English language by breaking away from conventional spellings and pronunciations. Using her chosen “language,” Shange addressed a wide range of themes, including, among others, racism, the unique position of black women, stereotypes, the black middle class, the disregard for black artists, and black survival. Central to her themes was a black feminist and PanAfricanist consciousness that emerged in her anti-racism and anti-imperialism stance, her rejection of Western cultural hegemony, and her commitment to recuperating www.abc-clio.com

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marginalized black traditions. The intensity of Shange’s drama is perhaps best expressed in her adaptation of Frantz Fanon’s “combat breath” theory. Her combat breathing implies the opening of wounds that would be left to bleed as part of a healing process, inspiring solidarity and seeking the spiritual transcendence of a corporal existence where women are vulnerable. Shange’s life and personal struggles had an extensive impact on her as a writer. She was born Paulette Williams to Paul T. and Eloise Williams, a surgeon and a psychiatric social worker, in Trenton, New Jersey, on October 18, 1948. Her early childhood, first in upstate New York and later in St. Louis, was extremely sheltered and comfortable. Shange was thirteen when her family returned east to New Jersey, where she completed high school. In New Jersey, she became increasingly aware of the constraints imposed by sexism and racism. Shange earned a bachelor’s (honors) degree in Afro-American music and poetry from Barnard College in 1970 and, in 1973, a master’s degree in American studies from the University of Southern California. It was also in 1971 that she dropped Paulette Williams and adopted the African (Zulu) name Ntozake Shange. Ntozake means “she who comes with her own things,” while Shange means “one who walks like a lion.” The new names pointed to her new identity and artistic direction. From 1972 to 1975, Shange taught at Sonoma State College, Mills College, and the University of California Extension. While teaching at Sonoma State College, she began writing poetry in earnest. She also found time to dance and perform her poetry with the Third World Collective, Raymond Sawyer’s Afro-American Dance Company, the West Coast Dance Works,

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and her own company then called For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide. She also participated in poetry readings at San Francisco State College and with the Shameless Hussy poets. Her involvement with African-type dance was enhanced by her participation in the activities of Halifu Osumare’s the Spirit of Dance, a small troupe of black women. Shange also worked with dancers and musicians who practiced Santeria, a religion developed among African slaves in Cuba. Taking advantage of her rich dance background, she reapplied this knowledge in the body language of Colored Girls with stunning effectiveness. At the age of 27, Shange moved to New York where, in July 1975, Colored Girls was professionally produced at Studio Ribea in New York City, including nearly 800 on Broadway. Initially relying almost absolutely on the choreopoem form, Shange gradually shifted to less rigid, though choreopoem-related formulas. The significance of her stylistic shift lies in her awareness of the creative restraints resulting from the formulation of rigid dramatic techniques. This gradual shift is evident in Colored Girls and four other dramatic pieces by Shange: Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1979), Spell #7 (1979), A Photograph: Lovers in Motion (1977), and Daddy Says (1987). Structured on the boogie-woogie, Shange’s Boogie Woogie Landscapes is an expressionistic and fantasy representation filtered through the random thoughts, reveries, visions, hopes, combat breath, internal conflicts, and memories of the play’s single “real” character, Layla. While Landscapes is technically set in Layla’s bedroom, the real landscape lies within her head. This mental process, both conscious and unconscious, grows out of a hostile www.abc-clio.com

racist and sexist setting, and is relayed in quick stream-of-consciousness succession, suggesting speed and kinesis. Shange’s Spell #7 is set in a St. Louis bar frequented by largely unsuccessful or frustrated black musicians and artists. The black identities constructed within this exorcised space are free of the dominant culture’s control and stereotypes. In line with the choreopoem, this play is structured on a nonlinear and nonrealistic plot arrangement, narrative patterns, and a stream-of-consciousness and play-within-play formula. An improvisational effect is sustained in what resembles a spontaneous rendering and dramatization of race- and gender-oriented stories in several tonal voices by the characters. A Photograph tells the story of Sean David, a misogynistic, ambitious photographer and the three women in his life—Michael, a dancer; Nevada, an attorney; and Claire, a model. While all three women are in love with him, he merely needs them to satisfy his ego. Sean pretends to be a strong black male, but his façade is crushed when he is rejected for a fellowship and a gallery exhibition that would otherwise launch his career. When Shange wrote Daddy Says, she practically discarded her choreopoem style. More than any of her dramas already discussed, this work resembles conventional drama the most. Addressing the sexual and social development of black women in the play, Shange journeys into the American Southwest where there has been a tradition of black cowboys/cowgirls as active participants in horse and cattle driving. Daddy Says readdresses a recurrent subject in earlier Shange plays, which is the central theme of sexism as it affects young black women and girls; it is directed at the freedom or lack thereof of women to make vital choices for themselves.

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Overall, Shange played a key role in expanding the black literary focus on racial and cultural identity so that it embraced a sexual revolution. Having lost faith in the ability of men to respond effectively to female subordination, she furnished the American stage with not just a significant black presence but a feminine one too. Shange thus made pronounced contributions to the Black Aesthetics Movement and its efforts to break down conventional walls. Her structural and representational choices show that while she confronted critical themes and raised fundamental questions, she also mourned the loss of an indigenous culture whose strength was dependent on rhythmic and religious precedents. It is a culture that her theater strived to recover. Phillip Effiong See also: African Literature; English, African American Vernacular; Fanon, Frantz; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, African; Guinea Dance; Hansberry, Lorraine; Pan-Africanism References Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. DeShazer, Mary K. “Rejecting Necrophilia: Ntozake Shange and the Warrior Re-Visioned.” In Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre, edited by Lynda Harticle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Richards, Sandra L. “Conflicting Impulses in the Plays of Ntozake Shange.” Black American Literature Forum 17, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 73–78. Shange, Ntozake. Preface. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1975. Shange, Ntozake. Interview. In Memory and Spirit of Frances, Zora, and Lorraine: Essays and Interviews on Black Women Writing, edited by Juliette Bowles.

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Washington, DC: Institute for the Arts and the Humanities, 1979. Shange, Ntozake. See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays and Accounts. San Francisco: Momo’s Press, 1984. Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” In the Memory of the Spirit of Frances, Zora, and Lorraine: Essays and Interviews on Black Women and Writing, edited by Juliette Bowles. Washington, DC: Institute for the Arts and the Humanities, 1979. Splawn, P. Jane. “Rites of Passage in the Writing of Ntozake Shange: The Poetry, Drama, and Novels.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1988. Wilkerson, Margaret B. “Music as Metaphor: New Plays of Black Women.” In Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre, edited by Lynda Harticle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989.

SHARPEVILLE MASSACRE On March 21, 1960, white South African police opened fire on an anti-pass demonstration in Sharpeville Township, near Johannesburg. Official figures, disputed by many, recorded 69 dead and 180 injured, of which many were shot in the back while running away. The demonstration marked the end of passive resistance to the racist system of apartheid. Pass laws, restricting the movement of Africans, existent in some form since 1790, multiplied with the influx of Africans seeking work in the rapidly industrializing towns of the 1920s. By the 1960s, over 100,000 Africans were arrested for pass violations annually. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a 1959 breakaway from the African National Congress, led active resistance to the hated pass laws. Robert Sobukwe, PAC leader, called on Africans to leave their passes at home and court arrest in a day of national protest. On March 21, ABC-CLIO

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confrontations between police and demonstrators occurred nationwide. In Sharpeville, around 20,000 people gathered outside the police station. When police refused to arrest them, confusion arose and, in the early afternoon, the police opened fire for about one minute. While some commentators saw Sharpeville as an example of state violence against a peaceful crowd, others described a mob clearly intent on violence. The brisk official inquiry clarified little. A nationwide state of emergency and the outlawing of all antiapartheid organizations followed the temporary suspension of the pass laws. Sobukwe was among the 11,503 people arrested and 6,800 jailed. Repressive legislation increased. Sharpeville, a watershed in twentieth-century South African history, marked the end of passive resistance, the beginning of the armed struggle, and of the international condemnation of apartheid. Laura Pechey See also: South Africa, History and Politics; Sisulu, Walter References Frankel, Philip. An Ordinary Atrocity: Sharpeville and Its Massacre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Reeves, Richard Ambrose. Shooting at Sharpeville. London: Gollancz, 1960. Thompson, Leonard. A History of South Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.

SIERRA LEONE The Republic of Sierra Leone is in West Africa, bordered on the north by Guinea, on the south by Liberia, and on the west by the Atlantic Ocean. Its current war-torn state dates from British colonization. It was originally named Sera Lyoa, Portuguese for www.abc-clio.com

“Lion Mountains,” by the Portuguese explorer Pedro da Cintra, who landed there in 1462. Sierra Leone was a major center for the eighteenth-century slave trade. Like neighboring Liberia, the country was settled by former slaves, but unlike Liberia, it became a British colony, only becoming independent in 1961. Sierra Leone is currently a republic with a president elected every five years and a unicameral parliament. The country has only recently emerged from a bitter civil war, lasting from 1991 to 2002. The economy is based on mineral exploitation, particularly diamonds, although little of the proceeds pass through formal economic channels, and funds from the “blood diamonds” fueled the civil war. Most of the population, currently around 6 million, relies on agriculture for their livelihood. There are twelve main languages spoken, as well as English and Krio (a Creole derived from English). The majority of the population is Muslim, followed by practitioners of indigenous religions and a small percentage of Christians. Prior to European contact, people in what became Sierra Leone participated in well-established long-distance trade routes that extended across the Sahara. From the seventh century onward, Islam spread along these trade routes. Following the Portuguese arrival, Sierra Leone became incorporated into the European and American slave trade. The first slaves in North America came from Sierra Leone; they were brought to the southern United States in 1652. Slaves continued to be taken from Sierra Leone through the nineteenth century; the famous Amistad rebellion in 1839 involved Mende who were eventually determined by the U.S. Supreme Court to have been illegally seized from Sierra Leone.

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They were returned to “Mendiland” (current Sierra Leone) in 1842 by a group calling themselves the Amistad Committee, which also established a mission there and became the American Missionary Association. Freetown, eventually to be the capital of the modern state, was founded in 1791, by a group of British abolitionists led by Granville Sharpe, as a settlement for freed or escaped slaves who had become “black poor” living in London. Many of these first settlers died. Some 1,200 former slaves who had settled in Nova Scotia following the American Revolution also settled in Freetown in 1792. The settlement was not initially intended to be a British colony, but the company that ran it went nearly bankrupt following attacks by the local Temne kingdom as well as the French navy. Freetown became a British Crown Colony in 1808. It continued to be settled by liberated Africans, or Krio, and the population rose to 6,000 within a decade. The new residents of Freetown embraced the English language and Western culture, which presaged the divide between the Krio, who saw themselves as culturally superior, and the ethnic groups of the interior. This divide worked against attempts at national unity throughout Sierra Leone’s history, and was not mitigated when the British eventually colonized the interior and established a protectorate in 1896. The British often played the Krio elite against the rest of the population in their efforts to undermine potential national unity. Sierra Leone’s decolonization process was lengthy, beginning with a new constitution and elections in 1951 providing a framework for the process. Dr. Milton Margai, the first medical doctor from the protectorate, became chief minister in www.abc-clio.com

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1953, and then prime minister in 1960. Sierra Leone obtained independence in 1961 and became a parliamentary democracy within the British Commonwealth. There were several political parties, including Margai’s Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), as well as the People’s National Party (PNP), launched by his brother Albert in 1958. The All People’s Congress (APC) was established in 1960 as an alternative party representing teachers and the working classes. However, the SLPP, led by Milton Margai, won the first postindependence elections, and he was prime minister until his death in 1964, when he was succeeded by his brother Albert. The independent government of Sierra Leone was not very stable, with a military coup following the 1967 elections, a return to civilian rule a year later, the adoption of a republican constitution in 1971, and the establishment of a one-party government by the APC in 1978. Major General Joseph Saidu Momoh, elected president in 1985, reestablished multiparty rule under a new constitution in 1991. However, Momoh was deposed in a military coup the following year. In the meanwhile, an ongoing rebel war in eastern Sierra Leone, led by Captain Foday Sankoh and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), was further destabilizing the country, as was spillover from the concurrent Liberian conflict. Presidential and parliamentary elections were held once again in 1996, because of popular demand and international pressure, and Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was elected president. Kabbah was overthrown by the military the following year, but was reinstated following a Nigerian-led intervention by the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Observer Group (ECOMOG) in 1998.

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The RUF continued to fight against the government, attempting another coup in 1999. Later that year, President Kabbah and RUF leader Sankoh negotiated the Lomé Peace Accord, but because another rebel group calling themselves the West Side Boys was not included in the negotiations, the peace did not last. United Nations peacekeeping forces and British troops also worked to stabilize Sierra Leone, but violence continued until 2002. Tens of thousands had died, and roughly one-third of the population was displaced, but perhaps even more horrifying was the rebels’ custom of mutilating civilians by chopping off their hands. The Lomé Accord had provided for a disarmament, demobilization, and rehabilitation program to assist all combatants’ return to society, as well as a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). However, demobilization was only significantly implemented following yet another peace agreement signed in Abuja in May 2001; the TRC began hearings in 2003. The UN peacekeepers finally withdrew at the end of 2005. Sierra Leone’s stability remained tenuous in 2007 as new national elections were due, conditions were deteriorating in neighboring Guinea, and a tentative new peace was unfolding in Liberia. Jericho Burg References Conteh-Morgan, Earl, and Mac Dixon-Fyle. Sierra Leone at the End of the Twentieth Century: History, Politics, and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Fyfe, Christopher. A Short History of Sierra Leone. London: Longman Group, 1972. Hirsch, John L. Sierra Leone: Diamonds and the Struggle for Democracy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001. Osagie, Iyunolu Folayan. The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone.

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Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Utting, Francis A. J. The Story of Sierra Leone. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971.

SIERRA LEONE COMPANY The Sierra Leone Company (SLC) was a joint-stock enterprise of a group of British philanthropists that took over the failing colony of Sierra Leone in 1791 with the intention of making it profitable. Disease, hostile indigenous neighbors, and a lack of organization plagued the colony, and despite new supplies and a small influx of settlers in 1788, the colony did not thrive. Granville Sharpe set up the St. George’s Bay Company to take control of the foundering colony. This organization became the Sierra Leone Company upon receiving a charter from the British government. Through its financial support, the SLC not only subsidized the colony but essentially kept it alive. Self-government transformed into company rule as the SLC took over the administration of the colony. The motives of the Sierra Leone Company were not completely altruistic, as company investors believed that the colony would one day become profitable. The company felt the key to success was a large settler population, and to that end organized the addition of a new population group to the original black settlers from England. In 1792, 1,200 former slaves who had been freed by the British Army during the American Revolution were transported from Nova Scotia, Canada, to Sierra Leone. Hopes for profitability and a thriving colony were quickly dashed as the settlers faced difficult times. Malaria led to a high mortality rate. International conflict impacted the new settlement of Freetown as the Napoleonic Wars broke out in 1794,

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resulting in the French navy destroying the newly established port. The Nova Scotian settlers were becoming frustrated and felt the SLC was not overseeing the colony fairly. Promised equality in all things, they found themselves shut out of government and the decision-making process of the colony. They complained that company administrators were racially prejudiced and ruled in an autocratic manner. Settlers claimed they had been promised free land when they agreed to repatriation, but the company failed to provide it. And when land was distributed, company officials imposed high rents. Settler discontent and frustration came to a head in 1800 when the Nova Scotia settlers rebelled. The majority of the colony’s population remained neutral, but the rebels established a rival government to the company’s and almost overthrew the colony’s governor. The rebellion was put down due to the fortuitous arrival of British soldiers accompanying 500 Maroons—runaway Jamaican slaves who had surrendered to British authorities in 1795. The Maroons had been transported to Nova Scotia and then to the Sierra Leone colony once they agreed to repatriation. The suppression of the rebellion did not result in the success of the colony under Sierra Leone Company rule. The already hostile indigenous Temne peoples of the region became further alarmed at the influx of the Maroons and the British troops who accompanied them across the Atlantic. Of the approximately 3,000 black settlers, less than half had survived by 1807. The dreams of a profitable colony slipped away and investors in the company began to dry up. In 1808 the Sierra Leone Company turned the colony over to the British government. Heather Thiessen-Reily www.abc-clio.com

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See also: Diaspora; Nova Scotia, African American Diaspora in References Falconbridge, A. M. Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone, During the Years of 1791–2–3: And Every Interesting Particular Relating to the Sierra Leone Company: and the Improbability of Its Total Abolition. London: L. I. Higham, 1802. Fyfe, Christopher. A History of Sierra Leone. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 1993. Sibthorpe, A. B. History of Sierra Leone. Los Angeles: Cass, 1970. Wyse, Akintola. H. C. The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretive History. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1991.

SISULU,WALTER (1912–2003) Walter Sisulu was a South African antiapartheid activist and cofounder of the African National Congress’s Youth League. Walter Sisulu and his wife Albertina devoted their lives to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Born on May 18, 1912, in Ngcobo, to a black mother and a white father, Walter left school at 15 and worked in low-paying jobs while also organizing a strike, educating himself, and writing articles on African heroes. Sisulu joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1940 and cofounded its Youth League (1943), which favored militancy. As repressive legislation increased after 1948, a new generation of black leaders emerged (Sisulu among them), advocating a policy of mass action. Sisulu helped lead the Defiance Campaign (1952–1953), during which 8,000 were arrested for violating discriminatory laws. He, and others, were banned from political activity and imprisoned for months. Sisulu was tried for treason, along with 155 other signatories of the Freedom Charter, which sought equal

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rights for all races. Jailed throughout the 1960 state of emergency, which was declared after a large group of black South Africans refused to carry their passes, he was eventually acquitted of treason in 1961. The Sisulus faced countless bannings, arrests, and imprisonments. With the outlawing of all antiapartheid organizations in 1960, Sisulu helped forge the armed struggle for equality through the ANC’s military wing. In 1963, he was arrested and charged with ANC activity. Released on bail, he disappeared underground. In July 1963, Sisulu was one of sixteen arrested at the ANC’s secret headquarters and charged with planning sabotage. Jailed for life in 1964 with seven others, Sisulu was released shortly before the decriminalization of the ANC in 1990. Walter Sisulu served as ANC deputy president 1991–1994. He died on May 5, 2003. Laura Pechey See also: Mandela, Nelson; Sharpeville Massacre; South Africa, History and Politics References Sisulu, Elinor. Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime. Claremont, South Africa: David Philip, 2002. “Walter Sisulu.” In Who’s Who in South African Politics, edited by Shelagh Gastrow. 3rd rev. ed. New York: Hans Zell, 1990.

SLAVE FORTS During the course of more than four hundred years of transatlantic slaving, the principal European powers involved built many forts along the coast of Africa to help sustain their part in the trade. Built partly as military and political establishments to protect their nation’s trading and commercial interests, the forts also acted as operational centers for conducting the trade in enslaved Africans. Although the forts were www.abc-clio.com

never the main means of conducting the trade or even overseeing it, their presence was a powerful and symbolic reminder of the European presence and involvement in Africa. There were three main types of establishments—castles, forts, and factories—which are generically called slave forts. The castles were the grandest and most elaborate structures, with significant fortifications. They were usually the seat of the official representative of the main European powers and fulfilled quasidiplomatic, military, and commercial functions. Cape Coast Castle was the base for the English Royal African Company and Elmina Castle, captured from the Portuguese by the Dutch in 1637, was the residence of the governor of the Dutch West India Company. The most numerous establishments were the forts, the mediumsized bases which also had combined commercial and military functions typified by such places as Dixcove. Factories made up the final category of slave forts. These smaller commercial bases were often not fortified and fulfilled a more local role. The Portuguese began the first fort at Arquin (Mauretania) in 1448 and over the next century and a half they constructed a further 13 to 15 forts, including founding Elmina in 1482. As the first European traders along the African coast, the Portuguese were principally interested in gold, ivory, spices, and wood rather than slaving, though in a precursor of the transatlantic trade, they did take enslaved Africans to the Azores, Cape Verde Islands, and Madeira. Indeed, until the late seventeenth century Africans from Benin and São Tomé were brought into Elmina as slaves to produce gold and to supply the overland slave trade to North Africa.

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The rapid development of sugar plantations and the consequent demand for labor in Brazil and the Caribbean from the early seventeenth century saw the arrival of the Dutch, then the English, French, and Scandinavian powers on the African coast anxious to get into the trade and supply their own developing colonies on the other side of the Atlantic. It was a period of fierce rivalry between the various national trading companies, which spawned a spate of building along the West African coast. Between 1640 and 1710, more than 40 forts were built, two-thirds of them along a 186-mile (300-kilometer) stretch of the coast of present-day Ghana. The forts frequently changed hands as the European powers battled for supremacy and to establish their spheres of influence. The period from the early eighteenth century saw a slowdown in building and probably only 15 new forts were erected during the ensuing century. By the early nineteenth century, there were probably some 70 to 80 significant establishments being maintained, though within only a short time they were no longer being used for their original purpose. Although the Europeans had superior military power, most castles and forts were built with the agreement of local African leaders. Sites were bought or rented. Although there were occasional tensions and altercations with the local population, the two generally lived in a reasonable degree of cohabitation. Until the mid-nineteenth century, there was little attempt to colonize Africa itself; the European presence was confined to the coast and Europeans had little or no control over the hinterland or inland communications. Virtually all the forts were built on the coast itself, and even at Ouidah, one of the few exceptions, the fort www.abc-clio.com

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was only some 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the sea. A significant number of slave forts still survive. Much of what is known of their original appearance comes from contemporary European descriptions and engravings. European travelers included references in their various works and also printed detailed engravings of some of the main forts. In general, the design of the larger and medium-sized forts followed a traditional pattern of buildings placed around a central courtyard protected by high walls and regular bastions or towers. There were usually openings for cannons and small apertures for small arms. Entry was via a gate on the seaward side protected by a guard tower. One of the key factors in locating forts was a source of secure drinking water. Most forts also had a separate area where Africans lived either as servants or awaiting transportation. Life in the forts for the European inhabitants was hard and difficult. To a large extent they operated as isolated communities, surviving on self-sufficiency and dependent for most of their supplies from ships arriving from the home nation. The day was a strictly controlled regimen of work and discipline regulated by the bell. The governors of the large forts exercised absolute power. In such circumstances, monotony and boredom were major problems, and this often led to drunkenness and violence. There were almost no European women, and although relationships with local women were forbidden, many resorted to the temptations of illicit affairs. The risk of disease and general health problems of living in a tropical climate, together with the stresses and strains of surviving in such conditions, meant that most Europeans only spent relatively short tours

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of duty, usually not exceeding two or three years. In the colonial and postcolonial eras, the role and use of the forts has varied considerably. Some were abandoned, left to fall into ruins or even on occasion slip into the sea. Several of the large forts continued to be used as administrative centers or fulfilled public functions as hospitals. A few governments made use of their fortified nature as prisons. Some of the most well-known forts have been converted into museums and/or places of memory, becoming important visitor attractions, especially for tourists. Elmina and Cape Coast Castles have both been declared World Heritage sites. This designation has led to tension between people who have tried to develop the sites’ tourist potential and those who see some the consequences of development, for instance, events or souvenir shops, as a violation of the memory of those who suffered. Anthony Tibbles See also: Cape Coast Castle; Ghana; Royal African Company; Slavery (History) Reference Lawrence, A. W. Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964.

SLAVE NARRATIVES The slave narrative genre first appeared around 1760 and later, in the nineteenth century, became one of the most significant forms of African American, and American, expression set in print. Slave narratives advanced the notion that no one could do more justice to the slave than the enslaved. Devising a set definition for slave narratives is extremely difficult given that diverse writers had differing experiences with bondage. Slave narrators sought to explicate www.abc-clio.com

the uniqueness of their time in bondage. The slave narrative form is a transatlantic one that explores the forced separation of Africans from their native soil. Slave narratives are based on the rhetorical supposition that the ability to sustain a complex narrative is what makes blacks equally intelligent as whites. The slave narrator was thought of as a reliable transcriber of the character of bonded laborers. Although slave narratives are a mode of self-definition, the definition that the narrator ultimately achieves is not a novel one, but one founded on the awareness of an identity that has always existed— an identity that is suppressed by slavery—an identity that can flourish only in freedom, but that can never be fully attained because white industrialists sustain a market economy driven by exploiting cultures they term the “other.” The goal that slave narrators had in mind was to explain that their misery stemmed from their having been forcefully transported from Africa to America. A primary feature of the slave narrative is to show the contribution that Africa made to the abolition movement. The Nat Turner rebellion of 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia, created a new generation of abolitionists that declared their undying devotion to emancipation. Journalist William Lloyd Garrison led abolitionist camps across the United States. Free blacks north of the Mason-Dixon Line contributed to Garrison’s American AntiSlavery Society by editing newspapers, organizing conventions, and circulating pamphlets. Blacks and whites united to sway public opinion toward accepting the liberation of black Americans. The slave narrative was the dominant form in American literature from 1830 to 1865. Slave

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narratives were published en masse with the intent of having America recognize the brutality associated with the enslavement of an entire continent. Americans were then expected to feel guilty given that a slave manufactured most consumable products. Most fugitive slaves would cross the Ohio River to gain freedom. Although there are no existing records indicating the exact number of slaves that escaped across the Ohio River, it has been estimated that approximately 60,000 slaves escaped their masters. Of these 60,000 fugitive slaves, some 6,000 wrote a narrative of their time in captivity. The objective that slave narrators attempted to accomplish was to prove the wrongfulness of an economic system that warranted their enslavement, by using the printing press as a weapon to terminate slavery. Slave narratives were written in Africa as well as America. Striking similarities in form and content among various slave authors resulted in the first printed transatlantic African American genre. White editors typically wrote introductory essays for slave narratives in order to attest to the trustworthiness of the author, prefatory material assured readers that the text was a factual one authored by a fugitive slave. Many often doubted that an author who was a slave had the intellectual capacity to produce an eloquent and complex narrative; these doubters alleged that a white abolitionist had written the manuscript in order to make the fallacious case that a slave was able to attain intelligence when properly educated. Slave narrators described slavery as a state of unbearable physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual torture. Escape was compelled by a personal disaster caused by either the sale of a loved one or an inner-conflict that forced the slave to reclaim their sovereignty from www.abc-clio.com

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their master. Slave narratives proved that slave masters were wrong to assume that Africa was a degenerate territory that required slavery; they argued that Africans were capable of producing a genre meant to advance the notion that their forced removal from Africa was unwarranted. Abolitionists’ presses published slave narratives and sold them at antislavery conventions across the United States. A large number of slave stories were printed in several editions and sold tens of thousands of copies. The immediate success of slave narratives was due in great part to the transcendentalist motif employed by ex-slave writers of not romanticizing an event in one period, but instead to demonstrate that past actions will inherently have an effect on the present and future. Slave narrators demonstrated that bondage severed their ancestral roots and that writing a narrative about their captivity was the sole means of keeping a connection with Africa. Slave narratives forged a transatlantic relationship not only among African Americans but also among the white Americans who were to discover that commerce must never be placed ahead of humanity. A major rhetorical device implemented by slave narrators was the collective “we” pronoun to unify bonded workers and every individual that profited from slavery. Readers were asked to empathize with the ex-slave subject’s tribulations. Slave narrators used collective pronouns to have humanity accept that forced servitude is an infringement of God’s creed that everyone is equivalent despite race, gender, or economic class. Collective pronouns unified the African American community so that they would not dismiss slavery as a normal practice and maintain the aspiration of reviving an Africa way-of-life.

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Slave narrators adopted the Romantic lyric “I” to have slave owners better understand bondage and to efface any sense of apathy that slave masters had toward forced African Diaspora. The slave narrator’s decision to address a white audience was intended to demonstrate that bondage was a white-constructed power dynamic that would cease only once the master/slave relationship was inverted. Abolition redefined Africa as a continent to be appreciated for its cultural value instead of exploitable labor. The pioneering slave narrative was The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oladudah Equiano, or Guastavus Vassa, the African (1814). Oladudah Equiano’s saga was a journey through a commercial system created to serve white culture at the expense of black submission. A double-consciousness emerged that separated enslaver from enslaved. Africans were to adopt a white Western mind-set if they were to gain admission into a white-dominated world. Equiano’s choice to appropriate into white culture meant that he compromise his black identity since this appropriation implied that he admit his heritage was inferior to white culture. Equiano’s narrative forged a transatlantic relationship between Africa and America that explained that many Africans chose to follow a slave-based market economy only to uphold their livelihood. The most widely read African American literary text of the nineteenth century was The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Douglass’s narrative deconstructs the white literary canon’s standard of what black autobiography must entail. Stressing a passive voice to achieve credibility, the narrative positions the slave in the role of the www.abc-clio.com

antagonist and subject of the story in two ways: by functioning antithetically against racist charges toward black selfhood, and by resisting the objectification/fragmentation that necessitated slaves to objectify themselves. Douglass retains authoritative power by making his own choices. The enslaver then becomes the object whose desires contradict the requirements that constitute a utopist nation. Objectifying the master exemplifies how the American market economy depended on the labor of bonded Africans. Forced submission of salaries by slaves to their masters demonstrated that the riches held by most wealthy antebellum industrialists were contingent on the work of African Americans. Douglass gained great fame and was invited to tour Great Britain. He demonstrated that a writer of African descent was capable of attaining international acclaim. Globalizing the slave narrative genre increased the marketplace of African writers to spread their avowals of the negative repercussions of slavery. The twentieth century saw the emergence of the neo-slave narrative—a form that suggests that the implications of slavery are beyond repair since they have left unbridgeable gaps in African history. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) examines these gaps through rememory, or the metaphoric apparatus that rebuilds past realities by depicting events that parallel the human psyche. Rememory has the reader consider the mind’s activity of depending on and accepting the integration of what has passed and what is currently transpiring in order to survive. Morrison therefore allows her protagonist Sethe to complete the journey from being a woman that identifies herself with motherhood only to a woman that realizes her human qualities. Morrison’s novel depicts a transatlantic connection between

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African psyche and American economics that sustains nearly two centuries after emancipation. Slave narratives remain significant in the twenty-first century for the reason that they are the first printed texts in African American literature, and as such they are both literarily and historically significant. Black authors of the American antebellum era struggled to have their culture properly integrated into the mainstream. In a contemporary context, slave narratives epitomize the role that literacy plays in preserving the intertwined histories of Africa and America. Gerry Del Guercio See also: Abolitionism; Equiano, Olaudah; Jacobs, Harriet Ann; Morrison, Toni; Slavery (Economics); Slavery (History); Williams, James References Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of African American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Davis, Charles H., and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Mentor, 1987. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987.

SLAVE REVOLTS/MARONNAGE Organized resistance to slavery is as old as slavery itself. Throughout the New World, forms of slave resistance, from rebellion to revolution, articulated the intolerable conditions of enslavement and asserted the rights of slaves to be free. That word of such revolts spread to other slave communities demonstrates the influence of such knowledge on other rebellions and revolts. www.abc-clio.com

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To rebel against slavery is as frequent as the institution itself, and rebellion includes a range of responses, both covert and open. In the transatlantic slave trade, hidden and indirect forms of rebellion included day-today resistance, such as work slowdowns, deliberately poor work performance, attacks on property, the creation of slave cultures, and literacy practices. Methods of open defiance included refusals to work, demands for concessions, rejections of orders, threats, violence, escape, and revolt. Slaves’ knowledge of revolts in other regions and countries enhanced their own determination to rebel and seek liberation. The earliest documented rebellion by enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere occurred at San Miguel de Gualdape in 1526, when slaves rebelled against the Spanish, and the first documented rebellion in Mexico occurred in 1537. In Brazil in the 1600s, a group of forty slaves rebelled, burned the sugar cane plantations, and killed the slave owners. They created a community that ultimately had a population over 20,000, and they are credited with developing the martial art of capoeira. Revolts took place often in the New World because people could not accept being enslaved. In Jamaica, an Asante warrior named Queen Nanny, led guerrilla resistance against the British, particularly during the First Maroon War from 1720 to 1739, and became a legendary figure. The slave uprising of Saint-Domingue, beginning in 1791, was the largest and most successful slave revolt in world history. The insurgency was on a massive scale unprecedented in the Atlantic world, and by 1792, the colony was engulfed in revolution, due in part to the arming of slaves by conflicting factions of whites and free colored people with various alliances and

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goals. Saint-Domingue had half a million enslaved Africans, comprising 80 percent of the population. The 1793 emancipation in Saint-Domingue was unusual in that it provided immediate emancipation and granted the former slaves citizenship as well as freedom. Toussaint Louverture became the leader of Saint-Domingue after emancipation, and in 1804, the new republic of Haiti signed its Declaration of Independence. The Haitian revolution was a significant example for slaves globally and a source of fear to all slave owners. Information about the Haitian Revolution made its way to slaves in the United States despite slave owners’ attempts to control information that might encourage insurgencies. The more restrictions upon reading and news were increased throughout the early nineteenth century, the more the slaves sought information, literacy, and allies. U.S. political leaders advised against the public discussion of slave revolts, but they could not suppress the messages about freedom taught by the revolutions in Haiti, France, and America. Freedom was not only intended for Europeans. The presence of Haitian refugees in Virginia also contributed to slave unrest. In 1800, Gabriel Prosser, a literate blacksmith knowledgeable about revolutionary political currents, planned to capture Richmond, Virginia. He gathered 900 people together at one time, but the conspiracy unraveled due to a torrential thunderstorm. Prosser was reported captured, and along with approximately 30 fellow rebels, was hanged. Several other slave rebellions in the following decades became linchpin moments for slaves working against the system that oppressed them. In 1811 in Louisiana, perhaps the largest U.S. slave rebellion erupted. Now www.abc-clio.com

known as the Louisiana Rebellion, it was led by a Haitian native. An unknown number of black people, at least 180 and possibly as many as 500, marched toward New Orleans, but federal troops came in to quell the rebellion. In 1822, Denmark Vesey conspired to take control of Charleston, Virginia, ultimately gathering 600 to 900 supporters. Vesey, a literate carpenter and sailor, had been inspired by the Haitian Revolution, and he had traveled widely in the Caribbean. Although able to buy his own way to freedom in 1800, Vesey was not allowed to buy his family members out of slavery. An active member of the African Methodist Church, Vesey knew he had to take action when white people closed down his church in 1821. But the tremendous number and diversity of recruits resulted in an information leak that halted his efforts to capture arms and ammunition and then take Charleston, and Vesey was arrested, along with other leaders. His story became legendary. Another major slave revolt was organized by Nat Turner in 1831 in Virginia. After experiencing “a vision that his duty was to end bondage,” Turner gathered 60 to 80 men and set forward to the ammunition stores of Southampton. Between 57 and 65 white people were killed along the way, and vigilante retaliation by angry whites killed over 200 black people, regardless of their connection with Nat Turner. Federal troops were sent in to prevent additional slaves from joining Turner’s Rebellion. After escaping capture, Turner surrendered. His final statements, expressing his beliefs and reminding his captors of how Jesus Christ had been crucified, became famous. It is believed that Nat Turner was incited to act by David Walker’s

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1829 “Appeal,” a long essay offering an argument against slavery and a call to revolution by the enslaved. Because Nat Turner had been a preacher and possessed reading ability, Southern states tightened their laws against literacy and put limits on black preachers. The fear that Turner’s and Vesey’s rebellions engendered brought long-lasting reprisals against slaves. New laws made the manumission or emancipation of slaves nearly impossible. Slaveholders increased regulations of free blacks, and they rejected any situations that would increase the number of free black people anywhere in the nation. Southern state lawmakers instituted curfews for slaves and free blacks and forbade slaves to assemble together for any reason, even religious. Heightened tensions contributed to slave owners’ hysteria about the possibility of slave revolts, and slave owners sought greater political power in order to protect their investments in the bodies of slaves. Slave-trading ships also were subject to revolts. In 1839, the Amistad was taken over by Joseph Cinque and 54 Africans during the Middle Passage. The slaves, gaining the support of outspoken abolitionists, were ultimately freed by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Later that same year, the U.S. domestic slave trade was disrupted by a mutiny by 19 slaves on the ship the Creole, sailing from Virginia to New Orleans. All 135 slaves reached freedom in the Bahamas. While slaves who risked their lives to join revolutionary movements challenging slavery were important examples to other slaves, there were other methods of resistance. Uncountable numbers of slaves operated individually or in clusters to create secret patterns of everyday resistance, such as www.abc-clio.com

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poor work performance, misleading the slave owners, and gaining skills of which their masters were unaware. Slaves developed a range of ways to undermine the slavery system. Ultimately, self-removal from the slavery system was an important method for slaves regaining ownership of themselves. Running away to a place where slavery was not legal was a common strategy. The border states between slave and free states—Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, and Delaware—had even more freedom attempts than the Deep South. Due to the inaccuracy of slaveholders’ records, an exact number of fugitives is not known. Still, analysis of extant reports about fugitive slaves shows that the average runaway slave was a young black man in his teens or twenties with such personality traits as courage, determination, and self-reliance. Escape disguises and methods were numerous and diverse, with slaves masquerading as free blacks or as whites, men posing as women, or women posing as men. Most runaways set out alone or with only a few others. Slave owners’ advertisements for runaway slaves described them in ways that reveal important details about the fugitives, such as skills in trade, the ability to read, write, and speak American Indian or other languages, appearance, and attempts to reach family members. Helping others to gain freedom was an important form of rebellion against the slavery system. Harriet Tubman, after liberating herself, helped over 300 men, women, and children to escape in the 1850s. The Underground Railroad was a loose consortium of different individuals and organizations that served to connect fugitive slaves with people who could help them hide out along the way to freedom in Canada. Because it had to operate in secret,

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little historical information is definitively known about the Underground Railroad. Both white and black people helped slaves, and people who had been assisted to freedom worked to raise funds for their escape and often stayed involved to deliver others to freedom. “Maroons” were groups of escaped slaves living in regions inaccessible to outsiders. The term probably comes from the Spanish word cimarrón, referring to a wild animal which had returned to the wild after being domesticated. Petit marronage was the French designation for slaves who left for a limited amount of time, while grandmarronage occurred when runaways formed independent, permanent communities and had no intention of returning to enslavement. In Mexico, maroons formed settlements called palenques. Runaways in the United States who could not get to the free states sometimes began maroon colonies in places such as the Allegheny Mountains, Blue Ridge Mountains, or Great Dismal Swamp, and virtually every state had maroon gangs of ten to 20 fugitive slaves. The maroons were often on the move, carrying weaponry and planning forays into town. These gangs of outlying fugitive slaves struck fear into the hearts of white inhabitants. Slaves were constantly planning, and slave owners were always worried about the revolts that were inevitable due to the legal yet immoral and indefensible institution that treated humans as property. Amy Cummins See also: Amistad Case, The; Creole Revolt; Haiti; Quilombo; Saint Kitts and Nevis Revolt; Slavery (History); Tubman, Harriet; Turner, Nat; Vesey, Denmark References Du Bois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004.

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Franklin, John Hope, and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Genovese, Eugene. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Gottlieb, Karla. The Mother of Us All: A History of Queen Nanny, Leader of the Windward Jamaica Maroons. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000. Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold. The African-American Odyssey. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000. Hunt, Alfred. Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Katz, William. Breaking the Chains: AfricanAmerican Slave Resistance. New York: Atheneum, 1990.

SLAVERY (ECONOMICS) The transatlantic importation of human slaves as chattel, or personal property, was essential to the expansion of Europe’s capitalist economy and its extraction of wealth from the New World. There remains a fascinating critical debate about the extent to which profits from the Atlantic slave trade, along with the profits from the sugar and tobacco grown by slave labor, helped fund Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. In the slave trading system, the fundamental item of exchange was the person of the slave, showing the falsehood of slave owners’ claims to operate a “benign” or kind institution. Auctions that sold slaves to the highest bidder were the most common method of selling slaves. A vivid description of a slave auction appears in William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, the first African American novel: “This was a Southern

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auction, at which the bones, muscles, sinews, blood, and nerves of a young lady of sixteen were sold for five hundred dollars; her moral character for two hundred; her improved intellect for one hundred; her Christianity for three hundred; and her chastity and virtue for four hundred dollars more.” Despite being considered other people’s property, slaves in the Caribbean and, to a lesser degree, in Brazil could have some measure of economic independence due to managing “provision grounds” like gardens. While slaves in Saint Domingue and Jamaica were among black people, and serfs in Russia lived in a peasant world avoided by their masters, slaves in the Southern United States lived in their masters’ worlds. The internal slave economy in the South was small because slave owners wanted to keep their slaves in utter dependence. Living conditions kept economic opportunities among slaves to a minimum, although slaves were able to develop some nurturing forms of culture and education within the slave quarter communities. While the law stated that slaves had no property rights, local custom often accorded slaves the privilege of small garden plots. Slave owners usually did not allow slaves to control what they grew, and they strictly limited the amounts of food available for the slaves’ consumption and the clothing slaves could wear. In the 1850s, between 5 and 10 percent of slaves were “hired out,” usually for a one-year term, to work for money paid by an employer to their master. Some slaves skilled as mechanics or craftsmen were able to “hire their own time,” although the slave owners still kept most or all of the money earned. Although it was rumored that a slave had invented the cotton gin credited to Eli Whitney, there is www.abc-clio.com

no historical evidence for such a claim. Nevertheless, it is known that a slave named Barclay built the first cotton gin in Mississippi by following a traveler’s verbal account and a simple drawing of Whitney’s gin. Southern slavery’s “commercial orientation” was central to the South as a distinctive region and to the social values of slavery. From colonial life onward, Southern agriculture focused on producing staple crops for a regular market. By 1850, about 55 percent of Southern slaves cultivated cotton; 10 percent grew tobacco; 10 percent produced crops including sugar, rice, or hemp fiber; 15 percent worked as servants inside houses; and the remaining 10 percent worked in industry or trades. Cotton ultimately became the most important crop for the region and nation. While in the year 1800 cotton accounted for only 7 percent of the dollar value of all U.S. exports, by 1860 cotton was 58 percent of all U.S. exports. Even the free states in the North were economically implicated in the institution of slavery, as the slave industries supported the entire nation’s welfare. The study of slavery in relation to economics continues to be subject to many political and ideological debates. The work of one particular pair of econometricians in the 1970s was published to immediate criticism that largely discredited it. The misuse and erroneous interpretation of data in Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman has been refuted by Herbert Gutman in Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of “Time on the Cross” (1975). For instance, Gutman explains how they underestimated the amount of whipping as punishment, gave inflated figures for the skills held by slaves, and thus

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argued illogically that a steep decline in slave skills followed Emancipation. The interpretive argument of Time on the Cross was also challenged by other scholars, who said Fogel and Engerman went beyond claiming the efficiency, profitability, and professional nature of Southern slavery benefited the economy to also claiming that slave owners were instilling modern work habits in their slaves and that slaves had benefited from the institution. While it is fair to say that Southern slave owners were aggressive in their aim to maximize profits, it is not accurate to claim that they were making slaves into productive workers who helped slaves achieve a modified version of the American Dream of rising in status. The very nature of unfree labor made that unfeasible by providing no compensation for slaves’ labor, denying slaves’ humanity, breaking up families, and offering no real incentives for better work quality. The Southern plantation owner had fundamental differences from the Northern industrialist. Scholar James Oakes published a book in 1982 that emphasized the aggressive and greedy character of slave owners in order to assert a fundamental similarity between the Northern and Southern social orders during the decades before the Civil War. But Oakes corrected himself in his 1990 book Slavery and Freedom, in which the author repudiated part of his previous argument and stated that while “a highly developed market economy” was necessary for slave society to develop, the relationship between masters and slaves was essentially “a nonmarket relationship.” Using slaves to produce goods changes the equation of production and consumption. Under Southern slavery, relations of exchange were determined by the market, www.abc-clio.com

and commerce required transactions and competition. But the relations of production were not determined by the market because slaves were unpaid and did not even own themselves. The workers could not negotiate for better treatment, although slaves did resist the slave economy in ways such as physical retaliation, subtle sabotage, appropriation of goods they had produced, or self-removal from the workforce. The entire Southern economy was predicated upon a system that did not compensate its workers. Furthermore, the slaves were not consumers who could buy goods, which further inhibited economic exchange. U.S. slavery was not fading out in the decades preceding its abolition, and abolition was not an economic decision because the institution was unprofitable. Slavery was still profitable at the time of the Civil War, although it provided inadequate stimulus to modernization, industrialization, or urbanization. Some historians have overstated or understated the profitability of slavery. To say that the Southern region in 1860 was the fourth most prosperous nation in the world in 1860 is accurate in a sense but overlooks the limitations of the Southern economy, which relied on only a few crops. Southerners kept planting more and more cotton to export to Europe, a tactic that gained money but did not build a developed and robust economy. The South’s economic development had fallen behind the North’s, and its manufacturing made up only 16 percent of the total for the United States. Railroad construction, literacy rates and schooling, and urbanization also lagged behind the rest of the country. Southern intellectuals of the antebellum era thought, and often feared, that slavery would end due to market forces,

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although scholars today realize the falsehood of the belief that slavery could die out on its own accord. The political economy of Thomas Roderick Dew, a college professor and administrator, led him to believe in the 1840s that, sooner rather than later, free labor would become cheaper than slave labor and thus cause a general emancipation of slaves. But Dew insisted that the South’s social system was a good model for a world order because only servitude could guarantee stability and, for those in power, liberty. Some people thought that the inevitable laws of political economy would “do their work” without the help of Northern agitation, and another claim was that black people, if freed, could not thrive independently. The arguments by pro-slavery political economists and apologists defending slavery were steeped in racist beliefs and generally led to unscholarly, biased conclusions. Proponents of slavery alleged that they were providing slaves with security from birth until death. Not only was this claim factually inaccurate, but it also contradicted free-market theory. They did not take into account the reality that most achievements of the modern world had come from freelabor economics and that genuine progress was necessary for survival. Slavery was the pivotal issue thrusting the United States into Civil War, and the related financial profits, a motivation in most wars, also heavily influenced the Southern states’ decision to secede from the Union. Southern states could only retain their economic and political power if slavery continued in the South and expanded into the new territories in the west. At the beginning of the war, President Abraham Lincoln stated in 1861 that the dispute between the North and South concerned the www.abc-clio.com

expansion rather than the existence of slavery. Taking effect on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation made the war to preserve the union into a struggle to make black people free, and it ended any chance that Britain or France would provide financial and military support for the Confederate States of America. The South’s failed cotton embargo also showed that the slave-based economy was going to have to change, by force and by law. Amy Cummins See also: Emancipation Proclamation; Slavery (History) References Bailey, Ronald. “The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England.” In The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, edited by Joseph Inikori and Stanley Engerman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Brown, William Wells. Clotel, or The President’s Daughter. 1853. Edited by Hilton Als. New York: Modern Library Classics, 2000. Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. Genovese, Eugene. The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Gutman, Herbert G. Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of “Time on the Cross.” Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold. The African-American Odyssey. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000. Inikori, Joseph. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Oakes, James. Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South. New York: Knopf, 1990.

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1004 SLAVERY (HISTORY) Solow, Barbara, and Stanley Engerman, eds. British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present. Revised edition. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.

SLAVERY (HISTORY) Slavery can be defined as not owning oneself, or what Stephan Palmie has called “institutionalized human unfreedom.” Scholars who study slavery identify two criteria: the legal recognition of property rights involving human beings, and the slave’s position as an outsider from society. There have been many forms and degrees of slavery throughout the past 4,000 years of world history, and slavery is believed to have existed in all parts of the globe, including classical Greece and Italy. Anthropologist Jack Goody states that the earliest legal documents record the sale of slaves, and the earliest legal code of which scholars have knowledge refers to the slaves’ constant efforts to escape from slavery. The desire for freedom from bondage has characterized every society that held fellow human beings in a state of “unfreedom.” Documentation of the transatlantic slave trade, which became the largest forced migration in history, began in the year 1441. A Portuguese historian reported that a group of sailors in Africa for oils and skins decided to take “captives” to be human merchandise valuable as servants. Yet even before that time, Africans had been enslaved for work in the mines of the Gold Coast, now Ghana, and the “market” for slaves had already existed in late-medieval Europe. There was extensive trade conducted by Islamic nations and managed by Sudanese horsemen due to the high demand www.abc-clio.com

for slaves in Muslim countries from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries. Transatlantic slave commerce developed after a preexisting slave trade among the Mediterranean, central Europe, and the Black Sea regions. Forms of slave trading and slavery had existed on the African continent for thousands of years. The process of African internal slavery involved acquiring people through transactions such as raiding, kidnapping, war, the selling of criminals, and indentured servitude to avoid starvation during famine. Historians argue that African internal slavery was part of a “continuum of relations,” with family and kinship ties on one end and the use of persons as chattel, or personal property, at the other end. Attesting to the difficulty of comparing African with American slavery, data show substantial variations in the treatment and use of slaves in African societies, yet it was undeniably the exploitation and subjugation of fellow human beings. Finally, scholars still debate whether the rise of exporting slaves was caused by European slave trading or was a separate development, but it is known that the trade relied on partnerships between Africans and Europeans. European ships relied primarily on “slave markets” in southwest Africa, the region between Senegal and Angola. First the coastal regions then the interior of Africa were raided for slaves. Such trade agreements were devastating not only to the slaves as individuals but also to the African countries being depopulated. The early modern slave trade, from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, sent most slaves to Portugal and Spain; numbers exceeded 50,000 people but could have been double that amount.

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The number of slaves exported from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade is now believed by economists to be not less than 12 million and not more than 20 million. But there continues to be substantial debate and new research about the estimated numbers of imported Africans, resulting in the numbers being revised upward. Historian Edward Reynolds quantified in 1985 that an estimated 11,698,000 people were exported from Africa to the New World, and that 9,778,500 of them survived to arrive in the Americas. From within that number, Reynolds estimated that at least 596,000 people were imported into what became the United States, but the figures were probably much higher. The Middle Passage denotes the journey from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean. The average length of this trip was at least sixty days, but it varied due to departure and arrival points and weather. High death rates were due primarily to dehydration, the length of the voyage, and the spread of contagious diseases in overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions. Treatment of the slaves included branding to indicate ownership, chaining by the ankles, removal of clothing, and sexual abuse. Slaves torn from their homelands usually did not know where they were going or why they had been taken. The desire to return to their homelands led slaves to attempt rebellions and suicide, despite harsh retaliation. Up to one-third of slaves who survived the Middle Passage died during the experience of “seasoning,” a disciplinary process aimed at breaking the spirits of the slaves so they would be effective workers. The demand for slaves beyond Africa was due to the need for workers on plantations for sugar, tobacco, cotton, and coffee, and in mines. Reynolds estimates that, of www.abc-clio.com

all the slaves who came from Africa, Brazil imported 38 percent; the British Caribbean 17 percent; Spanish America 17 percent; North America 6 percent; and the Dutch, Danish, and Swedish Caribbean 6 percent. In terms of scale, numbers, and cruelty, slavery reached unprecedented levels in the post-Columbian Americas. Greed and domination led governments and individuals in power to seek great profits without paying workers any wages or acknowledging that they were human beings. Various countries legally abolished, or outlawed, slavery at different times in history, usually after declaring incremental restrictions: Britain in 1834, Denmark and France in 1848, the United States in 1865, Cuba in 1886, and Brazil in 1888. The systematic importation of slaves into British North America began in 1619, and by the 1690s, slaves became cheaper than indentured servants in the North American colonies. Using slave labor allowed for the mass production of tobacco, rice, and indigo in the South. Slavery was an important part of the economy at the time of the U.S. War of Independence, or American Revolution, even though slavery contradicted the ideology that asserted American self-determination and freedom from Britain. In 1808, the U.S. Slave Trade Act went into effect, prohibiting the importation of slaves. Although U.S. participation in the transatlantic slave trade officially ended at that point, trafficking in slaves within the United States only increased. The slave population of the United States increased sevenfold between 1790 and 1860, and there were four million enslaved people in the South by the time of the Civil War. The condition of slavery denied the humanity of the slave. Laws stated that the

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authority of the master must be complete in order to render the submission of the slave perfect. Slave owners who mistreated and killed their slaves were not punished because slaves were considered property rather than fellow humans with human or legal rights. For example, their marriages were not considered legally binding, and they could not own property or provide legal testimony. Slave owners took sexual advantage of female slaves, and the children of slaves followed the condition of the mother, remaining in bondage. Although it was illegal to teach slaves to read or write, many slaves still learned to read. Furthermore, the existence of slavery delayed the development of public education in the Southern states. The dominant ideology in the South stated that slavery was acceptable although, in 1860, under 25 percent of the South’s white population was in a slave-owning family. Most Southern politicians were slaveholders who, watching out for their own interests, made support of slavery an integral part of Southern politics. Race prejudice also played an important role in causing poorer whites to accept slavery. Some people claimed that slavery was beneficial to blacks as well as to whites and that masters could serve in a parental relationship to their slaves. However, the institution of slavery cannot be beneficial to the slave subject because personhood is denied. Slaveholders and their political allies in the Southern states also alleged that the Hebrew Bible supported their practice of owning slaves. However, Christians of various denominations were essential in leading the movement to abolish slavery in the United States and other nations. The Civil War, fought for a network of reasons including the slavery debate, led to www.abc-clio.com

the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution in 1865 abolished slavery in the United States. Even after the process of Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877 helped bring some improvements in the living and working conditions of American blacks, the legacy of slavery and racism continued. Writers and public speakers have historically used the phrase “wage slavery” to compare the condition of not owning oneself with being economically discriminated against in unjust working conditions. The term came into use when the awareness of economic class exploitation was rising. For example, in antebellum America, Southern defenders of the institution of slavery claimed that their practices were no worse than the wage slavery of Northern states or of England. Nevertheless, not all ways of extracting labor from subordinated individuals are like slavery. Such a comparison can be inadequate in light of the historical realities and degradations people of African heritage suffered under slavery in the Americas. The institution of slavery still persists in the twenty-first century. It is believed that millions of persons suffer at the present time from modern-day slavery or other forms of unfree labor, but it is always important to describe the terms and conditions with any claim that people live in slavery. Amy Cummins

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See also: Emancipation Proclamation; Mexico (Afro-Mexican Identity); Netherlands Antilles; Puerto Rico; Sailors; Slave Forts; Slave Narratives; Slave Revolts/Maronnage; Slavery (Economics) References Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1988.

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SMALLS, ROBERT Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Nellie McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2004. Goody, Jack. “Slavery in Space and Time.” In African and Asian Systems of Slavery, edited by James L. Watson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold. The African-American Odyssey. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000. Inikori, Joseph, and Stanley Engerman. “Introduction: Gainers and Losers in the Atlantic Slave Trade.” In The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, edited by Joseph Inikori and Stanley Engerman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. July, Robert. A History of the African People. 5th ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1998. Kopytoff, Igor, and Suzanne Miers. “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality.” In Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Igo Miers and Suzanne Kopytoff. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. Palmie, Stephan. Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery. Knoxville: University of Tennesse Press, 1995.

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Reynolds, Edward. Stand the Storm: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Thorton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

SMALLS, ROBERT (1839–1915) Robert Smalls was one of the first African American heroes of the American Civil War, and later a prominent Reconstructionera politician in the South. Following celebrated military service in the Union Army, he returned to his home in Beaufort, South Carolina, where he parlayed his reputation as a war hero into a brilliant political career that spanned four decades. Smalls is, perhaps, best known to historians for his daring escape from slavery on May 13, 1862. Commandeering the Confederate

Portrait of Civil War naval hero Robert Smalls and captured Confederate ship Planter. Smalls’s capture of the vessel allowed him to free a group of African Americans from slavery, including his wife and children. (Library of Congress)

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ship Planter, on which he served as pilot, Smalls saved 15 people, including his wife and three young children. Having intimate knowledge of the signal codes required for moving in and out of Charleston harbor, which was under intense Confederate scrutiny and a heavy Union blockade, Smalls was able to run safely out to the blockade, providing the Union with the full resources of the ship as well as key tactical information about the harbor and adjacent Fort Sumter. Following the war, Smalls returned to Beaufort, purchased the home in which he had served as a slave, and won election to the South Carolina State House of Representatives, serving from 1868 until 1870. In 1874, Smalls was elected to the United States Congress, where he served five terms. In 1890, he took the position of Collector of the Port in Beaufort, which he kept for 20 years, remaining active and visible in the South Carolina Republican Party. In 1910, at the age of 71, he declined the position of ambassador to Liberia. He died on February 23, 1915. Matthew D. Brown References Miller, Edward A. Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839–1915. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Uya, Okon E. From Slavery to Public Service: Robert Smalls, 1839–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

SMITH, MIKEY (1954–1983) Mikey Smith was a Jamaican dub poet whose early success included a drama degree in 1980 from the Jamaica School of Drama. His transatlantic concerns with Africa and the Americas may be viewed in the themes of his poetry, which finds sympathetic ears worldwide; his poetry often www.abc-clio.com

revolves around ironic elements of cultural noise, social plight, variations of suffering, and, especially, affirmation of the present day. His connection to his transatlantic audience may also be viewed in his choice to perform in London at the 1982 “International Book Fair of Radical Blacks and Third World Books.” In 1981–1982 Smith made more international connections by touring Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, and Britain, receiving great acclaim for his highly crafted performances of his poetry. He also toured the world with reggae singer Gregory Isaacs. Smith was such a success in London that the BBC made a documentary about him titled “Upon Westminster Bridge.” In 1982, Smith recorded his trademark poem, “Mi Cyaan Believe It,” and eight other poems for a CD of the same name. On the disc he speaks his trademark “lawd” (lord)—that is sometimes extended into more of a howl, “lawwwwwwwwd.” Kamau Brathwaite likens the sound effect to the roar of a motorcycle engine. Carolyn Cooper describes it as the affirmative voice of the suffering. The record was produced in London by fellow Jamaican dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. Smith was just beginning to reap the benefits of his impressive creativity when personal and political problems turned against him. On August 17, 1983, he found himself in an argument with supporters of the Jamaican Labor Party, who later stoned him to death, although it is unclear exactly what took place and why. He died at age 29. In a prophetic poem titled “Dem Naw Destroy I,” Smith makes the case that he will continue to live through life’s hardships. The poem was published posthumously with his collection It a Come, in 1986. And Smith does live on

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through his poetry, which is included in anthologies like The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, and through the work of advocates like Linton Kwesi Johnson, who gives lectures on the importance of Smith’s poetry. David W. Hart See also: Brathwaite, Kamau; Johnson, Linton Kwesi; Morris, Mervyn; Mutabaruka References Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon Books, 1984. Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Morris, Mervyn. “Editor’s Notes.” In Mikey Smith, It a Come. London: Race Today Publications, 1986.

SMITHSONIAN AFRICAN ART MUSEUM The Smithsonian African Art Museum (SAAM) began as a private educational institution and has been transformed into a national museum supporting research and education and playing a leading role in fostering appreciation of African and African American art. The Museum of African Art was founded in 1964 by former U.S. Foreign Service officer Warren M. Robbins. The museum initially began as a private educational institution situated in what was previously the residence of Frederick Douglass—an ex-slave and prominent abolitionist during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Until 1979 the African art museum remained privately operated and possessed a scant collection of paintings by African American artists and an even smaller collection of African art. The Museum of African Art was absorbed by www.abc-clio.com

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the Smithsonian Institution in 1979 following a congressional act, and in 1981 was renamed the National Museum of African Art. In 1983 Sylvia H. Williams became the new director of the National African Art Museum. In 1987 a new building was erected on the National Mall to house the museum’s growing art collections. The National Museum of African Art currently houses a distinctive collection of visual art materials including sculptures, photographs, pottery, jewelry, furniture, and musical instruments, among a number of other artistic mediums acquired from across the entire African continent. The national art museum contains the largest public collection of contemporary African art in America. In addition to its role as the leading museum of African art in the United States, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art fosters distinctive research facilities and educational programs. The museum’s archives, named for famed photographer Eliot Elisofon, contain over 300,000 photographic images and transparencies that visually portray dimensions of African life. The archives also contain nontextual records, such as documentary films and other videos relevant to African art and history. The museum’s library, named for museum founder Warren M. Robbins, is part of the Smithsonian Institution libraries’ consortium and contains over 25,000 books and periodicals. Maps, videotapes, and children’s literature are also included in the library’s holdings. The repository is catered toward adult and juvenile researchers interested in exploring African history, art, and culture. The National Museum of African Art encompasses a high-tech conservation

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laboratory, and has been nationally recognized as the leading conservation center for the preservation of African art. African art aficionados often seek advice from curatorial staff on how to preserve and maintain private collections. The public is also invited to the conservation laboratory to have objects identified and to deposit donations. Since its inception the National Museum of African Art has developed into a superior museological institution, research facility, conservation center, and educational organization. The museum relies heavily on its volunteers, interns, and professional staff to create an entertaining and enjoyable learning experience. The museum continues to incorporate new and exciting exhibitions that educate and engage its viewing public. Talitha LeFlouria See also: Lewis, Mary Edmonia; Museums and Transatlantic Slavery References Heyman, Michael I. “Out of Africa and onto the Mall—and Beyond.” Smithsonian 30 (1999): 12. Robbins, Warren M. African Art in American Collections. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989. Sieber, Roy, and Roslyn Adele Walker. African Art in the Cycle of Life. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1987. Williams, S. H. “Discover an African Oasis in Washington.” Black Enterprise 18 (1987): 99–100.

SOCCER Soccer—better known as “football” outside the United States—is the most popular team sport in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. More generally, it plays an important part in the cultural, social, and often the economic and political life of these regions. www.abc-clio.com

South American soccer is dominated by Argentina and Brazil. The former has won the Copa America, the oldest international tournament in world football, organized by the South American Soccer Federation (Confederatión Sudamericana de Fútbol [CONMEBOL]), a total of 17 times (like Uruguay). In addition, the Copa Liberatores, a CONEMBOL international club tournament, has been won by Argentinean teams 20 times (as of May 2005). Brazil is the only team that has qualified for all 17 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association, world soccer’s governing body) World Cup tournaments and has won the championship a record number five times. The Argentinean and Brazil rivalry is mirrored by the ongoing dispute on who is the all-time best player of world soccer. Opinions are divided between Brazil’s Pelé, three times World Cup winner and former sports minister of Brazil, and Armando Diego Maradona, Argentinean World Cup winner in 1986 and the only player known to have inspired the foundation of his own church. Soccer in the CONCACAF (Confederation of North and Central American and Caribbean Association Football) region is dominated by Mexico. The Mexican national team has won the CONCACAF Gold Cup, a tournament held since 1963, seven times, followed by three-time champion Costa Rica. African soccer is organized via the CAF (Confédération Africaine de Football) and is dominated by North and West African nations. Egypt, Cameroon, and Ghana have all won the Africa Cup, the tournament held biannually by the CAF since 1957, four times. Cameroon and Senegal have both reached the FIFA World Cup quarterfinals once, which makes them the most successful

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African teams internationally. The fact that South Africa won the right to host the FIFA World Cup in 2010 partly reflects the augmented status of African soccer in an increasingly global game. In a globalized world, the best players tend to follow the money. Their departure has led to a phenomenon that could be described as a continuous “leg drain,” similar to the brain drain poor countries face by losing their best academics to richer countries. The soccer leg drain is more ambivalent. National teams can benefit from recent developments of the game through their players gaining insights at European or rich South American clubs. Many Latin American (and African) clubs increasingly rely on transfer fees earned from selling the most valuable players to finance themselves. In Brazil the transfer system has created an ownership model that makes it almost impossible for professional players up to a certain age to decide where to work. A rising problem is the increasingly young age of players who become subject to transfer deals. FC Santos of Brazil, for example, signed a nine-year-old boy from southern Brazil, said to be the “new Pelé.” The FIFA has declared its intention to change its transfer rules to rule out such transfers. Despite the economic pressures on the game, soccer remains a strong focal point for identity-building processes. Football clubs and national teams deliver a symbolic representation of an assumed origin (or belonging) for people that usually lasts an entire lifetime. Argentina is said to be divided fairly evenly between fans of the River Plate and Boca Juniors teams, and support for either club is an important characteristic of many Argentines’ selfdefinition. These connections are constituted by personal origin (place of birth, www.abc-clio.com

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social status, etc.) and define whole communities. They also help to strengthen the ties of exile communities to their homeland. U.S. Major League Soccer (MLS) makes use of these ties by allocating star players from South and Middle America to clubs with a perceived spectator potential in the local Latin community. For example, Jorge Campos, long-time goalkeeper for the Mexican national team, was signed by the L.A. Galaxy team. Similarly, perhaps the most skilled Colombian player ever, Carlos Valderrama was tapped to play for the Florida-based teams Tampa Bay Mutiny and Miami Fusion. These efforts were rather unsuccessful, and as a result, Club Deportivo Chivas USA was created. This team seeks to attract the Latin population of California by signing mostly Latin American players. Martin Falbe and Arne Niemann See also: Brazilian Culture; Mexico References Arbena, Joseph. Sport and Society in Latin America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. Armstrong, Gary, and Giulianotti, Richard, eds. Football in Africa: Conflict, Conciliation and Community. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2004. Wagg, Stephen, ed. Giving the Game Away: Football, Politics and Culture on Five Continents. London: St. Martin, 1995.

SOCIALISM Socialism, broadly defined, refers to some type of collective ownership and control of a society’s means of production, subsistence, and exchange. Over time and in diverse contexts, the specific mechanisms of control and practices of collective decision making have ranged from state control of the economy, as in numerous Soviet

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systems, to libertarian control through popular assemblies, as in the Zapatista communities of Chiapas, Mexico. Socialism, in varying forms and different perspectives, has been widely influential in a variety of national and regional contexts in Africa and the Americas. For many in poorer or developing countries, socialism, and especially the example of the Russian Revolution, has offered a model for the coincidence of industrial/economic and governmental/political revolutions. This revolutionary model, in which a seizure of national power has provided a lever for rapid industrialization, held great appeal throughout the twentieth century within numerous countries of the global south. As postcolonial governments looked for means by which to catch up with the industrial might of the former colonial powers, the approach of socialism, especially statist socialism, seemed to provide both a potentially effective political program and an ideological justification for statist reorganization of the economy and work. However, it should be noted that many commentators suggest that in both the Americas and Africa, many of the indigenous, or noncolonial societies, were actually organized as socialist societies in which the necessities of life were shared within relatively egalitarian communities. Movements or systems identified explicitly as socialist have a long history in Latin America, ranging from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the present. Among the most important examples include certain indigenous and agrarian movements during the Mexican Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and the Sandanista uprising of Nicaragua. In the twenty-first century significant socialist projects include the Zapatista movement in www.abc-clio.com

Chiapas, Mexico, the factory reclamation movements of Argentina, and elected national governments formed as part of the populist wave known collectively as the Bolivarian Revolution. These include the governments of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. The history of such explicit socialist movements or societies is more recent in Africa, dating especially to the movements against colonialism from the middle or late twentieth century. Important examples of socialist movements and systems include the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), which formed the first postcolonial government in Angola, and FRELIMO (the Liberation Front of Mozambique), which took power in Mozambique. Between 1974 and 1991 a socialist government under Lieutenant Colonel Mengitsu ruled Ethiopia. That government’s survival in the face of a variety of opposition and independence movements was dependent in part on aid and military support from Fidel Castro’s socialist government in Cuba. In addition, numerous socialist parties and organizations have been active in several Africa countries, including South Africa, where socialists of various stripes played significant parts in the downfall of the apartheid regime. African socialism refers to the perspective that traditional African communities exhibit characteristics, including social relations and sharing of resources, which reflect a form of indigenous socialism. Socialism was viewed as an ongoing characteristic of African communal life. Some African socialists argued that indigenous forms of socialism were key aspects of identity for many Africans based on local community experiences. African socialism was presented as an alternative to scientific, or

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authoritarian, socialism based on models borrowed from Soviet or Maoist regimes. Many postindependence leaders advocated some form of African socialism, although their visions and the actual projects they initiated to carry out their visions varied widely. Socialism provided an alternative to the exploitative and oppressive political economic regimes of imperialist rule. At the same time, Western versions of socialism, especially Soviet-inspired systems, were viewed as inapplicable to the specific social circumstances of less industrialized countries whose labor base was often concentrated in agricultural or resource extractive industries. Similarly, advocates of African socialism sought to draw upon local governance practices in order to organize social and productive change rather than through the centralized statist models of Sovietism. Perhaps the most influential version of African socialism was Julius Nyerere’s vision of ujamma (“villigization”) based on cooperative work and living in organized villages. Ujamma combined socialism and communal life toward the cause of rural development. The focus was on improving society through the development of people rather than ratcheting up production. Despite gains in areas of health and education, ujamma left many people worse off materially. Nyerere’s works had much influence on the perspective of the West Indian Marxist C. L. R. James and his analyses of working-class self-organization. African socialism held out a promise of self-sufficiency, equality, economic development, and prosperity following locally appropriate social practices. In practice, most examples of African socialism failed to deliver much in any of these areas. Many leaders who had advocated African socialism www.abc-clio.com

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fell back on authoritarian forms of Sovietstyle government when attempting to implement their policies. Among the most notable proponents of African socialism, in addition to Nyerere, are Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde), Samora Machel (Mozambique), Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso), and Michel Micombero (Burundi). Perhaps the most important, and indeed inspirational, direct connection between socialism in Africa and in the Americas is represented by the support given by Cuba to the socialist forces of Angola in their struggles, first for independence and later against the invasion forces of apartheid South Africa. Cuban forces and materials were deployed in support of the Marxist MPLA during the liberation struggles of 1975 and played an essential part in their ability to defeat the opposition movements backed by Western imperialist interests. This support helped the MPLA become Angola’s first postindependence government following the withdrawal of the Portuguese colonial power. The Cubans also came to the aid of Angola in 1988 when a South African offensive at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola threatened to defeat forces of Angola’s socialist government. In addition to sending thousands of troops to reinforce the Cuban forces already in Angola, the Cuban government reduced their country’s own anti-aircraft defenses by shipping its most advanced weapons to Angola. Angolan and Cuban troops, along with forces of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), managed a stunning victory over the apartheid army invaders. The South African defeat forced that country’s government to take part in negotiations that eventually led to the independence of

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Namibia, and indeed played a major part in the collapse of the apartheid regime only a few years later. This crucial, world-altering victory would not have been possible without the alliance between the socialist governments of Cuba and Angola. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet systems in Eastern Europe, along with the passing of Maoism and the embracing of capitalism in China, all dealt severe blows to the socialist societies of Africa. With the loss of aid and resources from the Soviet economies, many socialist governments in Africa became more desperate for aid from Western capitalist governments and international organizations like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. They also became more vulnerable to the pressures of Western capitalist governments and institutions to accept programs of neoliberal structural adjustment programs, including the privatization of government works and lands. The impacts of these programs were severe on local populations and led governments such as those of Angola, Mozambique, and Zambia away from previous social commitments to the people of those countries. The collapse of the Soviet systems in Eastern Europe did not have the same negative impact on socialist movements in Latin America. In fact, alternative, and in many ways novel, socialist movements have emerged in several Latin American countries. These movements, whether the grassroots and libertarian Zapatistas in Mexico or the electoral Bolivarian movements in Venezuela and Bolivia, have offered glimpses of potentially innovative movements that do not refer easily to the forms of socialism that have preceded them, especially the Soviet forms of statist socialism. Few social movements have had the global impact, either in symbolic terms as www.abc-clio.com

heralds of new (post-) socialist politics or in more practical terms as leaders in the global struggle against neoliberal capitalism, than the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, or simply the Zapatistas). Globally, the Zapatistas have been upheld variously as the heralds of a diversity of new politics. Thus the Zapatistas have been presented as examples of, to name only a few, postmodern rebellion, anarchism, autonomous Marxism, or the multitude. The Zapatistas have perhaps posed the most organized and convincing challenge to neoliberalism. In an early statement following their public emergence, on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, the Zapatistas argued that NAFTA meant a death sentence for the indigenous ethnicities of Mexico. The statement also charged that under the modernization program of the Mexican government of the day, indigenous people were entirely dispensable. For many, the Zapatistas presented the possibility of the first postmodern revolution: a revolution challenging contemporary notions of the nation-state and what is meant by citizenship. From the longerterm analysis of struggles, historically between the Mexican state and indigenous people, the Zapatista uprising may be seen as a predictable outcome of modernizing (and globalizing) programs that have suppressed the identity and aspirations of the Mayan people for centuries. The World Social Forum, a yearly gathering of socialist movements, provides a venue for socialists in the Americas and Africa to come together to discuss strategies for resisting capitalist globalization. The World Social Forum was initiated in 1990 in São Paolo, Brazil, sponsored by the Cuban government and the Communist Workers Party of Brazil, which now forms

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Brazil’s government. Since then the Social Forum has brought together thousands of socialists each year. African socialists, such as Patrice Lumumba and Amilcar Cabral, have been influential supporters of resistance movements in parts of the Americas as well as within Africa. In addition, the works of the Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney, especially through his work, How the West Under-Developed Africa, has influenced generations of African socialists. Perhaps the most dramatic example of individual socialist connections between Africa and the Americas occurred in the 1960s when, in an ill-fated attempt, Cuban revolutionary hero Che Guevera led local resistance to the Belgian colonial powers in the Congo. Jeff Shantz See also: Cabral, Amlicar; Castro, Fidel; Cold War; Decolonization, African; Industrialization; International Monetary Fund; James, Cyril Lionel Robert; Lumumba, Patrice; World Bank References Babu, A. M. African Socialism or Socialist Africa? London: Zed Press, 1981. Higgins, Nicholas P. Understanding the Chiapas Rebellion: Modernist Visions and the Invisible Indian. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Mbah, Samuel, and I. E. Irigariwey. African Anarchism: The History of a Movement. Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001. Nyerere, Julius. Freedom and Socialism: A Selection of Writings and Speeches, 1965–1967. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Nyerere, Julius. Ujaama: Essays on Socialism. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.

SOKOTO CALIPHATE The Sokoto Caliphate was an early nineteenth-century African Islamic kingdom. The Sokoto Caliphate emerged from the www.abc-clio.com

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jihad of Shehu Usman Dan Fodio; jihad is here understood as a struggle for the sake of Islam against unbelievers. The Shehu began preaching Islam in 1774–1775 to the Hausa and Fulani in the northwestern part of present-day Nigeria. In 1804, Sokoto itself became the headquarters of the Shehu’s son Muhammad Bello. The Shehu died in 1817, and Bello became caliph. But the caliphate lacked the cohesion that it had under the Shehu. Bello subsequently conducted 47 raids during his lifetime. At the time of his death in 1837, the caliphate had become solidified. It included regions of what are now Nigeria, Benin, Niger, and Cameroon. Politically, the caliphate was a system of local emirates that owed authority to the caliph in Sokoto. The caliph controlled the appointment of the emirs, who were fairly independent as long as they acted in accordance with the caliphate. But Sokoto was nonetheless the location of a centralized administration. The emirs paid tribute to the caliph, especially with the spoils of war, and Sokoto settled internal disputes among emirates. The emirates were usually able to defend themselves from individual invaders without the intervention of Sokoto. But the caliphate could not resist the large-scale movements of the British that began in 1900. In 1903, Sokoto fell to the British West African Frontier Force under Frederick Lugard. Mahriana Rofheart See also: Dan Fodio, Uthman; Fulani; Hausa References Adeleye, R. A. Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804–1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies. Bristol, UK: Longman, 1971. Last, Murray. The Sokoto Caliphate. London: Longman, 1967. Reynolds, Jonathan T. “The Politics of History: The Legacy of the Sokoto Caliphate in

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1016 SOMALIA Nigeria.” In Displacement and the Politics of Violence in Nigeria, edited by Paul E. Lovejoy and Pat Ama Tokunbo Williams. New York: Brill, 1997.

SOMALIA Located on the northeast coast of the Horn of Africa, Somalia has a population of approximately 8,305,000. In a state of civil war in the 1990s, Somalia has been the focus of much U.S. military involvement and international concern. The vast majority of the population is Muslim, most of whom are Sunni. Arabic is commonly spoken. Trade with Europeans began early, with Portuguese and British traders operating from the port of Aden. Subsequently, a small number of traders from the United States also had contact with Somalia, including Alexander I. Cotheal, who traded on the Juba River in southern Somalia in the 1850s. Egyptian soldiers occupied Somalia beginning in the 1870s. In 1884, the first British political agent was appointed to the country. Somalia became a British protectorate called British Somaliland in 1885, and was initially governed from India. In the south, Italians sought to colonize the land and establish plantations. In this colonial context, American explorers went to Somaliland in the 1890s. Best-known of these American explorers was the Pennsylvania-born A. Donaldson Smith. After inheriting a fortune in 1892, Smith went biggame hunting in Somaliland. He later explored under the auspices of the Royal Geographic Society, publishing Through Unknown African Countries: The First Expedition from Somaliland to Lake Lamu in 1897. International conflicts have been part of Somalia’s history, partly because of its www.abc-clio.com

proximity to European powers. In 1899, a rebellion broke out in British Somaliland led by Muhammad ibn Adb Allah Hasan, known to the British as the “Mad Mullah.” The revolt was gradually put down by the British use of the Camel Corps led by Richard Corfield. Corfield was killed at the battle of Dul Madoba in 1913, but by then the rebels had been largely defeated. During World War II, British Somaliland was briefly captured by Italy. The British retook the region and also gained control of Italy’s portion, placing the area under a British military administration. On July 1, 1960, Somalia gained independence and the U.S. Peace Corps started operations in the new nation in 1962. The first president was Aden Abdullah Osman Daar, and he was succeeded in 1967 by Abdirashid Ali Ahermarke. In 1969, Abdirashid Ali Ahermarke was assassinated and Mohammed Siad Barre came to power through a coup. He would remain president until 1991, although his power would erode dramatically to the point where, by the end, he controlled very little of the country. Internal revolts led to rebel groups taking over much of the countryside outside of the capital of Mogadishu. With these internal problems, there was little contact between Somalia and the Americas throughout much of the 1960s; the United States was, however, the largest donor of nonmilitary aid. U.S.-Somali relations were strained in the 1970s when Somalia sought military support from the Soviet Union. Soon after the Ogaden War of 1977–1978, in which Siad Barre sought and failed to seize the Ogaden territory form Ethiopia, U.S.Somali relations became closer; however, the United States remained critical of Somali human rights abuses.

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When Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, chaos ensued. Aid convoys sent by the international community were regularly hijacked. Somalia became what is known as a failed state, a country without effective governance. On December 9, 1992, the United States sent in 28,000 troops accompanied by soldiers from the French Foreign Legion, Canada, and many other countries. The warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid was in power in Mogadishu. Significant conflict resulted. On July 12, 1993, a U.S. helicopter attack killed many Somali clan leaders. On October 3, a team of U.S. soldiers sought to capture two of Aidid’s chief advisers. The attempt failed and the soldiers were pinned down. Eighteen were killed and seventy badly wounded. That incident, because of the helicopters the U.S. soldiers used, became known as “Black Hawk Down,” leading to a film of the same name in 2001. The United States would remain in the country, but both U.S. and United Nations forces would leave in 1995. Civil war continued for many years. As a failed state, Somalia has been a central focus of U.S. concerns about terrorism, with many fearing that the country offers an effective sanctuary for terrorists. Recently, the U.S. government froze the assets of al-Barakaat, the major international exchange in Somalia which was suspected of being linked to Al Qaeda. As of 2006, the U.S. government has supported the UN’s efforts to aid the newly-formed Baidoa-based coalition government. Justin Corfield

Keller, Edmond J. “United States Foreign Policy on the Horn of Africa: Policy-making with Blinders On.” In African Crisis Areas and U.S. Foreign Policy, edited by Gerald J. Bender, James S. Coleman, and Richard L. Sklar.: Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. Laitin, David D. “The American-Somali Military Alliance: Whose Agenda?” Transafrika Forum 2, no. 4 (1985): 21–44.

SONGHAY (MEDIEVAL EMPIRE) The Songhay Empire was an African kingdom that began in the fifteenth century and grew to prominence in the sixteenth century. The three great kingdoms that emerged in the western Sudan all took advantage of their strategic positions along trade routes connected to international commercial networks. The Berbers, an

See also: British Empire; Cold War; Peace Corps; Peacekeeping and Military Interventions; Terrorism References Bowden, Mark. Black Hawk Down. New York: Bantam Books, 1999.

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Tomb of Muhammad Ture (who took the name Askia), ruler of the Songhai Empire from 1493 to 1528, at Gao in present-day Mali. (Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY)

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indigenous people from North Africa, sold goods from the western Sudan to North African merchants, who in turn sold them to Asians and Europeans. Imports from abroad then entered West Africa. The Sudan benefited from the extensive commercial activity, which led to the founding of towns, cities, and states. Ghana arose during the fourth century, peaked during the eleventh, and fell to other conquerors about 1240. Mali was established about 1230 and reached its height during the fourteenth century. Songhay was the most powerful. It appeared about 1468, and was strongest during the sixteenth century. The Songhay Empire rose to eminence with the reign of Sunni Ali. He was a great general who defeated all of the fear-inspiring warriors of the western Sudan; among them were the Mossi, the Fulani, and the Dogon. He then captured Timbuktu from the Tauregs in 1468, and finally succeeded in conquering the important trading city of Jenne in 1473. These victories gave him command of the trade routes and the Niger Delta. Ali’s rule was a mobile military government created by conquest and maintained by force. He used military commanders to govern his vast lands. Sunni Ali organized a military fleet on the river comprised of war canoes, and he used several capitals as his bases of operations in order to oversee his vast domains. He continued to push the Songhay Empire, which now included its predecessors, Ghana and Mali, far into the northern desert. He governed effectively by allowing the local rulers in the more distant provinces to remain in their positions, as long as they collected taxes from the people and maintained order. Because Ali carried on a relentless pursuit of the Muslim Tauregs, and displayed little respect for Islam, he was www.abc-clio.com

frequently criticized in Arabic sources as a ruthless oppressor. Sunni Ali was always guided by politics and economics. He tolerated the Islamic faith and exhibited public support for the Muslim traders in his realm as the traditional source of economic prosperity in West Africa. However, Ali, like his predecessors, remained faithful to the old African ways, realizing that the basis of power in West Africa lay in maintaining the loyalty of its indigenous peoples. His military strength was dependent upon the support of his people, the indigenous fishermen and farmers of the Middle Niger region. Ali did not hesitate to punish the Muslim community if he suspected them of disloyalty. For instance, he persecuted the Muslims in Timbuktu because they supported his enemies the Tauregs. At heart, Ali was an African priest-king in the old tradition, always cognizant of the religious needs of his own people, and striving to balance the demands of the old African traditions with the new religion, Islam. Although the Muslims may have viewed him as a tyrant, Sunni Ali is today honored in Songhay oral traditions as the founder of Songhay civilization and as an authentic conquering hero. Sunni Ali died in 1492. Askia Muhammad (1493–1528) became the next powerful Songhay king. Known as Askia the Great, he led the empire in its glory. He established the Askia dynasty, and then went on to make intelligent and subtle use of Islam in order to reinforce his power in the Sudan. In other words, Askia the Great was most admired for his diplomatic skills. His taking the title “askia” instead of “sunni” was a symbol of his new administration. Askia was a military rank in the Songhai army, whereas sunni had been the traditional royal title.

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Just three years after his ascent to the throne, Askia Muhammad undertook a two-year pilgrimage to Mecca; the purpose of his trip was to cement relations with the key Muslim powers in North Africa. Like Mansa Musa of Mali before him, he traveled with a large caravan and distributed much gold. The Egyptian caliph named him the caliph of the Sudan, and he received the support of a noted North African Muslim cleric named al-Maghili, whose works are still known in West Africa. After he returned to Songhay Askia Muhammad began to assert Muslim law and learning in the empire, relying on the guidance of al Maghili. Timbuktu and Jenne were revived as important centers of Muslim learning and culture. Leo Africanus, the well-known traveler and writer from Morocco, first visited the Songhay empire in 1510, and published a colorful account of the region, vividly describing the town of Timbuktu as a thriving center of learning and commercial activity filled with learned men like doctors, judges, and priests, as well as bustling with many shops, merchants, and craftsmen. Askia Muhammad’s revival of cultural centers like Timbuktu provided the basis for a full flowering of indigenous scholarship. Native writers left valuable historical records written in Arabic, which had become the literary language of the western Sudan. The works of scholars trained in the religious and intellectual center at Timbuktu make up some of the first histories about the continent by indigenous Africans. One of these early scholars was Ahmed Baba. He completed about fifty works on Islamic law, compiled a biographical dictionary of Muslim scholars, and collected an extensive library. Some of his works are still used by contemporary www.abc-clio.com

Muslims in West Africa. A historian predating Muhammad and Baba was the Soninke born scholar Mahmud Kati. He was born in 1468 and reportedly lived to be 125. He was a personal follower of Askia Muhammad, beginning his long career by accompanying the emperor to Mecca. Kati began his major work, Tarikh al Fattash (The History of the Seeker of Knowledge), in 1519 and his descendants completed the text in 1665. Askia Muhammad developed Jenne as another important cultural and economic center. The trade products were essentially the same as they had been for Mali: salt and gold dust. Jenne was an important link between the traders in Timbuktu and the producers of gold in the forest regions of the south. Salt blocks traveled by canoe from Timbuktu to Jenne, where porters then transported this valuable commodity to the southern goldfields. Gold was the main impetus for the trans-Saharan trade, as well as kola nuts, and captured slaves for sale in the Muslim north. Additional trade items were luxury goods, horses for the military, and cloth. Jenne flourished as a prosperous Muslim market and city under both the Mali and Songhay empires. However, archaeologists have determined from studies of its burial sites, that the city was first established by ancient Africans, not Muslims. Jenne developed in the Niger floodplain, and the evidence indicates that it was occupied by Africans as early as the third century BCE. Terracotta figures have been excavated that place Jenne within the ancient, West African terracotta tradition along with the Nok culture. Askia Muhammad was an excellent administrator. He made some appointments based on merit while others were hereditary.

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He also governed with the help of Muslim officials and advisors. Each of the five provinces in his empire was headed by a governor. The governor was a royal appointee, not a local ruler, so he was very much dependent upon the emperor for his position. Governors raised their own armies, which were used to ensure the payment of tribute. Askia Muhammad modernized the military by organizing a permanent army, navy, and cavalry. Still, the emperor recognized traditional beliefs and customs. He never forced the common people to accept Islam. Many traditional customs were retained at court, traditional leaders were acknowledged at the village level, and Askia Muhammad never conducted a jihad against unbelievers in his realm. He was not as effective, though, in the matter of royal succession. The empire began to disintegrate shortly after the rule of Askia Muhammad was brought down in a rebellion led by one of his own sons in 1528. Years of civil war followed that undermined the empire. Then the Moroccans emerged as a very real threat. They intended to take over the lucrative trans-Saharan trade. In 1590 they succeeded in crossing the Saharan desert with a small army reinforced with European muskets that were superior to bows, spears, and swords. The Moroccans easily defeated the Songhay in battle, and the invasion was soon followed by political collapse. The Songhay Empire split apart and its people retreated to their original homeland along the middle Niger River. Earnestine Jenkins See also: Fulani; Islam, African American; Sudan (Darfur Region) References Conah, Graham. African Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

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Davidson, Basil. The African Past. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1967. July, Robert. A History of the African People. 4th ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1992. Oliver, Roland. The African Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Shillington, Kevin. History of Africa, rev. ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

SOUKOUS Probably the most influential African musical style, and definitely the most popular African dance music of the twentieth century, soukous (often known in Africa as “Congo music,” “Congolese rumba,” or “Lingala music”) is the electrified “rumba” of Central Africa that developed largely in the capital cities of Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, and, especially, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). Much as the African rhythms and calland-response traditions that left Africa with the slave trade returned to Africa in the form of rap music at the end of the twentieth century (creating a profusion of African rap styles); those same exported traditions previously returned to Africa in the 1930s in the form of the Afro-Spanish/Cuban rumba music known as “son.” This music Central Africa transformed into soukous. In Brazzaville and Kinshasa—in Africa’s equivalent of the musical syncretism of New Orleans that produced jazz—the rural Afro-Cuban dance music son was combined with the indigenous musical style known as maringa and jazz influences from Europe and America to create soukous. The most influential early soukous groups included African Jazz, in the early and mid-1950s, followed by the group O.K. Jazz, with guitar great Franco (François Luambo), and Rock’a Mambo.

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Soukous bands are typically large and include singers, one to four guitars, and various percussive and brass instruments. From the fifties to the present, there has been a general shift from a more acoustic and melody-focused soukous to a fasterpaced, electric soukous with a “galloping” rumba beat and extended electric guitar passages that are distinctive in their bright and flowing sounds at the upper ends of the guitar’s register. Each of these extended passages of instrumental jamming (guitars often with saxophones and/or trumpets) is called a sebene (pronounced “say-ben”) and is a distinctive “dance” feature of soukous that, in concert, can last upwards of half an hour. Another distinctive feature of soukous is that the lyrics are typically sung in the melodious language of Lingala. Kevin M. Hickey See also: Guinea Dance; Jazz and the Blues; Kongo; Music (African) References Stapleton, Chris, and Chris May. African AllStars: The Pop Music of a Continent. London: Quartet Books, 1987. Stewart, Gary. Breakout: Profiles in African Rhythm. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Stewart, Gary. Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos. New York: Verso, 2000.

SOULOUQUE, FAUSTIN (1782?–1867) Faustin Soulouque (aka Faustin I) ruled as Haiti’s president-for-life, then as emperor, from 1847 to 1859. Soulouque was born in Petit-Goâve around 1782 (the exact date is uncertain). His parents, both of whom had belonged to the Mandingo tribe in Africa, had been brought to Haiti as slaves when Haiti (then known as Saint-Domingue) was www.abc-clio.com

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France’s colony. A professional soldier, Soulouque served under André Rigaud, Alexandre Pétion, Jean-Pierre Boyer, and Jean-Baptiste Riché, charged with such sensitive tasks as commanding the Presidential Guard. When President Riché died in February 1847, the Senate gathered to pick a successor. Deadlocked over two competing candidates, senators chose Soulouque as a consensual alternative for the presidency on March 1, 1847. The light-skinned, elite mulâtres (mulattos) traditionally picked noirs (blacks) of pure African descent as nominal leaders of the country, only to manipulate them when they reached office. Soulouque was round, jovial, illiterate, seemingly uninterested in politics, and many wrongly concluded that Soulouque would be a harmless puppet. Soulouque soon proved otherwise. Relying on black generals he had befriended during his years in the army, and on a paramilitary force known as zinglins, Soulouque spent 1848 rounding up prominent mulatto politicians in Port-au-Prince and the south. Those who did not flee in time were harassed, arrested, and killed. A secret police and further executions in later years enforced a regime of terror that even Soulouque’s dictatorial predecessors seldom equaled. Other Haitian dictators had often secretly believed in Voodoo while defending the Catholic faith in public; Soulouque and his wife, Adelina, openly practiced both religions, which helped cow potential enemies into submission. On August 26, 1849, Soulouque was crowned emperor of Haiti under the name Faustin I. The crown of gilded cardboard Soulouque used for the occasion, along with the colorful nobility he proceeded to appoint (there was a Comte de l’Ile-à-Vache,

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or Count of Cow Island, among others), quickly made him the object of ridicule among European diplomatic circles. Victor Hugo, who despised French emperor Napoleon III, compared Soulouque to a black Napoleon III. A more elaborate coronation ceremony, with crowns and gowns brought from France at great expense, took place on April 18, 1852. Soulouque made repeated attempts to conquer the neighboring Dominican Republic. This goal had been pursued by several of his predecessors (Toussaint Louverture, notably), but it also had the nationalist aim of warding off French, British, and U.S. influence in Hispaniola (foreign powers blockaded Haitian ports in August 1851). A first expedition (launched in March 1849) unexpectedly faltered in April when Gen. Pedro Santana routed Haitian troops near Ciudad Santo Domingo. Two other short-lived expeditions followed in June 1850 and November 1855. Soulouque’s military proved unsuccessful, but he nevertheless managed to expand Haiti’s eastern border near Hinche. Foreign expeditions, the extensive police apparatus, royal pomp, and widespread embezzlement were hard to finance. Many Haitians (including Soulouque himself ) bypassed the customs house, greatly diminishing a traditionally important source of government revenue. Extortion made up some of the difference; the printing press and default on foreign loans provided the rest. Inflation ensued. The Spanish silver piastre, which only bought one Haitian gourde in the 1820s, bought five gourdes by the time Soulouque took over in 1847; when he left office, the piastre was worth 20 gourdes. In 1856–1857, when a worldwide deflation lowered the price of Haitian www.abc-clio.com

cotton and coffee, a full-blown economic crisis struck Haiti. In January 1859, Fabre Nicolas Geffrard, a Haitian general whom Soulouque had turned against, raised an army that fought its way from Gonaïves to Port-au-Prince, the capital. Soulouque managed to escape on a British ship that took him to Kingston, Jamaica, and exile. Following the fall of Geffrard in 1867, Soulouque returned to Haiti as an apolitical retiree. He died in Petit-Goâve on August 6, 1867. U.S. and European contemporaries scorned Soulouque for being a ridiculous, bloodthirsty self-proclaimed king. Today, historians frequently criticize Soulouque for passing few reforms of substance while in office, and of seeking power for power’s sake. The criticism is well deserved, but Soulouque’s presidency and reign are representative of a wider conflict in Haitian society that pits black leaders (populists, speakers of Creole, adepts of Voodoo, and nationalists) against mulattos (elitist, French-speaking, Catholic, and internationally oriented people). Soulouque, who fought Dominicans, defaulted on foreign debts, worshiped Voodoo, learned French at a late age, and promoted fellow blacks to the highest ranks of government, clearly belonged to the former school. Philippe R. Girard

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See also: Haiti; Pétion, Alexandre Sabès; Voodoo References Heinl, Robert D., Nancy G. Heinl and Michael Heinl. Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995. New York: University Press of America, 1996. MacLeod, Murdo. The Soulouque Regime in Haiti, 1847–1859: A Reevaluation. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Center for Latin American Studies, 1971.

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SOUTH AFRICA, HISTORY AND POLITICS The history of the South African region from the precolonial era to its present-day republic includes a diverse portrait of indigenous and colonizing peoples, and a painful account of the colonial practice of apartheid, the long road to its dismantling, and the current issues faced by the republic. In the pre-Christian era, southern Africa was inhabited by nomadic San hunter-gatherers. Around 500 BCE, Khoikhoi pastoralists began to move south and, despite some resistance, to assimilate the San—hence the term “Khoisan.” Agriculture came to the region with the slow southward drift of Bantu-speaking peoples into the region from around 500 CE. These Bantu-speaking peoples gradually assimilated, expelled, or killed the Khoisan. In 1652, a refreshment station was set up at the Cape by the Dutch East India Company, which soon began to appropriate Khoisan land, encourage European settlers, and import slaves from Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, the African kingdoms were consolidating their power with increasing violence, notably the Zulus under Shaka, the Ndebele under Mzilikazi, and the Sotho under Moshoeshoe. After repeated tussles with the Dutch, the British secured the Cape Colony in 1806; 5,000 Britons were soon settled in the colony (1820). Between 1835 and 1840, several thousand Dutch-descended colonists, angered by Britain’s emancipation of their slaves, trekked north, in what has become known as the “Great Trek.” In 1838, the Zulus, refusing to relinquish their land, massacred 70 trekkers, only to be defeated at the Ncome River. Anxious to retain power over Port Natal (Durban), the British annexed the region (Natal) in 1842. After lengthy wars, the British defeated the www.abc-clio.com

Xhosas (1878) and Zulus (1879), forcibly removing them from their land. By 1898, when Transvaal commandos conquered the Venda, the region’s entire indigenous population had been dispossessed and colonized. Industrialization and urbanization in southern Africa arrived with the discovery of diamonds in the Northern Cape (1867) and gold in the Transvaal (1886). Africans flocked to work in the mines; color bars were introduced to secure skilled work and high wages for whites; pass laws restricting the movement and employment of Africans were tightened. Having recognized the South African Republic (the Transvaal) (1852) and the Orange Free State (1854) as independent Afrikaner states, and now anxious to control the mines, Britain annexed the diamond fields (1871) and reannexed the Transvaal (1877). In 1881, the Transvalers defeated the British and regained qualified independence. Meanwhile, some Dutch descendants began to standardize “Afrikaans”—a Dutch Creole—and to call themselves “Afrikaners.” Tension between the Afrikaners and the British led to the South African War (1899), during which 26,000 Afrikaner women and children died from starvation and disease in British concentration camps. A peace treaty promising the republics self-government was eventually signed in 1902. Following much negotiation, the Union of South Africa was founded in 1910 as a unitary state comprising four provinces (the Transvaal and Orange Free State republics, and the Natal and Cape colonies), with Dutch and English as its official languages, and no extension of the franchise to nonwhites. Whites were by no means unified by the Union: a group of radical Afrikaners soon split to form the National Party (NP) in 1914, and following World Wars I

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and II—both of which South Africa entered on the British side—Afrikaner Nationalists again split to the right. When white mineworkers revolted against the use of cheap black labor (and 150 died), a Nationalist-Labour coalition, led by J. B. M. Hertzog, came to power promising to ensure white workers’ rights. Meanwhile, nonwhites were beginning to demand reform through various fledgling organizations: the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) (1923); the South African Native National Congress (1912), later the African National Congress (ANC) (1925); the Communist Party of South Africa (1921); and, in the late 1920s, the hugely successful Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU). The 1913 Natives Land Act, limiting African landownership, left 7 percent of South Africa’s land in the hands of the black majority in the form of overpopulated “reserves” (which served as reservoirs of cheap black labor). Meanwhile, the government attempted to curb the influx of Africans to the cities by setting educational standards for employment (1922), tightening pass laws, and clearing slums (1923). Crucially, in 1949, militant ANC members—most famously Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo—were coming to the fore of the movement. A major gold-miners’ strike in 1946 of between 60,000 and 100,000 Africans faced brutal state suppression. In 1948, riding on fears of black competition, the National Party, led by D. F. Malan, came to power under the slogan of “apartheid” (apartness). Over the next forty-six years, the National Party promoted Afrikaner interests and white supremacy, while systematically eroding all black participation in the political system. However, while they feared the black majority, their reliance upon cheap www.abc-clio.com

black labor made total segregation undesirable. Instead, detailed discriminatory legislation was passed, criminalizing interracial relationships (1949, 1950); racially classifying people as white, Asian, colored, and Bantu (black African); allowing the government to ban opponents without the right to appeal; racially zoning living and working areas; separating amenities; and extending the pass laws (1952). Over 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from “black spots”—which generally became white areas—to the reserves. The government soon grouped the reserves into eight (later ten) fragmented “tribal homelands,” creating the illusion of a white majority and causing ethnic tensions among Africans, and took over African education, implementing curricula that limited African horizons. In 1952, the ANC and SAIC launched a national campaign of defiance against the pass laws, and, in 1955, an alliance of anti-apartheid groups (including the ANC and SAIC) adopted a “Freedom Charter.” One hundred fifty-six members of the alliance were charged with (and, after a five-year trial, acquitted of ) high treason. In 1959, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) split from the ANC. When in early 1960 the PAC called on Africans to defy pass laws, police shot dead 67 Africans in Sharpeville. Countrywide protest erupted; police arrested and jailed thousands; a state of emergency was declared; and all African political organizations were banned. The ANC and PAC, debarred from political activity and pushed underground, initiated an armed struggle through new military wings. In 1963, 17 leaders of the ANC’s military wing—including Mandela—were arrested by the police and sentenced to life imprisonment. Prominent liberal politicians and religious leaders continued the

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public campaign against apartheid. On June 16, 1976, 15,000 Soweto schoolchildren peacefully protested against being taught in Afrikaans: two black youths were shot dead by police; unrest spread across the country; over 575 people (mainly young and black) died; and the security police brutally murdered Steve Biko (figurehead of the Black Consciousness Movement). South Africa—which had declared itself a republic and left the British Commonwealth in 1961—became increasingly isolated. Between 1976 and 1981, the government foisted “independence” on the “homelands” which the world refused to recognize. By 1978, the declining white and steadily growing black populations, increased violence, sharp recession, foreign disinvestment and criticism, and the collapse of Afrikaner solidarity rendered the apartheid system increasingly untenable. Under President P. W. Botha (1978–1989), palliative reforms were made, while countless government opponents suffered torture and detention without trial, scores dying in police custody. In 1984, the government created a new tricameral parliament consisting of three uniracial chambers—white, Asian, and colored (mixed race)—but carefully ensured its domination by whites. An interracial alliance of 525 organizations, the United Democratic Front (UDF) set about (with the help of the increasingly militant African trade unions) organizing boycotts, sabotage, strikes, and disrupting the colored (mixed race) and Asian elections. Violence spiraled throughout the 1980s, including a full-scale civil war between supporters of the UDF/ANC and Inkatha (a Zulu nationalist movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi and quietly armed by the government). Between 1981 and 1989, South African forces invaded Angola and www.abc-clio.com

conducted hit-and-run raids on Lesotho, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Zambia: over one million died as a result. In 1986, the government repealed the pass laws but state repression soon redoubled in a nationwide state of emergency. In 1987, a protracted miners’ strike of over 250,000 prompted the government to ban the UDF and 16 other organizations. In early 1990, President F. W. De Klerk unbanned the ANC, and all other proscribed organizations, and released thousands of political prisoners. On February 11, Mandela’s release from prison signaled the beginning of the transition to democracy. The government repealed apartheid legislation, and the ANC suspended the armed struggle. Formal talks among 19 political organizations collapsed following the Boipatong massacre, in which the ANC suspected police involvement. Negotiations soon resumed and an interim constitution was agreed upon in 1993. Following the 1994 elections, a Government of National Unity (GNU) with full legislative powers—in which minority parties would be included—was to devise a permanent constitution, which would include universal adult suffrage, a bill of rights, and an independent judiciary. Negotiations faced short-lived resistance from Inkatha, right-wing Afrikaner nationalists, and the nominally independent homeland of Bophuthatswana, which demanded a federation of sovereign states rather than the centralized state favored by the ANC. Civil war continued in Natal; the far right bombed ANC offices; scores were shot during an Inkatha demonstration; ANC youth leader Chris Hani was assassinated; and the PAC gunned down 11 churchgoers. Under pressure, Buthelezi finally agreed to enter the elections. In April 1994, the country’s

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first and strikingly peaceful democratic election gave the ANC a solid majority, and in May, Mandela was jubilantly sworn in as president of South Africa (alongside his two vice presidents, Thabo Mbeki and De Klerk). Framed under Mandela’s exceptional leadership, the South African constitution remains one of the most liberal in the world. However, despite a hugely successful program of electrification, and controversial land and affirmative action legislation, reconstruction and development was frustratingly slow; and South Africa’s crime rates remain among the highest in the world. The ANC’s invasion of Lesotho in 1998, its arms deals, and high government salaries also faced criticism. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, cochaired from 1996 by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and offering amnesty from prosecution in exchange for full disclosure, was more positively received: thousands of victims and perpetrators came forward but many apartheid functionaries remained silent; and the ANC’s detention camps were left unexamined. Following the 1999 general election (which the ANC again won), Mandela stepped down and Thabo Mbeki—prophet of an “African Renaissance”—became president. Mbeki (reelected in 2004) has increasingly attracted criticism for his stance on HIV/AIDS and for his failure to condemn Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. While South Africa boasts a growing economy, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, exacerbated by the poverty of millions of South Africans, threatens to overshadow the country’s other achievements. Laura Charlotte Pechey See also: Angola; Lesotho; Mandela, Nelson; Mozambique; Namibia; Sharpeville Massacre; Sisulu, Walter; Swaziland; Zambia; Zimbabwe

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References Davenport, Rodney, and Christopher Saunders. South Africa: A Modern History. 5th ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Ross, Robert. A Concise History of South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Thompson, Leonard. A History of South Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

SOYINKA,WOLE (1934–) Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, activist, and educator. He is a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born in Abeokuta, southwestern Nigeria, on July 13, 1934, Soyinka was educated at a government high school and University College,

Wole Soyinka of Nigeria is known as a poet, novelist, playwright, critic, and filmmaker of international stature. In 1986, he became the first black African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. (AFP/Getty Images)

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Ibadan, and at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. With about 40 published books of plays, poetry, fiction, autobiography, criticism, and politics, Soyinka is easily Nigeria’s most adventurous and prolific writer. Soyinka has held numerous professorial positions in universities across Africa, Europe, and America. An early story of his life dramatizes his childhood role as emissary for his aunt, Funmilayo RansomeKuti, leader of the Egba women’s 1945 demonstration that dethroned the traditional ruler of Egbaland. In college, Soyinka cofounded the Pyrate Confraternity to counter the perversion of Nigerian youth education by the importation of colonial foppery. Such unrelenting opposition to the excesses of institutionalized power marks all of Soyinka’s lifelong activism and writing. His representation of Nigeria as a hopeless half-child in his 1960 independence drama, A Dance of the Forests, drew the ire of the federal government. His The Man Died (1972) relates his 20 months of incarceration by the Nigerian government for protesting against the country’s civil war. Soyinka occupies a unique position as the only Nigerian that has been charged with treasonable felony twice, by the military dictatorships of Yakubu Gowon and Sani Abacha. The conferment of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature on Soyinka was both an affirmation of his commitment to social justice and an enduring recognition of the evocative defiance of his poetic power and imaginative complexity. Obi Iwaniwu References Soyinka, Wole. The Man Died. Middlesex: Penguin, 1977. Soyinka, Wole. A Dance of the Forests. In Collected Plays, 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Soyinka, Wole. Ake: The Years of Childhood. Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum, 1988. Soyinka, Wole. Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.

SPANISH EMPIRE For many decades before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, Spain was commercially active in the Mediterranean Sea and along the Atlantic coast of Africa. The 1469 marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, which united Aragon and Castile, helped pave the way for Columbus. Because the South Atlantic had been ceded to Portugal in the Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479), the two monarchs realized that it would be advantageous for Spain to seek new areas of commercial and territorial expansion. Upon the success of Columbus’s first voyage, Spain immediately financed a second. A combination of arms and disease, against which native populations had no defense facilitated this second conquest, which in turn gave Spain a dominantly strong economic position in Europe. At the height of its imperial empire, from about 1402 to 1824, Spain extended its territories around the globe. In the Americas, this expansion ranged from Alaska through the northwestern United States and California/Mexico; from the northernmost border of the Territory of Louisiana to Central America; south to Chile and Patagonia; and from present-day Georgia south to the Caribbean islands, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina. At times, Spain occupied various African territories in the Western Sahara (Morocco) and along the coast of what is now Equatorial Guinea, including the offshore island of Fernando Póo (Bioko). In Asia, Spain ruled

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the Philippine Islands; Oceania (Guam, Micronesia, Palau, and the Northern Marianas); and the Caroline Islands. In 1402, the Frenchman Jean de Béthencourt claimed the Canary Islands for Henry III of Castile; in 1492, Columbus stopped at the islands on his voyage to the New World. Spain did not officially possess the islands until 1479, and even then before all three (Grand Canary, La Palma, and Tenerife) were conquered. Portugal acquired the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde, and the São Tomé islands, and focused on spice trade with the East under Vasco da Gama. Until the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Spain and Portugal competed over the South Atlantic. The treaty protected Portugal’s exclusive route to India, and Spain dominated the Americas. After the conquest of the Canary Islands, the Spanish imposed a new economic model: expanding in the non-European world and taking advantage of forced colonial labor/servitude. Practicing single-crop cultivation, they established plantations of sugar cane, harvested by black slaves imported from continental Africa. Mining was also lucrative: silver could be easily mined in Potosí (Peru) and in Zacatecas (Mexico), thanks to the abundant supply of native labor. Other profitable exports from the Americas included cacao, tobacco, sugar, and animal skins. In 1503, the Board of Trade (Casa de la Contratación) was established to retain the trade monopoly with the American colonies and to govern commerce. According to the Spanish royal edict of repartimiento, settlers were allotted native Americans as possessions in the forcedlabor system known as encomienda. After the successful settlement of Hispanola in the early 1500s, Spanish conquistadors sought new territories. In 1508, Juan www.abc-clio.com

Ponce de León conquered Puerto Rico; by 1515, Diego Velázquez conquered Cuba. The first settlement on the mainland was Darién in Panama, founded by Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1512; later, in 1513, Balboa sighted the Pacific (South Sea). By the early 1500s, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Cuba were Spanish possessions— the most well-known Spanish colonies in the New World—and also points from which to set out in new directions. In 1507, the New World was named America after Amerigo Vespucci, an explorer whose letters provided information useful to European commerce. The exploration and conquest of Central America largely took place from 1522 to 1527. The fall of two major cities—Tenochtitlán in 1521 and Atahualpa in 1533—facilitated the Spanish conquest and settlement of Mexico. Juan Ponce de León returned to Florida in 1521 with a second expedition, but failed to establish a settlement. Perhaps the most successful conquistador leader was Hernán Cortés, who described his conquests in his published Letters. In the campaigns of 1519–1521, with a small Spanish force (and with the crucial support of around 200,000 Amerindian allies), Cortés defeated the formidable Aztec empire. Thus, Mexico was brought into the empire as New Spain. Similarly, Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca empire, which would become the Viceroyalty of Peru from 1531 to 1533. This area was particularly rich in gold and silver. During the reign of Charles I, Spain, with its vast holdings in the New World, became the most powerful state in Western Europe. Renamed Charles V in 1519 upon becoming Holy Roman Emperor, Charles commissioned the voyage of Ferdinand

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Magellan, a Portuguese explorer who found a westward route to Asia. En route from Asia to Spain, he was killed in a local war in the Philippines; after Magellan established claims in the East, the expedition reached Spain without him in 1522. By the early 1530s, the Spanish explorers had gone from Florida to Nova Scotia in North America. From 1537 to 1597, Spain had to focus upon the defense of the Caribbean from French, English, and Dutch attacks, leading the Spanish to develop the transatlantic flota system: two substantial fleets escorted by warships, one that left for Veracruz, Mexico, and the other for Panama. The Board of Trade in Seville governed commerce in the colonies. In 1543, the Crown created a merchants’ guild (consulado) to ensure a monopoly over trade and establish a permanent Spanish military presence. Fortifications were built to protect Havana, Santo Domingo, San Juan de Puerto Rico, and Portobelo. In 1559, the Treaty of ChateauCambrensis brought recognition of Spanish dominion over some of the regions of Italy (Sicily, Sardinia, Milan, and Naples), Flanders, and the Low Countries. Henry II of France, an aggressive enemy of Spain, died during the celebrations following the treaty, thus removing France from competing for power with Spain and the Hapsburgs. Chronic civil war and religious unrest further weakened France’s power. Using New Spain as a point of departure, the Spanish then colonized the Philippines, departing from Navidad, Jalisco, in November of 1564. Miguel López de Legazapi (also spelled Legaspi), accompanied by his pilot, a missionary named Andres de Urdaneta, arrived in February 1565. The expedition returned to www.abc-clio.com

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New Spain by October 8, setting a record for unprecedented speed and for crossing the Pacific from west to east. The Spanish also settled Sant Agustín (Saint Augustine) in 1565, protecting the northern flank of the empire from the French. Meanwhile, the Council of Trent convened (1545–1564) to create and approve an agenda for reform of the Catholic Church to counter the effects of the Protestant Reformation. In a famous debate in 1550, the ontology of native Americans was called into question by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (his position was that they were like animals, without souls). The priest Bartolomé de las Casas defended their humanity and their human rights; his ultimate aim, however, was to bring them into the faith (but not by force). As a result, enslavement was banned by law—but still carried out in practice. Another result of the Council Trent was the Calvinist-led 1566 rebellion of the Netherlands, the richest provinces in Europe, that wanted autonomy from the decrees of the Council of Trent. English support of Dutch rebels led the Spanish to plan a later, albeit unsuccessful, invasion of England. In 1569, offices of the Inquisition were authorized in Lima and Mexico City by Philip II. Shortly thereafter, he rewrote the royal decrees, replacing “conquest” with “pacification.” Spain defeated the Ottoman forces on the island of Malta, strategically located south of Sicily. When Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent died, leaving the sultanate to his son Selim the Sot, Philip II of Spain was emboldened to go to war with the Ottoman Empire. In 1571, Spain defeated the Turks at Lepanto in the famous battle by that name, thus wresting control of the Mediterranean from the Ottoman Empire.

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Another important event in 1571 was the dispatching of the first Manila galleons to New Spain by López de Legazapi. Spanish ships then regularly crossed the Pacific between Acapulco and Manila, carrying Mexican silver in exchange for Chinese silks, ceramics, and other Asian products. This profitable trade route created a Spanish stronghold in Asia. In 1583, an audiencia (division of viceroyalties) made Manila politically subordinate to New Spain. The Spanish were less successful in Northern Europe, with Dutch rebellions in 1566 and 1572. The legendary 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel was also costly for Spain, with losses of more than 30 ships and 15,000 men. This defeat in turn raised shipping rates, bankrupting Spain. In 1596, a retaliatory Anglo-Dutch fleet sacked Cadiz, Spain, destroying 34 Americabound ships and 4 million ducats worth of freight. Hostilities with the Dutch continued until the truce of 1609, also known as the Twelve Years’ Truce, or Pax Hispanica. Peace with France was established with the 1598 Treaty of Vervins; a treaty with James I of England in 1604 allowed Spain to focus its attention—temporarily—on the troublesome Dutch provinces. War broke out between Spain and the Netherlands again in 1621. In the seventeenth century, Spain’s European rivals of England, Holland, and France began to encroach upon the vast reach of Spain’s territories, planting colonies in the Lesser Antilles, the Guianas, and Central America. Economically, the colonies profited from or survived on piracy, sugar production based on slave labor, and contraband trade with Spain. The Portuguese claimed a much larger www.abc-clio.com

part of Brazil than agreed upon the 1594 Treaty of Tordesillas. Spain gained the port of Ceuta in 1668, but lost Gibraltar to Britain in 1704 in the War of Spanish Succession. In the War of Polish Succession, Spain took Naples and Sicily back from Austria, and took Cuba during the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1742). Spain lost territories to Britain but recovered them during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). In 1769, Spain began mission planning in California. In 1777, Portugal received what is now Uruguay (then Colonia do Sacramento) in exchange for the land currently called Equatorial Guinea. The Spanish Empire had declined, in part due to the difficulty of maintaining its colonies. Rivalry for wealth and power caused tensions between the elites in Europe and in the colonies. The destruction suffered by the Spanish fleet at the hands of the French at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), and the Peninsular War (1808) also contributed to Spain’s declining power. Similarly, in the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution largely bypassed Spain, causing its economy to decline. With financial troubles, a weak government, and a declining navy, Spain could no longer prevent a rapid expansion of contraband trade with the colonies. Two conspiracies at the end of the eighteenth century were harbingers of troubles ahead. The Conspiracy of Minas Gerais (1788–1789) and the Conspiracy of the Tailors in Salvador da Bahía (1798) were abortive attempts at revolt against the Europeans, in this case, the Portuguese. The conspirators were executed, but the uprisings set other events in motion. Influenced by Enlightenment ideals and inspired by the French Revolution,

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these attempts at rebellion foreshadowed the independence movements of the next century. Napoleon’s bold seizure of power in Iberia (1807–1808) also created a pretext for the colonies to govern themselves in the temporary absence of a Spanish monarch. The French territories also sought independence. Napoleon’s efforts to subdue the revolt in San Domingue (Santo Domingo) were unsuccessful, resulting in Haitian independence. Each colony’s struggle for independence was unique, but most of the American colonies became independent in the early 1800s. In 1806 and 1807, British forces occupied Buenos Aires. The colonial rebels, newly confident, rose up against the Spanish authorities and other European occupying powers in a number of strategic locations: La Paz, Mexico City, Chihuaha, Quito (now in Ecuador), Caracas (now in Venezuela), Santa Fe de Bogotá (now in Colombia), Granada, Santiago (Chile), Las Piedras, Asunción (now in Argentina; then in Paraguay), and Cuzco (Peru). Presentday Argentina became an independent state in 1816; Chile in 1818; New Granada, under the legendary Simón Bolívar, in 1819; Mexico in 1821; Ecuador in 1822; and the area that is now Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia (named after Bolívar) in 1825, then called the Republic of Gran Colombia. Santo Domingo declared independence in 1821 and, for a brief period of time, sought to be included in Bolivar’s Republic of Gran Colombia. Santo Domingo was occupied and ruled by Haiti until a revolution in 1844. The United States was the first nation to recognize Gran Colombia and Mexico, in 1822. President James Monroe asserted the famous Monroe Doctrine, stating that European interference in the Americas www.abc-clio.com

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would endanger its “peace and safety.” In 1823, the United Provinces of present-day Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) declared independence from Mexico. After the former British colonies in America became the United States, Spain ceded the Ohio Valley; in 1800, it returned the Louisiana Territory to France. In the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the United States bought Louisiana from Napoleon, and in 1819, acquired Florida by treaty. After the wars of independence from 1810 to 1826, Spain no longer had a vast empire in the Americas, only Cuba and Puerto Rico; in North Africa, Melilla and Ceuta; and in the east, the Philippines, Guam, and the Micronesian islands. Napoleon tried to take over Spain, but had to face guerilla warfare and the uprising of the Spanish people. This attempt was followed by the Peninsular War, various civil wars, a republic, and an unsuccessful democracy. From 1868 to 1898, Cubans fought for independence and won with the help of North America. In the Spanish-American War of 1898, Spain had to contend with the United States and Cuba. The United States purchased Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Guam. (Since 1959, however, Cuba has been under the leadership of Fidel Alejandro Castro, who overthrew the regime of Batista, became prime minister of Cuba in February 1959, transformed Cuba into the first Communist state in the Western Hemisphere, and has held effective power in the country ever since. As of 2007, he is the world’s longest-ruling head of government.) In 1899, the Marianas and Marshall Islands were sold to Germany, and at the end of the nineteenth century, Spain had only a few African holdings. Spain had

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gained Ifni, south of Marrakesh, in 1860, declaring it a protectorate in 1884. In 1911–1912, Spain had formal claims to Morocco, although it was divided with France. The Rif Berber rebellion led by Abdelkrim was suppressed by the French, bloodily, in 1925. The Spanish Civil War was fought 1936–1939 under General Francisco Franco. In World War II, Franco’s forces overcame those of Vichy France in Tangiers, but Spain did not and could not invest substantially in its African colonies. Spain surrendered most of its territories to France when French Morocco gained independence in 1956, but retained control of Ifni, which had been governed jointly with Spanish Sahara since 1936. The Moroccan sultan Mohammed V invaded Spanish Sahara in 1957 in the Ifni War, also known as La Guerra Ignorada, the Forgotten War. Tarfaya was given to Mohammed V, and Spanish Sahara was reconfigured from the north (Saguia el-Hamra) and the south (Río de Oro). The Spanish Parliament convened with representatives from the Gulf of Guinea, now Equatorial Guinea, in 1959. The new country, Equatorial Guinea, was granted limited autonomy in 1963 and independence in 1968. The Sidi Ifni enclave was returned to Morocco by Spain on January 4, 1969. The former Spanish Sahara lasted until the Green March of 1975, when Spain was compelled to withdraw from the region. Spain and the European Union both claim equal parts of the Canary Islands and the African cities; Morocco still claims the Canaries, Ceuta, Melilla, and Isla Perejil (Leila in Arabic). Elizabeth A. Pallitto and Román A. Santillán See also: Casas, Bartolomé de las; Chile; Colombia; Colonialism; Cuba;

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Decolonization, African; Mexico; Mexico (Afro-Mexican Identity); Monroe Doctrine; Nicaragua; Paraguay; Peru; Postcolonial Studies; Puerto Rico References Covington, Paula H., ed. Latin America and the Caribbean: A Critical Guide to Research Sources. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. McNeil, Robert A., ed. Latin American Studies: A Basic Guide to Sources. 2nd ed. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990. Mills, Kenneth, and William B. Taylor, eds. Colonial Spanish America. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1998. Werlich, David P. Research Tools for Latin American Historians: A Select, Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1980. Handbook of Latin American Studies. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press. Handbook of Latin American Studies Online. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1936.

STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER (1811–1896) Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist author and activist whose antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became America’s first bestseller in 1852. She was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, daughter to Congregational Church minister Lyman Beecher. Harriet received her formal education at the Congregational Church and at the Hartford Female Seminary. Lyman Beecher moved his family to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1832 to serve as president of the Lane Theological Seminary. In 1836, Harriet married Calvin Stowe, an instructor at Lane, and bore seven children with him. Notable members of the Stowe household included clergymen Henry Ward and Edward Beecher, and reformer Catherine Beecher. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s texts deal primarily with the repercussions of Puritanism in New England during the eighteenth and

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References Ammons, Elizabeth, ed. Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1980. Crane, Gregg D. “The Look of the Higher Law: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Antislavery Fiction.” Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE

Harriet Beecher Stowe, U.S. author and antislavery advocate. She is most famous for her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (Library of Congress)

nineteenth centuries. Books by Stowe include Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852); A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853); Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856); The Minister’s Wooing (1859); The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862); Old Town Folks (1869); Sam Lawson’s Old Town Fireside Stories (1869); and Lady Byron Vindicated (1870). Stowe’s sentimental and religious stance against slavery led Abraham Lincoln to state that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the book that started the American Civil War. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is regarded as the novel that most accurately presented the valor of the American abolition movement, and as the American North’s international vehicle of propaganda that alleviated itself of the shame of having remained passive toward slavery. Gerry Del Guercio See also: Slave Narratives; Slavery (History)

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Founded on February 1, 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was created to encourage young activists to use sit-ins and nonviolent antisegregation protests during the Civil Rights Movement. The group was formed at the suggestion of Ella Baker, who was then the director of the Atlanta headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Perceived as more radical than the SCLC, the political ideals of SNCC in the early days were nonviolence and pacifism. But the continual threats from the whites, particularly during SNCC’s community programs, and the rise of militant black power with the election of Stokely Carmichael as SNCC chairman persuaded SNCC volunteers to resort to violence. In addition to citizenship education drives, SNCC led Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer, in 1961 and 1964 respectively. Freedom Rides were organized to desegregate bus terminals throughout the South. Along the way, many Freedom Riders received death threats and were brutally beaten by mobs. Eventually the U.S. Justice Department sent federal marshals to protect the riders. Freedom Summer was an effort to draw national attention to Mississippi’s racism and to register black voters in rural counties of the South. SNCC also helped to create the Mississippi Freedom

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Democratic Party (MFDP) that functioned as an alternative to the white-dominated state Democratic Party. Furthermore, SNCC protested America’s war in Vietnam and provided a model for the future feminist movement. The prominent members and leaders of SNCC included John Lewis, Stokeley Carmichael, Ella Baker, Julian Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, Robert Moses, and Diane Nash. Sathyaraj Venkatesan See also: Civil Rights Movement References Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1964.

SUDAN (DARFUR REGION) The Darfur region is the westernmost region of Sudan, where ethnically diverse peoples have historically coexisted peacefully, but became the scene of ethnic tensions and genocide. The Darfur region shares an international border with Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west and northwest, Libya to the north, and Egypt to the northeast. It also shares a border with three other Sudanese regions: Shimalya to the northeast, Kordofan to the east, and Bahr al-Ghazal to the south. The population of Darfur is about seven million people, who belong to more than 60 ethnic groups and whose members are largely categorized as Zurga (blacks or indigenous population) and Arabs. Although both categories of Darfur’s population are black or brown, they have since the late 1970s been categorizing themselves, and been categorized by outsiders, as Arabs and indigenous Africans. The Fur outnumber all www.abc-clio.com

other ethnic groups in the region. They are the founders of a kingdom that lasted for almost four centuries (1640–1917). This kingdom was a cultural and economic meeting point for West Africa, Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, and Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Therefore, in addition to its indigenous groups, such as Fur and Dajo, other groups from Central, West, and North Africa, the Nile region, and Arabian Peninsula migrated and settled in Darfur. Being a meeting point for the abovementioned regions, Darfur was probably involved in the transatlantic slave trade, but there is more documentation of its involvement in the trans-Saharan slave trade. The sultans of the Fur kingdom followed an accommodating policy by which they were able to integrate the groups and individuals who constituted the population of their kingdom. Most of the people who migrated as individuals or small families settled in the capital city of the kingdom, and many of them worked in the administration of the kingdom; some of them reached high positions as ministers or governors of the provinces. Those who migrated to the kingdom in bigger groups were offered areas where they settled. To further the integration of the immigrating population, the sultans were largely exogamous (they often married non-Fur women). The sultans divided their kingdom into six big administrative units known as dars (singular dar), which were like provinces or regions. These provinces were Dar Fashir and its surroundings (including the capital city and neighboring areas); Dar Daali (also known as Dar Ab-Asheikh), which included the plains to the east of Jabel Marra until Kordofan; Dar Abu Umong, which included the whole region from central Jabel Marra to the south and southeast up to Dar Firti, which presently includes northern

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parts of Bahr al-Ghazal and northwestern parts of Central African Republic; Dar Abu Dimang, which included western and southwestern parts of Jabel Marra to the west and southwest until Garcila (its center was Zalingai and its surroundings); Dar al-Takanawi lying to the north of Fashir (the capital) up to current southern fringes of Libya; and Dar al-Garib, which included the area to the west of Dar Abu Dimang up to Waddie (current Chad). Several groups were given autonomous status within these provinces and on several occasions they were directly accountable to the sultan in Fashir. For example, dars such as Dar Rizeigat, Dar Bani Halba, and Dar Fallata, where Arab ethnic groups live today, were initially parts of the big dars (provinces), like Dar Abu Umong, but were marked off by sultans as homelands of the groups whose names they carry. The governor of each province/region was known as abu and he was responsible for the welfare of his subjects. The governors collected taxes and tribute and sent them to the sultan. In times of war, the sultan asked the governors to send young men, including their sons, to defend the kingdom. In November 1916, the last sultan of Darfur, Ali Dinar, was killed by British and Egyptian armies and his kingdom annexed to Sudan. The accommodating climate that the sultans prepared for their subjects made the latter interact peacefully, often to the extent that they developed complementary economic niches and intermarried. In many cases herders were dependent on farmers to satisfy their needs of agricultural products such as millet, sorghum, vegetables, and fruits. The pastoralists also herded their animals on the stalks of millet, sorghum, tomatoes, and other crops after the farmers had harvested the farms. In addition to meat, hides, butter, and milk, the farmers needed www.abc-clio.com

animal manure to renew the fertility of the farmlands. Herders left with friend farmers their weak animals as well as heavy luggage which they did not want to carry during the long seasonal transhumance. On the other hand, farmers entrusted pastoralists with their animals during the rain seasons because they were busy working the land. As a result of these complementary relationships, some pastoral people became farmers and farmers became pastoralists and lived in camps as if they were originally herders. People also picked up each other’s languages and their ways of life until it became almost impossible to distinguish indigenous Africans from Arabs in some parts of the region. Since the late 1970s, however, the influence of leaders in Khartoum, inflamed by Arab nationalism at the presence of Israel in the Middle East, disturbed this complementary relationship between Arabs, who were largely pastoral, and the indigenous Africans, who were sedentary farmers (also practiced herding). The terms Zurga and Arab that had been used for simple identification of individuals’ colors became stereotypes and the basis of conflicts in the 1980s between the two branches of the population. The conflicts have escalated since 1989, when the country began to be ruled by a group of Arabized Nubians whose objective is to eradicate non-Arab groups who have retained their distinct cultures and languages. The government of Sudan’s project of Arabism (policies aimed at transforming Sudan into a pure Arab country) recruited and exploited Arab militiamen (janjaweed ) in cleansing Darfur of its indigenous population because they are seen as a block to further expansion of Arabism into Africa south of the Sahara. Thus the government ripped the Darfur society to the extent that the return of

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peaceful interaction between its Zurgas and Arabs is almost impossible in the near future. The United States was the first country that took seriously the stories about the genocide in Darfur. The U.S. House of Representatives called the atrocities genocide, and Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice visited the region. In June of 2007 an international conference held in Paris, France, was attended by 18 nations, including eight of Sudan’s major economic supporters from the industrialized nations, as well as China, a major consumer of Sudanese oil. The attendees affirmed support of an African Union and the presence of United Nations peacekeeping troops in Sudan, but were undecided on the means to implement these recommendations. Gamal A. Adam See also: Genocide; Islam, African American; Religion (Africa) References Haaland, Gunnar. “Economic Determinants in Ethnic Process.” In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, edited by Fredrick Barth. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. O’Fahey, R. S. State and Society in Darfur. London: C. Hurt & Co., 1980. O’Fahey, R. S., and M. I. Abu Salim. Land in Darfur: Charters and Related Documents from the Darfur State. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983. O’Fahey, R. S., and J. L. Spaulding. Kingdoms of the Sudan. London: Methuen, 1974.

SUNDIATA Born around 1202, Sundiata Keita is the most beloved and celebrated hero in Mali and was the first emperor of Mali. According to the oral tradition, the son of Nare Maghan Konate, king of Mande, and Sogolon Konde, nicknamed “Kediougou,” which means “unattractive,” led an extraordinary life filled with challenges he www.abc-clio.com

overcame. As a child, Sundiata was paralyzed and for years could not walk. But when Sasuma Berete, his father’s first wife, mocked his mother for having a crippled son, Sundiata in response to the insult that made his mother cry, rose up and walked. During his teenage years, Sundiata joined the hunter’s community. There, he was taught the code of honor and the esoteric science of the hunters. He was an excellent hunter and soon became a simbo, or master hunter. After his father passed away, Dankara Tuman, Sasuma Berete’s son, became king. At his mother’s request, Dankara sent Sundiata and his family into exile. They found asylum in Mema. When Sumanguru Kante and his army invaded and took over Mande, Dankara and his family were forced into exile. Tired of living under Sumanguru tyranny, the people of Mande sent for Sundiata. His father’s throne was waiting for him. In 1235, Sundiata and Sumanguro met for the fifth and last time in Krina. Sundiata defeated Sumanguru who, according to the griot, disappeared inside a cave in Koulikoro. After winning the war against Sumanguru Kante, all the leaders of the Mandingo coalition met to pledge allegiance to Sundiata and proclaimed him emperor of Mande. According to the oral tradition, it was during this ceremony that Sundiata changed the name of his empire from Mande to Mali. During his reign that lasted more than 20 years, Mali became a peaceful, prosperous empire. Sundiata Keita died under mysterious circumstances in 1255. Anna Dao

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See also: Africa, Precolonial; Folklore, African References Djibril Tamsir Niane: Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Conrad, David, trans. Sunjata: A West African Epic of the Mande Peoples.

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SUNDIATA KEITA (1202–1255) AND SUNDIATA EPIC The Sundiata Epic is the oral tradition that tells the story of Mali’s emperor Sundiata’s rise to power. It is one of the oldest surviving epics. Sundiata Keita, also called “Lion King,” was the founder of the Mali Empire. According to the griot, the traditional historians, oracles predicted Sundiata’s birth and extraordinary life long before his parents met. Even today in Mali, Sundiata is still the most beloved and celebrated hero of the country. Sundiata was the son of Nare Maghan Konate, king of Mande (a group of states in West Africa), and Sogolon Konde, nicknamed “Kediougou,” which means unattractive. According to the oral tradition, Nare Maghan already had a wife, the beautiful Sasuma Berete. But when Sogolon arrived in Mande, he married her to fulfill the prophecy he had been told. The prophecy said that the unattractive woman would give birth to a son who, “like the seed of a baobab tree—the biggest tree in the savanna,” would become one of the greatest emperors of West Africa. Both wives gave birth to sons. Sasuma Berete had Dankara Tuman, while the other wife had Sogolon Diata, which became Sundiata. As a child, Sundiata was paralyzed and for years could not walk. One day, Sasuma Berete, his father’s first wife, mocked his mother for having a worthless, crippled son. In response to the insult that made his mother cry, Sundiata rose up and walked. During his teenage years, Sundiata joined the hunter’s community. There he was taught the code of honor and the esoteric science of the hunters. He was an excellent hunter and soon became a simbo, which means “master hunter.” www.abc-clio.com

After their father passed away, Sundiata’s older brother Dankara Tuman became king of Mande. Fearing that her son would one day be dethroned by Sundiata, Sasuma convinced Dankara to chase Sundiata out of Mande. Sundiata left with his mother Sogolon, his two brothers, and his sister. The road of exile took them to different kingdoms. But in every territory, Sundiata and his family were asked to leave. Finally, they found asylum with his mother’s family in Mema, where Sundiata was trained and became an exceptional warrior. Meanwhile, Sumanguru Kante, the “invincible king,” and his army were taking over Mande. In a desperate attempt to keep his throne, Dankara Tuman forced his sister, Nana Triban, to marry Sumanguru. The union didn’t save him. Sumanguru Kante and his army invaded and took over Mande. This invasion forced Dankara Tuman and his family to flee into exile. Tired of living under the tyranny of Sumanguru, the people of Mande sent for Sundiata. His day had come. His father’s throne was waiting for him. From 1232 to 1235, the armies of Sundiata and Sumanguru Kante fought five times. Sundiata lost the first battles, but then support came. First, Nana Triban left Sumanguru after discovering the secret antidote to his invulnerability: the spur of a white cock attached to an arrow. Then, after his uncle Sumanguru betrayed him by taking away his wife, Fakoli Kuruma and his army joined Sundiata. A legendary battle for Mande took place in 1235 in Krina. Sundiata launched the fatal arrow. It barely touched Sumanguru but its effects were devastating. He lost all his powers. According to the griot, Sundiata chased Sumanguru who ran and disappeared inside a cave in

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Koulikoro. The site where Sumanguru Kante disappeared still exists in Mali and is believed to be haunted by his spirit. After winning the war, the 12 leaders of the Mandingo coalition pledged allegiance to Sundiata and proclaimed him emperor of Mande. According to the oral tradition, it is during this ceremony that Sundiata changed the name of his empire from Mande to Mali. Sundiata then organized his nation. The 12 leaders were nominated kings of their respective regions. Every year they paid the emperor’s taxes with agricultural products (rice, millet, sorghum, beans, cotton, peanuts). Taxes were also imposed on such goods as silk, dates, and sugar imported from neighboring countries, sometimes as far as Egypt. Kola nuts and salt were exported from Mali. All gold mines belonged to the emperor. Gold was used to buy horses, armaments for the army, and to pay soldiers’ salaries. Gold was also donated to poor families and offered as gifts to distinguished guests. During his reign, that lasted more than 20 years, Mali became a peaceful, prosperous empire. Sundiata Keita died mysteriously in 1255. He left behind an empire that included Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. The people of Mali consider him the father of their nation. Anna Dao References Cissé, Youssouf T., and Wa Kamissoko. Soundjata la Gloire du Mali. Paris: Karthala, 1991. Conrad, David, trans. Sunjata: A West African Epic of the Mande Peoples. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2004. Niane, D. T. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Essex, UK: Longman, 1995.

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SURINAME The Republic of Suriname, on the northeastern coast of South America, has a population of about 437,000. It is religiously diverse; nearly half are Christians, 27 percent are Hindu, and 19 percent are Muslim. Named Surinam during colonial rule, it was renamed Suriname after independence. In 1630, the English established a short-lived settlement at Toriaca, near the present-day capital of Paramaribo. In 1651, English traders established another colony on the Surinam River which was named Willoughby, after Francis Willoughby from Barbados. This colony included African slaves in order to establish plantations. These slaves seem to have come from Barbados and other Caribbean islands rather than directly from Africa. The colony was captured by the Dutch 16 years later. The Treaty of Breda in 1670 gave the Dutch control over what became Surinam in return for the British keeping New Amsterdam (modern-day New York). The African slaves in Surinam became the subject of a book by the English woman writer Aphra Behn. Behn wrote of her early experiences in Surinam in the novel Oroonoko, of the History of a Royal Slave (1688). Based on an enslaved African prince she met in Surinam, it described the prince being transported to Surinam as a slave. This story proved durable and popular across the eighteenth century. The Dutch tried to develop Surinam and established sugar plantations in the eighteenth century, also importing African slave labor. However, many of these slaves easily escaped into the tropical forests and swamps that covered much of the country. These escapees became known as Maroons or “Bush Negroes,” with some known as the Ndjuka. These Maroons waged an

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intermittent guerilla war against the Dutch for years. Attacks by Maroons led to peace treaties being signed with them in 1761 and 1762, in order to reduce the loss in confidence in Surinam by businessmen in Amsterdam. A slave revolt took place in Berbice in 1763. Some plantations were abandoned or had their output reduced. It was not until 1790 that the colony’s economy recovered. Among the many operations against the Maroons was one in 1772 that was recorded by John Stedman, an English soldier, in his famous Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. The British occupied Surinam during a part of the Napoleonic Wars, from 1804 to 1816. They recruited some of the Africans into five companies of the Black Chasseurs of Surinam. After the war, the British helped influence the Dutch in reducing the slave trade. In 1816, the authorities in Surinam established a court to deal with matters concerning slaves. Seven years later, the Dutch outlawed the slave trade and agreed to the seizing of their ships if equipped for slavery, even without slaves on board. On July 1, 1863, slavery was finally abolished in Surinam. Plantation owners were given 300 guilders per slave in compensation. However, emancipation did not mean immediate freedom: laws ensured that the 33,000 slaves who were declared free had to work for another ten years, albeit in a plantation of their choice. In an attempt to increase the number of plantations from the 1870s, many Chinese and then Indian, and finally Javanese laborers were brought to work in the country, reducing the influence of the African ex-slave population. Nonetheless, sugar declined in importance. In the period 1863–1873, sugar made up 80 percent of the exports of Surinam. This www.abc-clio.com

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fell in the next decade to half of all exports. By 1939 it was only 6 percent of exports. During the early 1930s, with rising unemployment owing to the Depression, Anton de Kom, a Creole, emerged as a major nationalist figure. He and others urged independence, and although he was deported, others started protesting. On November 25, 1975, Surinam became independent as the Republic of Suriname. The descendants of African ex-slaves and Maroons and people of Creole heritage are major parts of the population today. Justin Corfield See also: Dutch Empire; Oroonoko; Slave Revolts/Maronnage References Brana-Shute, Rosemary. “Approaching Freedom: The Manumission of Slaves in Suriname, 1760–1828.” Slavery and Abolition 10, no. 3 (December 1989): 40–63. de Groot, Silvia Wilhelmina. “The Maroons of Surinam: Agents of Their Own Emancipation.” In Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context 1790–1916, edited by David Richardson. London: Frank Cass, 1985. King, Johannes. “Guerilla Warfare: A Bush Negro View.” In Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, edited by Richard Price. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973. van den Boogaart, Ernst, and Emmer, Pieter C. “Plantation Slavery in Surinam in the Last Decade before Emancipation.” In Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, edited by Vera Rubin and Artur Tuden. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977.

SWAZILAND The landlocked kingdom of Swaziland borders South Africa and Mozambique and has a population of about 1,161,000. It was ruled by the king of the Swazis, first King Ngwane in the late eighteenth

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century, later his grandson Sobhuza I in the nineteenth century, and then Sobhuza’s great-grandson Sobhuza II in the early twentieth century, the second of whom managed, against various colonial powers, especially the British, to maintain the Swazi kingdom’s independence. However, by 1895 the land had become a dependent territory of the Boer Republic of Transvaal. After the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, the area was placed under the British colony of Transvaal. Finally, in 1906 it was placed directly under the rule of the high commissioner of South Africa; the following year a resident commissioner was appointed to the protectorate of Swaziland. The king of the Swazis still controlled much of the country, with the people fiercely loyal to him. Many U.S. Christian missions were established in Swaziland: the Evangelical Alliance Mission (as the Scandinavian Alliance Mission of North America) from 1892; African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1904; the Church of the Nazarene and the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America Missionary Society from 1910. One of the first of the missionaries was Petra Mallena Moe, who was born in Norway but moved to the United States when she was 19 and left for South Africa when she was 29. A year later she moved to Swaziland and worked at the Bethel Mission there until her death in 1953. Others included Harmon F. Schmelzenbach from northern Ohio, who worked in Swaziland from 1910 until his death in 1929; and Joel C. Rogers from Battle Creek College, who opened a mission station in Swaziland in 1919. On September 6, 1966, Swaziland became independent while remaining within the British Commonwealth. The country

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was immediately recognized by the United States, Canada, the British Caribbean, and most other countries in the Americas. Charles Joseph Nelson was the first U.S. ambassador appointed to the country (in 1971), and was succeeded by David Benjamin Bolen in 1974 and Donald Richard Norland in 1976. The U.S. Peace Corps has operated in Swaziland since 1969. With the increase in world attention on South Africa during the late 1970s and 1980s, and various levels of sanctions brought against the country for King Sobhuza II’s suspension of the constitution and banning of political activity in order to prevent multi-party elections in 1973, the United States and other countries concentrated some effort in ensuring that Swaziland remained stable. Some Americans in South Africa, keen not to have their children educated in the segregated South African school system, sent them to international schools in Swaziland. The Swazi royal family took the surname Dhlamini (or Dlamini) and six members moved to the United States. G. P. Dhlamini studied at Harvard University and James M. Dlamini studied at Columbia University. Phonius M. Dlamini gained a doctorate from the University of Manitoba in Canada with his thesis “Cost-Benefit Analysis on Simunye Sugar Project: The Case of a Resettlement Scheme in Swaziland.” Political life in the country is still centered on the king and the royal family. Justin Corfield

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See also: South Africa, History and Politics Reference Booth, Alan R. Historical Dictionary of Swaziland. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000.

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T TANNER, HENRY OSSAWA (1859–1937) Henry Ossawa Tanner was an American artist, an expatriate, and a painter of international acclaim. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1859, and he lived most of his young life in Philadelphia. His father, Benjamin, was a bishop for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Tanner grew up in an intellectual and spiritual household that impacted the themes for his art. From 1879 to 1885, he intermittently attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under the instruction of Thomas Eakins. Unfortunately, he faced racism at the academy and in his life because he was an African American artist in a white-dominated art world. The artist struggled for his art to be judged on artistic merit rather than his racial heritage. In 1891, Tanner traveled to Europe to study in Rome; however, the artist chose to study in Paris at the Académie Julian. In Europe, Tanner experienced freedom from racism, and he lived in France for the rest of his life, returning to the United States briefly. During Tanner’s stay in France, the country was reevaluating its colonist (and racist) attitude toward Africa, yet the artist appeared unaffected by this process. Tanner’s art reflects his transatlantic experiences and the influence of both Eakins

and the French painters, Jean Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean Paul Laurens. In 1893–1894, Tanner painted black genre scenes including The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor, which was his attempt to restore dignity to his race that previous genre pieces neglected. His works reflect the realist style of Eakins and the popular genre of France that depicted peasants, and these paintings became a symbol of African American potential and a vehicle for racial uplift. After 1894, Tanner never painted black figuration again; he began the grand religious paintings that compose the majority of his work. These religious paintings are biblical narratives that encapsulate themes of struggle, hope, liberation, and redemption, and they contain the bold colors of French academic painting and Eakins’s reliance on light. In 1895, Daniel and the Lion’s Den won an honorable mention at the French Salon. In 1897, the French government purchased The Resurrection of Lazarus for the Luxembourg Gallery, which was a rare honor to be bestowed on an American artist. In 1923, Tanner was honored with the Chevalier Legion of Honor, the highest honor France awarded to foreigners. His religious works were his most famous, and he continued to paint religious scenes until his death in 1937. His art and

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his religious beliefs provided him solace from the racism that he confronted. Tanner was a crucial, transatlantic figure because he represented the artistic styles of both America and France, and he was a forbearer of the canon of “Negro” art that would develop in the 1920s. Kelly J. Baker See also: Lewis, Mary Edmonia; Smithsonian African Art Museum References Bruce, Marcus. Henry Ossawa Tanner: A Spiritual Biography. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2002. Matthews, Marcia M. Henry Ossawa Tanner: American Artist. 1969. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

TANZANIA Located in East Africa, the United Republic of Tanzania has a population of approximately 36,400,000. Formerly a part of the German colonial empire, Tanzania became a British colony after the defeat of Germany in World War I. Tanzania was formed in 1964 through the consolidation of Tanganyika, a British protectorate that gained independence in 1961, and the island of Zanzibar into a single political entity. Tanzania’s history of relations with the Americas after colonialism is tied to the broader history of the Cold War and its aftermath. Important cultural changes were instituted soon after independence. While English is a major language as a consequence of colonialism, Tanzania adopted Kiswahili as a national language in the 1960s. In part this was a shedding of a colonial legacy, while also a seeking to create national unity through a common language. More broadly, Tanzania’s public education system has sought to adopt Western educational www.abc-clio.com

materials and methods to the postcolonial cultural, economic, and political reality. In contrast to its northern neighbor, Kenya, Tanzanian, independence was gained relatively peacefully. Under the leadership of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania engaged in a process of nation-building that attempted to blend both Western concepts of national unity and economics with what Nyerere regarded as the unique dimensions of African history, politics, and culture. Nyerere was one of the architects of the Non-Aligned Movement that sought to create a coalition outside of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Developing nations in Africa and Latin America were the backbone of the Non-Aligned Movement. Even though Cuban leader Fidel Castro would visit Tanzania in 1977, seeing the nation as an ideological ally, Tanzania’s balancing act during the Cold War made it possible for Tanzania to maintain relatively friendly relations with the United States despite its strong socialist national policies. In 1967, Nyerere announced the Arusha Declaration, which made the search for self-reliance a national policy. In the context of the Cold War, and the conflict between U.S.-style capitalism and Sovietstyle communism, Nyerere sought a third path, seeking to blend socialism with the specific dimensions of Africa’s history and Tanzania’s cultural circumstances. Central to Tanzania’s development, Nyerere believed, was organizing the nation’s extensive but fragmented rural economy. Tanzania’s policies of socialist rural development under Nyerere were termed ujamaa (“familyhood”) socialism. It is a model of socialism that did not follow the models of either the Soviet Union or Maoist China. Rural areas were collectivized in an attempt to

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economically and socially consolidate farflung villages. At the same time, Tanzania sought to decentralize power by giving authority to councils at the district and village levels. Tanzania is a regional power. In 1979, Tanzanian troops toppled the violent Idi Amin regime in Uganda. Nyerere himself reached international prominence as a strong supporter of Pan-Africanism. In 1984–1985, Nyerere served as chairman of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), an organization promoting cooperation among African nations later renamed the African Union (AU). Despite a history of political stability, Tanzania endured a substantial economic crisis in the 1980s and 1990s as the economy worsened under socialist policies and with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1985, Nyerere retired as president. Subsequently, pushed by global economic forces and the rising tide of neoliberal economic policies promoted by the United States and international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the nation began to revise its economic policies to favor international investment and capitalism. Environmental issues have created significant ties between the United States and Tanzania, particularly around wildlife conservation. With Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest point on the African continent, the Serengeti National Park, and many other complex ecological regions, Tanzania is an important site for wildlife and biodiversity conservation efforts. Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti National Park are both World Heritage Sites of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and popular tourist destinations. The environmental issues that www.abc-clio.com

arise from extensive tourism have resulted in an important dialogue in Tanzania about creating environmentally sustainable tourism industries. This dialogue is part of a broader transatlantic and international concern about balancing environmental preservation and economic development. In June 2006, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) allocated $1.5 million and initiated the Community Conservation Project for the Urambo District, a five-year-long biodiversity conservation effort intended to consolidate ongoing environmental preservation and economic development efforts in the Ugalla ecological region. Tanzania became embroiled in U.S. geopolitics on August 7, 1998, when the U.S. embassy in Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, along with the U.S. embassy in Kenya, were bombed by Al Qaeda linked terrorists. Richard Juang See also: Cold War; Environmentalism; NonAligned Movement; Terrorism References Miguel, Edward. “Tribe or Nation?: NationBuilding and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania.” World Politics 56, no. 3 (2004): 327–362. Pitcher, M. Anne, and Askew, Kelly M. “African Socialisms and Postsocialisms.” Africa 76, no. 1 (2006): 2–13.

TAYLOR, CHARLES (1948–) Charles Taylor, a Liberian of American descent, has been a controversial political leader in Liberia and internationally. Born on January 28, 1948, to an Americo-Liberian father and a native Gola tribeswoman, Taylor was interested in the connections between the United States and Liberia, which was colonized by freed slaves in

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but was arrested and jailed there in 1984; he escaped, however, before he could be extradited. He hid for four years, making a violent reemergence in Liberia on December 24, 1989, at the head of an anti-Doe guerrilla force called the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). The NPFL split into two competing fractions, one led by Taylor, the other by Prince Johnson (the latter faction executed Doe). This rupture within the NPFL incited a bloody five-year civil war, which ended in Taylor’s election as president in July 1997. As president, he became actively involved in the deadly civil war in Sierra Leone. Taylor was indicted by an international court for war crimes in 2003. Trapped between two insurrectionary rebel forces, Taylor accepted asylum from Nigeria in that same year. Alana Trumpy Charles Taylor was a guerilla leader during Liberia’s long civil war. Known for staggering brutality, he was made president of Liberia in 1997, in strong part out of Liberian fears of the war’s continuation. Subsequently deposed, he has been put on trial for war crimes in the Hague. (AFP/Getty Images)

1847. On a student visa, Taylor went to study in Massachusetts in 1972 and stayed there until 1980. During this period, Taylor rose through the ranks of the Union of Liberian Associations and eventually became its national chairman. Upon returning home in 1980, Taylor was involved in a violent coup originating from the socioeconomic disparity between descendants of Americans and the native people of Liberia, a rebellion that brought Taylor into a key position as the director of purchases within the new dictator Samuel Doe’s government. He was expelled from this role in 1983 when he was accused of embezzling government funds. He fled to the United States www.abc-clio.com

See also: Liberia References Huband, Mark. The Liberian Civil War. New York: Routledge, 1998. Adebajo, Adekeye. Liberia’s Civil War: Nigeria, ECOMOG, and Regional Security in West Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Liberia: Chronicle of Human Rights Violations under the Government of President Charles Taylor, September 1997 to April 2002. Accra, Ghana: Media Foundation for West Africa, 2002.

TCHICAYA U TAM’SI (1931–1988) Tchicaya U Tam’si is the pen name of Gerald-Félix Tchicaya. Tchicaya was born in Mpili in the French Congo, the son of Jean-Félix, a member of parliament who represented the colony in Paris. His mother, from whom he was separated at the age of three, was from the Belgian Congo. Tchicaya represents a second generation of African

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writers and poets who sought to depict African experiences in both Africa and the New World in complex, often surrealist, poetic forms. Tchicaya was a rebellious spirit, prompt to revolt against any form of power. He stopped his schooling very early. At 20, he started working in factories, and also held a position in a printing works. Later he became a journalist, and in 1960 he served as editor of the journal Congo of the MNC (Congolese National Movement) in Leopoldville. He witnessed Patrice Lumumba’s rise and fall. After the imprisonment of Lumumba in 1960, he went back to France to work for 20 years at UNESCO. He retired in 1980 to dedicate the rest of his lifetime to writing and literature. He died in 1988 in Bazancourt. Tchicaya started writing under the shade of a circle of French writers and intellectuals like Supervielle, Luc Estaing, Fombeure, and Bosquet. His father once submitted his son’s poems to his colleague, Aimé Césaire, who prophetically stated: “He will be a great poet.” His works have been translated into many languages, including English and German. Three main periods form his literary career. The first period (1955–1978) is essentially poetic. Under the name of Tchicaya U Tam’si, which means in Vili language “the leaf that tells its country’s story,” he published collections of poems: Le Mauvais Sang (The Bad Blood, 1955), Feu de brousse et A Triche-cœur (1957), Epitomé (1962), Le Ventre (1964), Arc musical (1970), La Veste d’intérieur et Notes de veille (1977), and Le Pain ou la Cendre (1978). Reviewers generally deemed Tchicaya’s poetry as hermetic, suggesting that “keys” are needed to interpret it. Although Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Lautréamont were his models, his work www.abc-clio.com

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was enriched with the mythical image of the Congo River. To many critics, Tchicaya is the best poet of the second generation of African writers. The second period is theatrical and covers the years 1976 to 1980. Works from this period include Le Zulu and Vuène le fondateur (both 1978), Le Destin glorieux du Maréchal Nnikon Nniku prince qu’on sort (1979), and Le Bal de Ndinga (1987). Originally a novella, Le Bal de Ndinga was dramatized by G. Garan and performed over two hundred times on European stages in the 1990s. The third period, from 1980 to his death, is mainly dedicated to novels and short stories. Tchicaya’s four novels are Les Cancrelats (The Cockroaches) and The Madman and the Medusa (both 1980), Les Phalènes (1984), and Ces fruits si doux de l’arbre à pain (1987). The first novel could have been published in 1958 if he had found a publisher. Some of Tchicaya’s novellas were published in a collection, La main sèche (1980); others appeared in newspapers or in journals. Tchicaya also published an anthology—Légendes africaines (1966). The Americas were part of Tchicaya’s life and literary work. He dedicated poems or statements to Harlem, Cuba, the Caribbean, and Latin America. His personal mythology of black blood included all blacks. His “surrealistic poetry” was as sophisticated as Césaire’s cosmology, with which it was constantly compared. The two men also shared common mythical topics, such as the figure of Lumumba or the conception of blackness. In Epitomé, Tchicaya evokes Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, pointing out the destiny of Amerindians and the exploitation of the Americas by the conquistadores. He

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identifies himself with all exploited peoples of the world. In his imagery the sea symbolizes death since it emptied Africa and helped slave merchants to commit their crime. The sea therefore is a source of betrayal, frustration, and suffering for black Africans deported to the Americas. He visited, at the end of his life, Cartagena de Indias in Colombia. His encounter with Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella clearly shows his interest in discovering three centuries later the remnants of African values, rites, words, and habits in people who have experienced the existential trauma of deportation and slavery. Zapata Olivella and Tchicaya agreed to organize a joint colloquium of black writers from Africa and Colombia, which would take place in August 1988. Unfortunately the Congolese poet died in April of that year. Kahiudi Claver Mabana See also: Guillén, Nicolás; Lumumba, Patrice References Mabana, K. C. L’univers mythique de Tchicaya U Tam’si à travers son œuvre en prose. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Mbama, Yves. “Tchicaya poète de la condition humaine.” Langues et littératures 9 (2005): 91–104. Mendez, Denise. “La présence africaine en Colombie.” Africultures. November 1, 1998 1998. www.africultures.com/index.asp? menu=revue_affiche_article&no=5322 §ion=corres (accessed November 17, 2007).

TECHNOLOGY TRANSFERS The transfer of African technologies and knowledge affected agriculture, building, and manufacturing in the Americas from the time of European conquests. Each colonizing nation—Portugal, Spain, Holland, Denmark, France, England—began the economic exploitation of the Americas with the labor and manufacturing experience of www.abc-clio.com

enslaved Africans. This African labor force was knowledgeable and skilled in the mining and forging of iron, in gold, copper, and silver metallurgy, in planting crops of rice, cotton, sugar, indigo, and tobacco, in spinning and weaving textiles, and in many methods of construction and transportation. Technologies that moved with enslaved populations were numerous and interrelated. Iron making and forging techniques produced steel and other metal tools for agriculture, hunting, and construction. Africans prepared the forests, swamps, and jungles for cultivation and irrigation from Brazil to the Hudson River. They dug the mines and then processed the ores. Africans fished the bays in dugout canoes called pettiaugers, built with African methods of boatbuilding. Those canoes also transported raw materials, products, and people on coastlines and rivers until the nineteenth century. Techniques for woodworking were further applied to Caribbean hardwoods to create fine furniture. African techniques for strong knitted nets used in skein fishing were readily transferred for the fishing industry and for their own consumption (fish, locally caught, was frequently the only protein that the enslaved people had to supplement meager rations). Brick making, regularly done from Morocco to the Congo, was a source of construction materials in the New World. Culturally, cooperative marketing and methods of working in unison were practices that readily crossed the Atlantic. Craft and trading networks organized by women, as they were in Yoruba societies, flourished in the margins of the New World colonies. The evidence of African technologies in the Americas varies depending on how technology is defined through different historical periods. In general, however, it is

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not coincidental that both the European scientific and industrial revolutions occurred during the period of the transatlantic slave trade. Also, slaves were often taken from the regions in which they might have worked with the same raw materials that they would work on in the Americas, with the notable exception of sugarcane. The historical recognition of the role of African technologies and knowledge has been blocked by the assumption that technologies were created solely by Europeans and Euro-Americans and could not be invented or even imagined by Africans, a prejudice that took hold in the nineteenth century. In general, the African technologies and knowledge transferred to the Americas may be defined as methods of production often leading to further manufacture. In fact, African technologies had substantial effects on the political and industrial revolutions of North America and Europe. While gold was the initial motive for early European conquests in the New World, the largest deposits, in California, would not be discovered until 1848. Iron and ironworking has an overlooked importance in the industrial revolution. Brazil holds 25 percent of the world’s iron ore, which became increasingly more important when put into use by African technology. Iron production in the British colonies of the United States was founded on using enslaved African labor. At the time of the American Revolution, Pennsylvania iron makers had the largest number of slaves in the North. Additionally, profits from the manufactures of enslaved Africans and their descendants paid for the subsequent Industrial Revolution in England in the mid-1700s. As iron-producers, West and Central African societies had the tools to cultivate many crops since the first millennium. www.abc-clio.com

African understanding of cotton cultivation was important to the development of the American South. Well before European arrival in the Americas, cotton was produced on plantations in Upper Guinea in Africa that often used domestic slave labor as well as mechanical means of separating seeds. The cotton was spun into yarn by women and made into textiles by weavers who were primarily men, whose craft guild’s identity and visual language could be read in the colors and threads. Evidence of African architecture and construction techniques abound in the Americas. Houses, whether round or rectangular, with thatched roofs in compound, communal living styles, are regularly noted in historical narratives. The construction practices from diverse homelands guided the African craftsmen and laborers in the New World. For example, the Mande architecture traditions of cylindrical buildings and thatched roofs were diffused throughout the West; round-house architecture on the west coast of Mexico was introduced to the decimated Native American population by enslaved Mande. The mayor of Guatulco wrote to the viceroy of New Spain in 1591 that “I have been informed that in a hilly place called Coyula, two leagues from said town . . . there are black runaway slaves. And to the present time they are there, with their houses, maize cultivation, cotton-growing, and other things, as if they were in Guinea” (Thompson, 1983, pp. 197–199). African construction could often be sturdier than European techniques. When a major earthquake shook the Caribbean in 1692, leveling Port Royal in Jamaica with such force most of the structures, especially houses of brick, were reduced to rubble, “Only the humble slave huts . . . escaped destruction

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because of their resilient stick and thatch construction. Symbolically, the distraught English survivors ejected the Negroes from these quarters and moved into the slave huts themselves” (Dunn, 1986, p. 186). In early New York City, previously New Amsterdam, Africans cleared the road now named Broadway and the African Burial Ground bears testimony to the skills of the (mostly) enslaved people who were an estimated 20 percent of the English colonial population in the eighteenth century. The Africans also built a wall now known as Wall Street. In the upper New York countryside, the Dutch brought a group of experienced Africans to first clear the swampy land for agriculture. The transatlantic slave trade moved people with knowledge in all directions. Both the goober peanut and tobacco, and knowledge of their cultivation, were brought from South America to the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, then to West Africa and back again by the enslaved farmers in North America. As early as 1607, before the British brought enslaved Africans into Jamestown, Virginia, tobacco, which is indigenous to the Americas, was routinely planted, traded, and smoked in Senegambia and Sierra Leone. The descendants of rice cultivators brought enslaved to North America returned the original African technological process to the homelands. The African American ship owner Paul Cuffe (known as a mulatto because his mother was a Massachusetts Indian) organized the first back-to-Africa movement in North America with his own ships seeking to establish viable farms in Sierra Leone. In the era of the American Civil War, Dr. Martin R. Delany planned to reestablish cotton production in Africa and rebuild infrastructure by a railroad linking the www.abc-clio.com

West African Atlantic coast with the Red Sea. Free people in Brazil, who had purchased manumission for themselves in cooperative brotherhoods known as cofradias, returned as merchants and then became part of a larger trading network of mixed African and European people on both sides of the Atlantic. Knowledge was often carefully passed from one generation to the next. There are many occupational examples of sons following fathers as apprentices on aristocratic plantations and in the industrial shops of Southern cities. The occupational clan tradition continued even in the choosing of names following manumission and emancipation: the name Woodland was established in freedom by a Maryland kinship group that was assigned to woods tasks in slavery; after emancipation they lived as a group in Baltimore, the family elder with a sawing business. The evidence of technological transfer is complicated by biases in historical research and by the immediate resistance to production by the newly enslaved, who was not interested in cooperating with the slaveholder or overseer who was oppressing him. For example, nails with cores of steel from the caskets of first-generation Africans in the slave burial ground of Catoctin Furnace, Maryland, were overlooked for many years by archeologists. The evidence is structured on three African regional ethnic streams to the Americas in the Atlantic slave trade: Wolof, Mande, and Mandingo from Upper Guinea (Mali, Senegal, Sierra Leone); Yoruba, Ibo, Mina, and Akan from Lower Guinea (Benin, Ghana, Nigeria); and N’Gola, Makongo, and Bakongo from Central Africa (Cameroon, Angola, Congo). The sources of existing African technology for

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mining and the growing of sugar, rice, and cotton in the Americas are established by early Muslim and European traders and travelers in Africa whose narratives suggest the industrial nature of African cities in the savanna, the forest, and the interior deserts. The Mali kingdom of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, formed by Mende and Mandinga who converted to Islam, is frequently noted as the source of enslaved African people in the Americas who were literate in Arabic, and who had great mathematical and technical knowledge. The travels of Mungo Park, a Scotsman who made two journeys in Upper Guinea in 1798 and 1801, offer descriptions of agriculture, iron smelting, and other technologies. Scholarly research on technological transfers between Africa and the Americas is currently in rapid growth at many archeological sites. In Cuba, historians, architects, and archaeologists have begun to study coffee plantations. In Benin, caves of iron-rich soil that are hundreds of years old are being examined by a cooperative venture of Denmark and Benin. The African Burial Ground in New York City was declared a national monument in 2006. Jean Libby See also: Boatbuilding; Ironworking; Plantations and Plantation Systems References Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624 – 1813. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in Development of Brazilian Civilization. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.

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Lovejoy, Paul E. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Starobin, Robert S. Industrial Slavery in the Old South. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Sweet, James H. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the AfricanPortuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit; African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1983. Vlach, John Michael. “Roots and Branches: Historical Patterns in African Diasporan Artifacts.” In African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, edited by Sheila S. Walker. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Walsh, Lorena S. From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community. 1997. Reprint, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.

TELEVISION IN AFRICA, AMERICAN INFLUENCE ON Television, a major source of entertainment and enjoyment, has become a vehicle through which the United States has opened up African cultures to its language, consumer products, political beliefs, and economic system. Many researchers assert these TV programs are used to entice viewers to watch content that has foreign cultural values imbedded within them, with the objective of eroding the local values and traditions and replacing them. As a result, what Africans believe, what they aspire to, and what moves them to act or not has been subjected to external influence and control. Culture is defined as the total pattern of human behavior; its products are embodied in speech, action, and artifacts and dependent upon humanity’s capacity for

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learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. Critical for a society’s chances of survival are the internal capacity and external freedom to develop its cultural system autonomously. However, current trends under the broad definitional umbrella of “globalization” are bringing together all societies and promoting Western values and culture at the detriment of other cultures. The unfettered global market erodes national boundaries in terms of the flow of goods and at the same time confronts national sensibilities and values. In the postindustrial marketplace, the majority of goods exchanged in the marketplace are of essentially cultural nature, such as television programs, games, videos, toys, and music. Though modern communications technology is offered to the world with the suggestion that the expression of cultural diversity is guaranteed, centrally controlled technology has become the instrument through which diversity is being destroyed and replaced by a single global culture. A critical assessment of the history of relationships between the industrial nations and African countries since the colonial era indicates that such interactions have technological, economic, and cultural dimensions. African countries are markets for the manufactured goods and cultural products with accompanying beliefs, values, and ideologies of dominant nations, especially the United States. With the creation of a single world market, all societies yield in some measure to Western values, which have supplanted all aspects of cultures in developing countries. In the area of consumption, the capitalist culture has imposed a Western consumption pattern—a penchant for Western-made products like food, cars, electronic gadgets, and movies. www.abc-clio.com

This desire for Western products plays a major role in dissociating people from their cultural roots and traditions of solidarity, replacing them with media-created “needs” and producing common behaviors resulting in a new breed of men, women, and youth for whom religion, culture, and nationality can seem only marginal elements in a working identity. According to Rob Kroes, the United States dominates the global traffic in information and ideas, and American music, movies, television, are software are so dominant, so sought after, and so visible that they are now available literally everywhere on the Earth. American products, from cars to movies, from clothing styles to kitchen apparel, are agents of American cultural diplomacy. Television has become a major source of information and entertainment all over the world, and audience perceptions of social realities closely correspond to the “realities” portrayed on television, and audiences adopt values and behaviors emphasized in television programs. Information presented on television is readily available; little effort is needed to process it—realities are presented in summary forms, with simple solutions. Some researchers believe that television presents a distorted but uniform picture of reality that is internalized and accepted by heavy viewers, primarily because of the pervasiveness of its images. It is believed that Western powers, mainly the United States, export mass media, especially television programs, to developing countries as a device to broaden their domestic commercial activities and with a deliberate intention of corroding the traditional cultures of these countries. Many researchers further assert that after influencing the local inhabitants with their

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television programs and convincing them to adopt the American ways of life, the United States then sends its transnational corporations to take their country’s natural resources, convinces them to provide cheap labor for manufacturing U.S. goods, sells these same products back to them, and takes the profits back to the United States. African cultures have entertainment traditions that favor the reception of American programs whose cross-cultural appeal makes them universal products. In large part, the dominance of American-style entertainment, information, and educational programs during primetime represents the attempts to reach out to the elite class who are cultural hybrids, as well as to the masses, which are being steadily incorporated into a pro-American reality. In the process, they re-contextualize and resemanticize American culture to make it function within expressive settings entirely of their own making. Exploring the significance and impact of the Americanization of Nigerian television, Nosa Owens-Ibie concluded that because the production of television programs is expensive and because most African nations lack the technological base for hardware and software production, they rely on foreign suppliers and experts for their regular program schedules, which account for about one-third of total transmission time, and mostly on programs from the United States since it offers cheaper and ready alternatives. American shows have the clear advantage over local programs in terms of standard programming requirements, owing to their technical quality, set, style of presentation, and sequence. Drawing on America’s unique advantage as a cultural “melting pot” and its ability to fashion products with www.abc-clio.com

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an appeal to peoples all over the world, television program producers create quality movies, soaps, sitcoms, sports, musicals, and cartoons. These shows are considered dynamic, and they successfully project and capture the global cultural imagination, and consequently have a heavy impact on the popular culture. According to G. K. Kieh, Jr., Africans are taught from early childhood to accept capitalism as the only correct and realistic route to development. They learn to be docile and passive and to accept their subservience to all that is Western, and so when they grow up, they are open to the further colonizing of their minds by the Western movies and television programs imported into these countries. Young children spend a significant amount of time with media and experience pleasure from and identify with media texts, but because they lack cognitive skills and the life experiences necessary to evaluate media messages as adequately as might an adult, they are likely to learn and be influenced by TV content. They turn to media texts to construct and make sense of their emerging identities, and to develop strategies for acting on their own dreams and coping with social dilemmas. Jeremy Seabrook confirms the popularity of the internationally acclaimed American children’s television programs all over the world, which have children in 130 countries as devoted viewers of what producers call “universal values,” such as racial harmony, peaceful dispute resolution, respect for the environment, and equal rights for women, regardless of the culture of the receiving countries. The programs serve to demobilize the poor in the places where they live: hope becomes increasingly concentrated in the distant and exotic; delight is

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found not in celebrating their own lives and achievements, but in the admiration of the shadowy celebrities of films and pop video. This detachment undermines their faith in themselves and diminishes their own capacity to find significant cultural satisfaction in their own deeds and achievements. As Sembene Ousmane, African novelist and cineaste succinctly put it, American television takes possession of people’s minds as another culture, a completely different view of things, is brought into the home. As a result, the model of society handed down by ancestors is smashed and replaced by another. Despite the attempt to regulate the content of television in African countries, very little success has been achieved in reducing the proliferation of American programs. The influence is evident in the concept, context, presentation styles, costumes, set, and informality of some parts of otherwise serious local programs. Compounding the problem is the lack of sufficient local alternatives to challenge African dependence on foreign products. There is clearly a need for media literacy to be included in national and regional educational policies toward developing a critical media consciousness of Africans. Media education would teach people to critically engage popular media materials, including the most familiar films, television, music, and other forms of media culture. Though resistance to the effects of Western cultural products in general, and American television specifically, has developed as the condition intensifies, and different African nations are formulating national cultural policies to curb the trend, economic development of these nations remains the solution to the invasion and subordination of their culture to the communication output and perspectives of a few www.abc-clio.com

powerful, market-dominated economies of their cultures. Esther F. Ojo References Hamlink, Cess. Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications. New York: Longman, 1983. Kieh, Jr., George Klay. “The Roots of Western Influence in Africa: An Analysis of the Conditioning Process.” Social Science Journal 29, no. 1 (1992): 7–19. Kline, Stephen. Out of the Garden: Toys, TV and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing. London: Verso, 1993. Kroes, Rob. “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving End.” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 463–477. Owens-Ibie, Nosa. “Programmed for Domination: U.S. Television Broadcasting and Its Effects on Nigerian Culture.” In Here, There and Everywhere: The foreign Politics of American Popular Culture, edited by Reinhold Wagnleiter and Elaine Tyler May. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. Seabrook, Jeremy. “The Racketeers of Illusion.” New Internationalist, no. 308 (December 1998): 22–24. “Sembene Ousmane.” UNESCO Courier 43, no. 1 (January 1990): 4–7. Tan, Alexis S., Gerdean Tan, and Todd Gibson. “Socialization Effects of American Television on International Audiences.” In The Impact of International Television: A Paradigm Shift, edited by Michael G. Elasmar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003.

TERRORISM Terrorism is an attempt to, through the threat or use of violence, create fear to coerce people to comply with the terrorists’ demands. Terrorist attacks have occurred throughout the Americas and Africa in the United States, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, and Tanzania, among other countries. Terrorist groups run the gamut from

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the single-issue driven Animal Liberation Front and Environmental Liberation Front in the United States and Canada to groups with broader political and economic agendas, such as Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), National Liberation Army (ELN), and United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (UAC) in Colombia; Tupac Amaru and Sendero Luminoso in Peru; the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda; National Liberation Front (FLN) in colonial Algeria; South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) in formerly South African-held Namibia; and Al Qaeda, the Armed Islamic Group, the Egyptian Islamic Group, and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) throughout much of northern Africa. Historically, terrorist demands have been political, economic, or social, including independence from colonial rule, withdrawal of foreign troops, the freeing of prisoners, the end of racial and ethnic discrimination, and redistribution of wealth. Terrorism has traditionally been aimed at garnering widespread attention and creating fear that would force governments to reverse existing or adopt new policies. Such groups as FARC in Colombia and the African National Congress in South Africa sought to minimize the number of casualties but maximize the publicity and effect such attacks would have. To this end, these groups have engaged most commonly in assassinations, hostage-taking, and limited bombings. Targets typically have included government and military personnel and installations, foreign citizens, and corporate facilities. Such groups often take credit for their attacks, stating demands that must be met to achieve the release of hostages or prevent future attacks. Terrorism is used largely to discredit the government, www.abc-clio.com

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demonstrating its inability to protect the citizenry from attacks and therefore its lack of legitimacy. These motives continue to be prevalent in Latin America, where key organizations like FARC, ELN, and the UAC in Colombia, Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru in Peru, and the Popular Revolutionary Army in Mexico continue to seek economic redistribution and political power. In recent years, terrorist groups seeking goals based on religious beliefs have become increasingly prevalent. This shift has been most prevalent in Africa. Whereas historically groups in Africa, such as the FLN in Algeria, SWAPO in Namibia, and the ANC in South Africa, sought independence from colonial rulers or the end of apartheid government, many terrorist organizations in twenty-first century Africa are seeking the religious purity of their respective countries. These groups, including Al Qaeda, the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, the Egyptian Islamic Group, and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, advocate the total restructuring of societies to correspond with their religious tenets. While such organizations also seek to delegitimize and replace the government, their goal is broader: it is to create a vacuum into which the terrorist groups may enter and reorder the society. Whereas traditional terrorists seek to gain allies among the population, these new terrorists do not. Their goal is the destruction of those who are unbelievers. To accomplish this, they engage in far more destructive attacks, such as the 1998 destruction of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It is these groups who are most likely to seek and use weapons of mass destruction. In addition to goals and tactics, terrorist organizations increasingly are not organized

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along hierarchical, centralized lines as was Sendero Luminoso, but along a networked, or hub, structure. These are decentralized structures with autonomous cells, most of which have no knowledge of other cells. While there is typically an acknowledged center, as with Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, it may provide little more than ideological guidance, training, and support. The U.S./Canada-based Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF), formed in 1992 and 1976 respectively, are extreme examples of this form of group. Anyone espousing similar ideas to these two issues (animal rights and environmentalism) may consider themselves members, and cells undertake actions with no guidance from the center. These groups have a number of advantages. They are flexible, able to adapt rapidly to changes in technology or to the tactics of counterterrorist organizations. They are also difficult to stop; destruction of individual cells has little effect on the whole and even the capture, isolation, or incapacitation of a leader does little to stop the terrorist threat. This removes from governments a traditional tactic: capturing or killing and delegitimizing terrorist leaders, as Peru did with Sendero Luminoso’s Abimael Guzman in 1992. There is no internationally accepted definition of terrorism. The United Nations has long debated definitions; while its members condemned all terrorist actions at its World Summit in 2005, they failed to specify what terrorism was. The Organization of American States has similarly proscribed terrorism but failed to clearly define it. Debates about definition often revolve around the motivation behind the acts of terror. The terms “terrorist” and “terrorism” have negative connotations in contrast to other terms, including www.abc-clio.com

“guerrilla,” “insurgent,” and “revolutionary.” Terrorism is a tactic used by organizations to combat forces too strong to combat using conventional or guerrilla tactics. Indeed, terrorism is often used to augment these military forms, particularly guerrilla warfare. Groups such as Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria have supplemented guerrilla war with terrorist attacks. Whether an attack qualifies as a military action or a terrorist attack is often unclear. The most common differentiation is target. When civilians, government officials, or off-duty military personnel are targeted, the action is considered terrorist; when on-duty military personnel are targeted, it is most commonly considered a guerrilla or insurgent action. Countries supporting groups whose fights for self-rule have included terrorist actions often oppose labeling those movements as terrorism. The African Union is among the few international organizations to define terrorism. In 1999, the organization’s members, excluding Zambia and Zimbabwe, signed and/or ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism, also known as the Algiers Convention. While it includes a clause explicitly excluding efforts to achieve “liberation or self-determination” (Part 1, Article 3), this convention defines terrorism as “any act . . . which may endanger the life, physical integrity or freedom of, or cause serious injury or death to, any person, any number or group of persons or causes or may cause damage to public or private property, natural resources, environmental or cultural heritage and is calculated or intended to . . . intimidate, put in fear, force, coerce or induce any government, body, institution, the general public . . . to do or abstain from doing any

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act or to adopt or abandon a particular standpoint” (Part 1, Article 1). Terrorism is not new in the Americas or Africa. In both regions, terrorism was an integral part of the anticolonial revolutionary movements. Prior to the American Revolution, tarring and feathering was used to intimidate those collecting taxes for the British. In the 1950s through the 1970s, independence movements throughout Africa utilized terrorism in order to expel the colonial powers, most notably in Algeria where the National Liberation Front (FLN) attacked French facilities and personnel. Elsewhere, the failed Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya utilized terrorist actions to try to force Kenyans to support the rebellion and the British to leave the country. In 1966, the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) launched attacks to free Namibia from South African rule. In the 1960s, terrorism in both regions was based heavily on left-wing ideology. Throughout the Americas, the Cuban revolution was an inspiration to groups. In Brazil, the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard was formed following a 1964 military coup and conducted kidnappings and raids until 1970. Beyond providing inspiration, Cuba actively aided a number of groups in Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, and Guatemala. In Bolivia, the communist National Liberation Army was formed in 1966 and conducted a limited number of operations until 1988. Excepting Colombia, where terrorist groups formed in the 1960s operate with significant success in the twenty-first century, these revolutionary movements failed. In the late 1960s, terrorism spread throughout Latin America; even traditional guerrilla groups began relying more heavily on terrorist methods. www.abc-clio.com

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In the United States, the communist antiwar group the Weathermen emerged in 1969 and engaged in several bombings of public property. In 1966, the Black Panthers was formed; it and its militant offshoot, the Black Liberation Army, engaged in criminal activities, facing off with police several times into the early 1970s. In the 1970s and 1980s, terror continued throughout the Americas and Africa, often playing out the Cold War in countries across the continents. As in the 1960s, much of the terrorism was employed by left-wing organizations, typically espousing forms of Marxism. These groups included the Movement of April 19 (M-19), which was formed in 1970 in Colombia, and the pro-Moscow Tupac Amaru and Maoist Sendero Luminoso in Peru. At the same time, there was a rise of anticommunist groups, including the Contras in Nicaragua and smaller groups in Honduras and Costa Rica. While the communist groups often received assistance from Cuba and the Soviet Union, the anticommunist groups received similar logistical, intelligence, and weapons support from the United States. In South Africa, the African National Congress, formed in 1912, adopted terrorist tactics in the early 1960s, seeking racial equality and an end to apartheid rule. In the 1970s and 1980s, it continued its attacks, bombing facilities of international corporations doing business in South Africa. SWAPO, fighting for the independence of what is now Namibia, continued attacks against South African-supported businesses into the late 1980s. Terrorism occurred elsewhere on the continent, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt in 1981 by al-Jihad al-Islami. During this period, state terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism were also

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prevalent in both the Americas and Africa. State terrorism refers to acts of terror conducted by a state against its own citizens or other governments. Within Chile, Augusto Pinochet’s government arrested, killed, and “disappeared” thousands of its citizens. South Africa was widely condemned as conducting state terror throughout the 1970s and 1980s, both for its attacks on its own citizens and for sponsoring attacks on sub-Saharan states such as Zimbabwe. State-sponsored terrorism refers to the assistance given by a country to terrorist organizations, most commonly in the form of sanctuary, training facilities, weapons, and funds. In the 1980s, Libya was particularly active, responsible for at least four attacks, including the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the 1986 bombing of a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. soldiers, and the 1989 bombing of a French airliner over Niger. Cuba was also considered an active sponsor of terrorist organizations across Latin America and in Africa. The end of the Cold War did not mean the end of terrorism in either the Americas or Africa. While terrorism did decline in Central America in the 1980s, left-wing militants launched sporadic attacks against U.S. targets. In Mexico, the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) emerged and a number of bombings occurred following the 1994 Zapatista uprising. In Colombia, too, right-wing groups emerged, including the umbrella organization United Self-Defense Forces/Groups of Colombia (AUC), which grew from several paramilitary groups in the 1980s to combat FARC and the ELN. In the United States, there was a rise in right-wing “patriot” groups, espousing antigovernment www.abc-clio.com

sentiments, and anti-Semitic and racist Christian “identity” and neo-Nazi groups. Among their followers was Timothy McVeigh, who in April 1995 detonated a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people. In both Chile and Peru, terrorist attacks declined after the first two years of the 1990s. Successful crackdowns in Peru by President Alberto Fujimori’s government led to a decline in activities by Sendero Luminoso, the largest terrorist (and guerrilla) group in Peru; its leader, Abimael Guzman, was arrested in 1992. Tupac Amaru, another Peruvian Marxist organization, continued its activities in the 1990s, culminating in the 1997 attack on the Japanese ambassador’s residence, leading to a four-month standoff as the terrorists held 72 hostages. Elsewhere in Latin America, following the U.S. invasion of Panama, the December 20 Movement (M-20) was formed, carrying out attacks throughout the 1990s in an attempt to destabilize the government. In Argentina, the Lebanesebased organization Hezbollah bombed Jewish sites: the Israeli embassy in 1992 and a Jewish community center in 1994; the two attacks killed more than one hundred people. By the mid-1990s, “narco-terrorism” became a common term, reflecting an increasing link between illegal narcotics production and terrorist activities, most notably in Colombia. Terrorist organizations, such as the left-wing FARC and ELN and the nationalist AUC have all utilized the drug trade, as well as other criminal activities, especially kidnapping and extortion, to fund their organizations. Such funding has allowed these groups significantly increased sustainability.

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One organization that has an impressive ability to fund itself and to garner widespread support is Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda (also Al Qaida), meaning “the base,” was founded in the late 1980s by Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden had, in the 1980s, joined the mujahideen in their war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and had been drawn to the teachings of Abdullah Azzam, a leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In Afghanistan, bin Laden would also meet Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had spent time in an Egyptian prison suspected of having conspired to assassinate Anwar Sadat. While bin Laden provided funding, the other two men provided spiritual guidance, calling for a strict version of Sunni Islam and condemning those governments deemed insufficiently Islamist, including those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In 1989, bin Laden returned to his native Saudi Arabia. His voicing of disapproval with the Saudi government and opposition to its willingness to allow U.S. troops on its soil for the Gulf War led to a revocation of bin Laden’s citizenship. In 1991, bin Laden went to Sudan where he and Al Qaeda bought land and engaged in the training of Al Qaeda members for attacks on U.S. interests as well as against Middle Eastern governments. Beginning in 1992, Al Qaeda began to launch periodic attacks against Western interests. It takes credit for arming Somali forces that battled American soldiers, leading to the deaths of 18 Americans in Mogadishu in October 1993. In 1995, four Al Qaeda members aided the Egyptian Islamic Group in an attempted assassination of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. In 1996, Al Qaeda would be expelled from Sudan and move to Afghanistan. However, its involvement in Africa and relations with African www.abc-clio.com

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terrorist organizations became closer. In 1998, Al Qaeda allegedly orchestrated the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. That same year, Al Qaeda also created an umbrella organization called the Islamic World Front for the Struggle against the Jews and the Crusaders (AlJabhah al-Islamiyyah al-’Alamiyyah li-Qital al-Yahud wal-Salibiyyin), including many African Islamist terrorist organizations. Mostly in northern Africa, these organizations, encouraged by the emergence of Wahhabism in the 1960s Middle East, grew out of the increasing disenchantment with the West and pro-Western governments and the worsening economic situations in many of the countries. The September 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were the most costly attacks on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. Four planes were hijacked by members of Al Qaeda; two were flown into the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.; the fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania as passengers sought to retake control. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. Africa has become one of the key regions in the resulting U.S. War on Terror. Al Qaeda has been particularly active in Kenya: bombing a hotel in 2002, attacking an Israeli airliner with SA-7 surface-to-air missiles in 2002, and, in 2003, attempting to attack the U.S. embassy in Nairobi with light aircraft. Al Qaeda has also received funding through the diamond trade in Sierra Leone and Liberia; however, cells in these countries do not appear to have been active in terrorism. Other groups have been linked to Al Qaeda, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, al-Ittihad al-Islamiyyaa in

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Somalia, al-Jihad in Egypt, and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in northern Africa. In Latin America, there are rumors but little evidence of Al Qaeda activity. Al Qaeda is not the only terrorist organization active in Africa or the Americas. Of the 80 terrorist groups listed by the U.S. State Department in its 2005 Country Reports on Terrorism, 10 were based in Africa and five in the Americas. Other groups, including Al Qaeda, had significant presence in African countries and still others, such as the Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah, and the Tunisian Combatant Group (located in Europe), received financial and logistical support from people within the Americas and Africa. In Latin America, Sendero Luminoso increased its activities in the first years of the twenty-first century. FARC and ELN in Colombia continue to occupy territory and raise significant amounts of their funding from the narcotics trade. On the other hand, the AUC agreed to disarm in 2005. In the United States and Canada, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF) continue to conduct attacks, primarily on business and government targets. Andrea M. Lopez See also: African Union; Insurgency and Counterinsurgency References Borum, Randy, and Michael Gelles. “Al Qaeda’s Operational Evolution: Behavioral and Organizational Perspectives.” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 23 (July 2005): 467–483. Dempsey, Thomas. “Counterterrorism in African Failed States: Challenges and Potential Solutions.” Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, April 2006. Feldmann, Andreas E., and Maiju Perälä. “Reassessing the Causes of Nongovernmental Terrorism in Latin

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America.” Latin American Politics and Society 46 (Summer 2004): 101–132. Katzman, Kenneth. “Al Qaeda: Profile and Threat Assessment.” Congressional Research Service. August 17, 2005. Hoffman, Bruce. Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Howard, Russell, and Reid Sawyer, eds. Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the New Security Environment. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. Laqueur, Walter. The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Laqueur, Walter. A History of Terrorism. Edison, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001. Laqueur, Walter, ed. Voices of Terror: Manifestos, Writings and Manuals of al Qaeda, Hamas, and Other Terrorists from Around the World and Throughout the Ages. New York: Reed Press, 2004. Rotberg, Robert, ed. Battling Terror in the Horn of Africa. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005. U.S. Department of State. Country Reports on Terrorism. 2005.

THIONG’O, NGUGI WA (1938–) Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a Kenyan novelist, dramatist, essayist, and teacher whose works are frequently taught in African and postcolonial literary surveys. He was born in British-ruled Kenya on January 5, 1938. As part of his re-formation of identity, he officially changed his name from (James) Ngugi to Ngugi wa Thiong’o in 1977. Ngugi’s works memorably depict the prolonged liberation struggle of Kenya. His early novels, Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967), portray oppressive life under colonial rule and revolve around the Mau Mau rebellion, the militant anticolonial movement during the 1950s that led to Kenya’s independence from colonial rule.

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After regaining independence in 1963, the Kenyan authoritarian government associated with the comprador bourgeois line used not only the inherited colonial state machinery but also relied on Western capital. In Petals of Blood (1977), Ngugi describes the neocolonial exploitation of a ruling minority on behalf of U.S.-led imperialism and the political struggle of the marginalized masses of peasants and workers in postindependence Kenya. In contrast to Chinua Achebe’s argument for the adoption of the English language by African writers, Ngugi claims that writing in an African language is a necessity, that it is part of the anti-imperialist struggle of African peoples. By emphasizing the political power and responsibility of a writer, he insists that African writers use African languages. Also, Ngugi denounces the mindcontrol of colonial education that imposes negative qualities of backwardness and underdevelopment upon African peoples, cultural values, and languages. He advocates the necessity of teaching African languages and literatures as an essential part of the process of decolonizing the mind. Thus, with his novel Devil on the Cross, and continuing to his later novels, including Wizard of the Crow (2006), Ngugi began authoring his works in his mother-tongue, Kikuyu, which then are translated into the English language. Having been actively involved in the promotion of African literature and ongoing engagement with political social issues, Ngugi has made tremendous impact on Africans and the African Diasporas with his outspoken critique of power, state and social injustice, and the African political experience in a global context. Since 1982, Ngugi has lived in exile in Europe and the United States. As of 2007 he serves as Distinguished Professor of www.abc-clio.com

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Comparative Literature and Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. Heejung Cha See also: Achebe, Chinua; African Literature; Colonialism; Decolonization, African References Gikandi, Simon. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lovesey, Oliver. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000. Nazareth, Peter, ed. Critical Essays on Ngugi wa Thiong’o. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000.

TITANIC The ill-fated voyage of the RMS Titanic, which sank on April 14, 1912, has occasioned various cultural responses, from cartoons and advertisements to poems, songs, and films. From soon after the sinking, African Americans have taken a leading role in this outpouring, despite the fact that there were reputedly no blacks on board at all. Probably the first African American secular song about the voyage was Butler “String Beans” May’s Titanic Blues of 1913, which inaugurated the humorous boast that the singer himself was aboard and survived due to his great athleticism. During the next 15 years such an extravagant lie was less common than moralistic ballads that used the disaster to indict AngloAmerican bourgeois culture for its hubris and lack of concern for the poor. An especially moving example was God Moves on the Water, recorded by Blind Willie Johnstone in 1929. According to an undying rumor, world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson was denied passage on the ship because of his color. Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”)

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composed his blues Titanic with this “fact” as central to the disaster. When Johnson wants to get on board, the captain refuses with the racist retort, “I ain’ haulin’ no coal”; however, he and his passengers are punished for this racism by the disaster itself that the song revels in: Black man oughta shout for joy, Never lost a girl or either a boy Cryin’, “Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well!”

In a similar vein, the Titanic toasts that came into their own after World War II took issue with a tragic reading of the disaster and emphasized the humorous. Extremely lewd and bawdy, they were long oral narratives that had as their hero a supposed black stoker on the ship, Shine. He warns the captain that the ship will sink, but the captain refuses to listen and initiate the disembarkation of his passengers until it is too late. Meanwhile, Shine is already swimming to safety and refusing the blandishments of the rich white men and women aboard.

a white wife who boarded in France and traveled second class. He died in the disaster, but his wife and children survived. The Titanic disaster continues to be the subject of narrative interpretations, not the least of which is the epic James Cameron film Titanic (1997). A twentyfirst century African American take on the disaster was shown by an extended joke on the subject in Spike Lee’s film Original Kings of Comedy (2000). Here again, black agency is emphasized as the black band members refuse to go down with their ship, but make improvisatory boats out of tables, with tablecloths for sails, and survive the disaster. RMS Titanic might have been a virtually lily-white ship, but this has not stopped African American artists from exploring its multiple valences for discussing black Atlantic realities. Alan Rice References Abbot, Lynn, and Doug Seroff. “‘They Certl’y Sounded Good to Me’: Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues.” American Music (Winter 1996): 402–453. Biel, Steven. Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Jackson, Bruce. Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African American Narrative Poetry from Oral Tradition. New York: Routledge, 2004. Oliver, Paul. Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Rice, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum, 2003.

Big man from Wall Street came on the second deck. In his hand he held a book of checks. He said, “Shine, Shine, if you save poor me, “Say I’ll make you as rich as any black man can be.” Shine said, “You don’t like my color and you down on my race, get your ass overboard and give these sharks a chase.” (Jackson, 2004, p. 190)

The reversal of traditional power relations in these poems made them very popular among African Americans and they are still told today. Latest revelations about the passenger list on the Titanic, however, have exploded one of the myths that created them. There was in fact one black man aboard, a Joseph Larouche, a Haitian with www.abc-clio.com

TOGO Located in West Africa, the Republic of Togo, with a narrow coastline, and stretching inland to Burkina Faso, has a population of approximately 5,557,000, many of

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whom live along the coast in the south of the country. It was originally a German colony after German commercial agents signed “treaties of protection” in 1884. The German government then took over control of Togoland and governors were appointed from 1898. James Nathan Calloway, an American agriculturalist from Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), Alabama, moved to German Togoland, where he was involved in an experimental station growing cotton until at least 1930. Togo’s economy is heavily tied to phosphate, some of which is exported to the Americas, and the rest to France. At the outbreak of World War I, the British and the French invaded and captured the colony, with most of it continuing under French rule, and the western section being placed under British control and being absorbed into the Gold Coast (now Ghana). The French administered their section, Togo, under the mandate of the League of Nations, independent of their other colonies, and in 1946 it was transferred to a United Nations trusteeship. From the 1930s some U.S. missionaries with the United Presbyterian Church of North America went to Togo. In 1956 Togo was granted internal autonomy; it became independent on April 27, 1960. The first U.S. ambassador to Togo was Leland Judd Barrows, who was succeeded in 1961 by Leon Baqueiro Poullada. The U.S. Peace Corps started working in Togo from 1962. In the following year there was a coup d’état against the president, Sylvanus Olympio, who had for many years championed Togo independence, but who had become unpopular with many army officers. On January 13, 1963, he was ambushed and pursued to the gates of the U.S. embassy, where he was intending www.abc-clio.com

to seek asylum. Soldiers shot him dead outside the gates, and Nicolas Grunitzky, a longtime rival, came to power until he himself was deposed in a coup four years later. Gnassingé (Étienne) Eyadéma was president from 1967 until his death in 2005, although the position was largely ceremonial for much of that time. There has been significant intellectual exchange between Togo and the Americas. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a few students from Togo started studying at Harvard, and Mensah Kpognon of the ministry of planning in Lomé attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now most of the theses on Togo are written by people from Togo. Indeed, as of 2006, of the 16 recent Canadian master’s and doctoral theses on Togo, all but one are authored by people from Togo. Music from Togo has long been popular in France and has traveled to French colonies in the Americas. King Mensah, one of the best-known musicians from Togo, moved to French Guiana during the mid-1990s before settling in Paris, where he leads his own group, Favaneva. Justin Corfield See also: British Empire; French Empire; Ghana; Tuskegee Institute Reference Decalo, Samuel. Historical Dictionary of Togo. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

TOOMER, JEAN (1894–1967) Early twentieth-century philosopher and writer Jean Toomer was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C., on December 26, 1894. His best known work, Cane, was claimed by both the American modernist movement and the Harlem Renaissance. He was the only child

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of North Carolina planter Nathan Toomer and Nina Pinchback, daughter of biracial politician P. B. S. Pinchback who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate during Reconstruction. Although Pinchback could pass as a white man, he ran for office on the Negro ticket and was denied entrance to both the House and Senate as a result. Like his maternal grandfather, Toomer’s physical appearance did not betray his race, so he moved easily through white society, even identifying his race as white on official documents such as college applications and marriage licenses. The theme of race occupies much of Toomer’s writing and philosophy. Inspired by his 1921 trip to Sparta, Georgia, where he served as principal at an industrial and agricultural school for blacks, Toomer’s breakthrough work Cane (1923) depicts Southern black folk culture in the interim between slavery and civil rights. The book’s compelling and authentic treatment of rural Southern blacks and its innovative structure—a montage of poetry, fiction, and drama—represented a modernist advance for African American literature, and today Cane is widely recognized as the seminal literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. In spite of the black community’s overwhelmingly positive response to the book, Jean Toomer was disheartened by the lukewarm response of white critics and moderate sales marketwide because his goal had been to achieve universal praise without regard to race. Abandoning fiction writing for more philosophical pursuits, Toomer immediately began to search for a means of transcending racial divisions. He found it in the Russian philosopher Georges Gurdjieff in early 1924. Gurdjieff ’s Unitism philosophy promised a higher consciousness www.abc-clio.com

and paralleled some of Toomer’s own ideas, so Toomer devoted himself almost wholly to Gurdjieff, becoming his disciple and using his writer’s skills to spread Gurdjieff ’s message. Though Toomer experimented with other means of enlightenment, such as Scientology, spiritual travels in India, and Quakerism, his life and work after 1924 and until his death in a nursing home on March 30, 1967, were devoted to Gurdjieff. Dana Nicholas See also: African Literature; Harlem Renaissance References Griffin, John C. Biography of American Author Jean Toomer, 1894–1967. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. McKay, Nellie Y. Jean Toomer, Artist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Toomer, Jean. Cane. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.

TRADE, FAIR Fair trade is a component of international trade within the complex system of development. Declining prices of primary products such as coffee, abhorrent labor conditions in garment sweatshops, the worldwide increase in human trafficking, and unsustainable agriculture practices have all contributed to the groundswell of support by producers and consumers for fair trade measures to address these global problems. Fair trade measures to address these problems in Latin America and Africa have focused on product pricing and working conditions. In particular, products such as coffee, tea, cocoa, and garments have all been affected to some degree by fair trade measures. Governments in Latin America and Africa have similar objectives for economic

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growth, increased employment, price stability, and improved equity in income distribution. Increasing international trade through trade liberalization (removal of trade restrictions) is often mentioned as a primary component of any country’s attempts to accomplish these objectives. Yet the specific prescription for achieving these objectives is different for every country, and must take into account the actions of both developing and industrial countries. Many argue that industrial countries have a responsibility to construct a global trade system that enhances the participation of developing countries and ensures that they access a fair share of the potential gains that arise from international trade. Latin American and African nations have used international trade and/or the liberalization of trade agreements to increase employment, economic growth, and stability; to improve foreign relations; and to increase political and economic status within the world community. International trade agreements and various types of industrial and protectionist policies enacted within a country also affect income distribution and the overall welfare of a nation’s citizens. The results of these efforts have often been mixed. Ten years after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed between Mexico, the United States, and Canada, Mexican exports had grown approximately 10 percent per year but mean real wages of Mexican workers were lower in 2000 than in 1990. Both poverty and inequality increased for Mexican workers since NAFTA was adopted as the agriculture sector lost jobs due to cheap food imports from the United States. There have always been frequent debates among policymakers and producers and consumers regarding the relative merits www.abc-clio.com

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of unrestricted (free) international trade. While international trade is a necessary ingredient in economic growth, the argument is often made that international trade without a fair trade component will not result in sustainable development. International trade is often portrayed as having positive macroeconomic effects (e.g., increase in overall economic growth and investment), but mixed microeconomic effects (e.g., individual workers and firms can experience gains or losses in the demand for their skills/products). Thus the net effect of international trade on employment and firm expansion often varies between sectors and products. The negative distributional effects of international trade on specific employment sectors (e.g., farming), specific geographic regions (e.g., coffee or tea producing regions), or specific classes (e.g., low-income vs. middle or upper-income classes) often result in winners and losers. Theoretically the winners compensate the losers through government transfer programs or the provision of social safety nets. In reality, this type of compensation rarely occurs—especially in low-tech industries. Trade liberalization can result in cheap imports flooding the domestic markets of both developing countries (e.g., U.S. grain into Mexican markets) and industrial countries (e.g., Chinese apparel into U.S. markets), resulting in domestic unemployment and business bankruptcies. Trade liberalization may also lead to the removal of government subsidies and government protection from the world market for products such as cotton and sugar. This removal would have adverse effects on some producers: for example, U.S. cotton and sugar beet producers. But it would have positive effects on others: for example, West African cotton producers

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would be released from a controlled pricing system imposed by the DAGRIS corporation. In contrast, producers of coffee and other beverage products are competing to sell their products in liberalized world markets dominated by a few large multinational corporations (MNCs). In the coffee market, Nestle, Sara Lee, Kraft, and Proctor and Gamble purchase 50 percent of the world’s beans. The fair trade component within international trade focuses on product prices and working conditions. Fair trade is often presented as a socioeconomic contract between producers and consumers that guarantees the producers a fair price for their labor. The fair trade price has historically been higher than the market price for commodities such as coffee, tea, and cacao (used in the production of chocolate). Fair trade pricing is often described as a floor price or minimum price that will be paid for a product. Advocates of fair trade maintain that when consumers pay a fair trade price they are contributing to sustainable development for producers and their families in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Fair trade is also concerned with improving the conditions under which products are produced. Working conditions in developing countries often violate basic worker standards. Many workplaces force employees to work long hours without breaks, employ children, pay workers in company script rather than wages, and do not observe basic safety requirements. Additionally, environmental degradation from soil erosion, misuse of chemicals, and factory pollution occur when products (e.g., cacao and garments) are grown or manufactured in areas with few health and environmental regulations. www.abc-clio.com

The implementation of fair trade pricing and improved working conditions requires challenging international trade agreements, national laws, business purchasing policies, and consumer attitudes. Fair trade policies encourage the education and organization of consumers and producers in order to negotiate a socioeconomic contract that provides the required leverage to implement fair trade pricing and improved working conditions. Since the mid-1990s, fair trade education and organization have occurred using a variety of vehicles: rallies, grassroots campaigns, Web sites, and shareholder resolutions. Product markets do not demand changes in pricing or working conditions, but activists utilizing the above vehicles in their “name and shame” campaigns have successfully challenged corporations to change the way they do produce and market their products. Companies such as Nike, Proctor and Gamble, and The Gap have been successfully pressured to adopt corporate codes of conduct with their suppliers, implement production site monitoring, and offer higher-priced fair trade products. Organizations that provide certification and information to consumers and businesses on fair trade practices include TransFair, Fair Trade Certified, Fair Trade Federation, and Rainforest Alliance. TransFair, a certifying fair trade labeling organization, was established to increase consumer awareness and provide information on purchasing fair trade commodities. Begun in Europe in the 1980s, TransFair was first organized in the United States in 1999. Since its debut in the United States, it has resulted in $55 million additional income to more than 800,000 farmers and their families in 50 countries. Increasing numbers of businesses in the United States

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have begun offering a line of retail products to consumers with fair trade labels. These products include wood (Home Depot), coffee (Proctor and Gamble, Dunkin’ Donuts), bananas (Wild Oats Markets), handicrafts (Ten Thousand Villages), and cocoa and tea (Equal Exchange, which sells fair trade products to 19,000 churches). Fair trade pricing can be illustrated using the example of coffee. Historically, producer prices per pound of coffee have ranged from $2.30 in 1965 to $4.30 in 1985 to $0.90 in 1997 and $0.55 on average since 2003. Due to the sharp decline in coffee prices since 1997, 600,000 Central Americans lost employment opportunities and 5 million were living below the poverty line. As of 2006, returns to coffee producers from a pound of roasted coffee vary from $0.55 for coffee marketed by MNCs such as Proctor and Gamble and sold in grocery stores (e.g., Folgers) to $1.26 for fair trade blends to $3.77 for fair trade coffee sold directly to the consumer by a producer cooperative under the TransFair label. A discussion of the principles of fair trade is often broader than the economic language of prices and working conditions. Fair trade can also include providing economic opportunities for the poor, increasing transparency and accountability in relations between the poor and other individuals and institutions, building capacity of the poor and their enterprises, gender equity, and advocating sustainable environmental practices. The complexity of development is exemplified when utilizing this broader view of fair trade with regard to sweatshops. While sweatshops often exhibit characteristics of unfair pricing structures and horrific working conditions, they also provide socioeconomic opportunities for poor women that were nonexistent in the www.abc-clio.com

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countryside. In the “race to the bottom” of low wages and minimal working conditions, the application of fair trade principles can raise the level of this bottom. Gayle A. Morris See also: Economic Community of West African States; International Development; International Monetary Fund; Microfinance; United States Agency for International Development; World Trade Organization References Bales, K. Disposable People. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Dougherty, P. Who’s Afraid of Adam Smith? How the Market Got Its Soul. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002. Irwin, D. Free Trade under Fire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Lappe, A., and B. Terry. Grub. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Rivoli, P. The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Sachs, J. The End of Poverty. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Stiglitz, J., and A. Carlton. Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

TRADE ZONES, AFRICAN Trade zones in Africa, of which several have emerged recently, are designed primarily to liberalize trade and harmonize markets among regionally aligned countries as well as, significantly, to influence government policy along neoliberal lines. Major trade zones on the continent include the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Communaute Financiere Africaine (CFA) Franc Zone, and the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA). The trade zones are viewed as crucial to the further

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expansion of neoliberal socioeconomic regimes across the continent through the New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD). The largest trading bloc in Africa is COMESA, with 27 member-states spanning the continent from Egypt in the north to Namibia in the south. With almost 385 million people, the member-states of COMESA encompass almost half of Africa’s population. ECOWAS includes 16 memberstates covering 220 million people, while SADC involves 14 member-states and almost 190 million people. There is some overlap among Africa’s trade zones. Eight SADC members (Angola, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe) are also members of COMESA. The Francophone countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo are also part of the CFA Franc Zone. Critics contend that trade zone emphasis on competitive markets, enhanced resource exploitation, and industrial profitability have only exacerbated extreme levels of poverty and low social and health indicators. Trade areas such as COMESA, ECOWAS, and SADC are further troubled by, and as some critics suggest, contribute to, inequalities in regional economies. Each zone shows a mix of larger and more dynamic economies alongside some of the world’s poorest countries. These unequal relations have given rise to concerns about the domination of weaker economies by the regional powerhouses. Jeff Shantz References Oyejide, T. A., A. B. Ndulu, and J. W. Gunning, eds. Regional Integration and Trade Liberalization in Sub-Saharan Africa. Vol. 2, Country Case Studies. London: Macmillan, 1999.

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Shantz, Jeff. “CFA Franc Zone.” In Encyclopedia of Globalization. Ed. Ashish Vaidya. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005.

TRANSCULTURATION Fernando Ortiz, the Cuban omnivorous scholar who wrote extensively on AfroCuban culture, was the first to coin the term “transculturation” in analyzing the historical, cultural, and economic counterpoint between tobacco and sugar, which he claimed could be the organizing image for understanding the island’s rich sociocultural brew. Ortiz analyzed transculturation as occurring in a subjugated culture under colonialism and slavery that is able to incorporate, transform, and subtly subvert elements of the dominant culture in order to fashion meanings that ensure not only the survival of a culture and its people but also the ability of such subjugated people to thrive and create a new culture. For example, Regla de Ocha (also known as Santeria) is a religion that is neither purely Yoruba nor purely Spanish, but owes much to both and is uniquely Cuban, even if its African roots are primary. Transculturation is a hybrid emblem of cultural creativity, a material practice that both reinscribes the past and transforms the present, a performative philosophical reasoning, and an act of social resistance. In a Caribbean context, transculturation has understandably focused on the interaction and transmutation of European and African cultures, but often ignored is that the first transculturations were among different African peoples themselves, say, between Yoruba and Kongo, between Mandingo and Fon, between Wolof and Ashanti. Also significant in some instances are Amerindian-African transculturations,

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as with the Garífuna peoples, and in the histories of Guyana, French Guiana, and Suriname. Examples of transculturation can be musical (danzón, zouk, reggae), religious (Regla de Ocha, Voodoo, Shango), culinary (callaloo, ajiaco), and linguistic (Papiamento, Sranan-Tongo, the English and French Creoles spoken in different islands). Transculturation (in the Anglophone Caribbean the term creolization is preferred; creolité is used in the Francophone countries) is by no means a smooth transaction, but instead a long, often painful historical process first marked by deculturation and forced assimilation, as when slaves were stripped of their humanity and culture (clothing; changing of names; religious prohibition; physical, sexual, and psychic violence). But over centuries, as power relationships changed both during and after slavery, the Caribbean began to evolve Euro-African cultural realities that became uniquely Jamaican, Cuban, or Martinican. Transculturation is often seen as having a racial meaning, and in this sense, a synonym of mestizaje, or racial mixing, is used. Some intellectuals, including Ortiz, have used the term to describe their countries as racial democracies, and also as a way to deny the existence of racism, indirectly implying that whiteness is still the norm. Transculturation’s racial dimension does not mean that racial mixing denies the existence of racism (“intimacy does not mean equality”) nor “shadism”—the obsession with a person’s degree of whiteness or blackness—but it does mean that both race and identity, as definitions and lived relations, change over time and are embedded within historically specific power relationships. Transculturation requires using the www.abc-clio.com

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past as a means to envision how we will shape the future, as Stuart Hall has suggested. That all individuals bear a responsibility in defining how racial and cultural identities operate is especially important when considering how being black, mixedrace, or white is shaped so differently in Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Martinique, Haiti, or the United States. In analyzing Afro-Caribbean culture, scholars and artists have come up with a wealth of metaphors trying to capture the racial, social, and cultural complexity of the region: culinary (callaloo, ajiaco, stew), metallurgical (crucible, melting pot, forge), spatial or architectural (crossroads, fourstoried house, limbo, repeating island, open Gnostic space), natural-ecological (trees, roots, rhizomes, mangrove, manigua), literary (cross-cultural poetics), as well as the above mentioned references to racial and cultural mixing (Creolization, mestizaje, hybridity). None of these metaphors alone are sufficient, but they help us understand that being African in the Caribbean, as a transculturated being, is a matter of roots that have been (and are) routes that extend to and from all corners of the planet. Alan West-Durán See also: Atlantic World; Calypso; Creole/Criollo; Cuba; Cuban Music, African Influence in; Cuban Ritual Music, African Influence in; Jamaica, Women’s Role in; Kongo; Mexico (Afro-Mexican Identity); Obeah; Puerto Rico; Reggae; Voodoo; Yoruba References Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben eds., Formations of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.

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1068 TRAVEL WRITING Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo. The Cuban Condition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Shepherd, Verene A., and Glen L. Richards, eds. Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002. West-Durán, Alan. African Caribbeans: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003.

TRAVEL WRITING A term coined by the cultural studies critic Raymond Williams, travel writing encompasses literary journeys across a range of genres that address or illustrate cultural contact, conflict, and interchange. There is wide-ranging travel literature on Africa and the Caribbean. Though the black Atlantic was formed—and continues to evolve— through the movement of people, their journeys are rarely represented by conventional travel books. Typically written by professional authors as the result of a specially undertaken expedition or assignment, such works are poorly equipped to describe the enforced journeys of slaves or those fleeing oppression or in search of education or employment. But accounts of these journeys, though neglected, do exist, if scattered across a range of genres— autobiographies, diaries, letters, speeches, journalism—sometimes ghost-written, frequently unpublished, often out of print. Recent attempts to draw attention to the richness of this material have helped to force a reconsideration of the rather narrow definition of travel writing employed by the Western publishing industry (often uncritically assimilated by critics and theorists). Since the 1980s, a considerable body of this www.abc-clio.com

work has been reprinted, and a new generation of authors has emerged, conscious of this heritage which they seek to continue. Most of the first-person accounts of enslavement in Africa and the Middle Passage appear in eighteenth-century slave narratives, such those of Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cuguano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw. The stories of American-born slaves tell of enforced marches and flights to freedom across the United States. A significant number offer accounts of journeys to Europe and farther afield as fugitives, as public speakers, as domestic servants, or— in the case of David Dorr, author of A Colored Man Round the World (1858)—as a slave accompanying his master. Dorr went on a tour that took him as far as Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Some former slaves went on to play a leading role in public life in the United States following the Civil War. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892) consolidated Frederick Douglass’s reputation as a man of the world with his accounts of crossing oceans and continents, inaugurating a tradition that would include future political leaders such as Kwame N’krumah, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela. Writers such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes traveled so extensively that their autobiographies are effectively travel narratives. Predictably too, perhaps, the careers of prominent musicians and sportsmen and women have provided a rich source of travel anecdotes: for instance, the memoirs of concert pianist Philippa Duke Schuyler (Adventures in Black and White, 1960) and of soccer star Pele (My Life and the Beautiful Game, 1977). The life stories of lesser-known figures may find their way into print with small publishers, and often repay the effort of

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tracking them down. More fragmentary biographies are found in diaries and letters, usually published posthumously. Other experiences may be captured by oral historians, typically appearing in themed collections that address immigration or military service. But many travelers have left only the barest record of their experiences, their words recorded by writers who met them, often briefly, incorporating their stories within their own. Journalism offers much of interest. One finds a wide range of accounts of visits abroad in The Crisis (whose editor, W. E. B. Du Bois, contributed many notable pieces), London-based The Keys, Barbadian magazine Bim, and Essence (selections from which have recently been anthologized in Go Girl! ). C. L. R. James’s memorable first impressions of London were first published in the Port of Spain Gazette (1932); Nicolás Guillén’s reports from the Spanish Civil War and the Eastern Bloc appeared in Cuban periodicals; and Nat Nakasa and Lewis Nkosi offered black South African perspectives on New York City and Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. Travel also inspired some of the best essays of June Jordan: for instance, “Beyond Apocalypse Now” (1980) presents reflections on race and identity prompted by a winter visit to St Paul, Minnesota, in a manner reminiscent of James Baldwin’s “A Stranger in the Village” (1953). Perhaps one of the first conventional book-length travel narratives by a black author was The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands (1857). John Ocansey’s account of his attempt to recover money owed by a Liverpool merchant (An African Trading, 1881) and Ham Mukasa’s record of a Bugandan chief ’s journey to attend Edward VI’s coronation (Uganda’s www.abc-clio.com

Katakiro in England, 1904) are classic books that have been reprinted. Booker T. Washington’s The Man Furthest Down (1912) is an unjustly neglected study of poverty in Europe. Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham brought their anthropological training to bear on their reflections on Jamaica and Haiti, which they visited in the 1930s and 1940s. After World War II, major travelogues by Richard Wright (on Spain, Gold Coast, and Indonesia), Bernard Dadié (Paris, New York, Rome), Andrew Salkey (Guyana, Cuba), and An African in Greenland (1981) by Tété-Michel Kpomassie appeared. Caryl Phillips’s The European Tribe (1987) and The Atlantic Sound (1999), Colleen McElroy’s A Long Way from St Louie (1997), and Gary Younge’s No Place Like Home (1999) mark the emergence of a tradition-conscious body of black travel writing. Probably the richest evocations of travel are to be found in imaginative works of fiction, poetry, and drama, which often recreate experiences otherwise poorly represented in print. These may include more or less autobiographical novels, which capture the experience of migration, such as George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) or Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1991). The plays of August Wilson and the poems of Grace Nichols suggest how other literary forms can address questions of displacement and belonging. Finally, the diasporic scope of novels such as Sandra JacksonOpoku’s The River Where Blood Is Born (1997), or extended verse sequences such as Edward Brathwaite’s The Arrivants (1967), have the freedom to range across continents and generations to provide memorable syntheses of black Atlantic histories and memories.

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Several themes may be identified in this body of work. Predictably enough, their authors often tell of travel under duress, from the enforced voyage of the slave ship to the rushed flight of fugitives and refugees, or the dull compulsion of “economic” migration. But the obstacles preventing travel are almost as common: the difficulties in obtaining passports, the segregation of public transport, the sheer lack of access to transport at all. Journeys across national borders frequently prompt reflections on the change of social status— even of “color”—occasioned by the transition from one racial regime to another. If the dominant tradition in travel literature tells of journeys from the metropolitan center to a (neocolonial) periphery that is assumed to be unfamiliar to the author and his or her readers, black Atlantic travelers frequently recount journeys in the opposite direction. But with personal and family ties to more than one continent, the question of “home” is often a vexed one. Alasdair Pettinger See also: Atlantic World; Crisis, The; Dadié, Bernard Binlin; Hughes, Langston; Hurston, Zora Neale; Kincaid, Jamaica; McKay, Claude; Slave Narratives; Wright, Richard References Griffin, Farah Jasmine, and Cheryl Fish, eds. A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998. Handlin, Oscar, and Lilian Handlin, eds. From the Outer World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Lee, Elaine, ed. Go Girl! The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1997. Pettinger, Alasdair, ed. Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic. London and New York: Continuum, 1997. Vogel, Amber, ed. “Africans Abroad.” Special issue, Journal of African Travel Writing 8/9 (2001): 74–181.

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TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO The Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago have evolved into a multiracial society comprised mostly of East Indian and African descendants. In 1498, Christopher Columbus charted the islands during his exploration of the southern Caribbean, and the Spanish established a more permanent outpost in Trinidad after 1514. Hundreds of Spanish missionaries and planters migrated to Trinidad and Tobago, but the islands’ population remained stagnant until the late eighteenth century when French and British colonizers and their African slaves settled the islands in larger numbers. As the competition for colonies among European powers intensified, the British Crown, in particular, saw Trinidad and Tobago as a lucrative sugar-growing colony and as a strategic outpost to challenge Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese hegemony in the southern Caribbean. The British gained control over French-occupied Tobago by 1763 and took Trinidad from Spain in 1797. Merchants and planters quickly established large plantations that produced sugar to be exported to Great Britain, Europe, and its North American colonies. This led to the importation of more African slaves (which outnumbered Europeans and Amerindians combined) until the British declared in 1807 that it would end its participation in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1833, the colonial government adopted a plan to abolish slavery gradually, declaring that slaves would be required by law to remain on plantations for a term of six years. Nonviolent slave resistance hastened the death of this scheme, and by 1838, Trinidad became the first British colony to end chattel slavery. Still, British administrators did not want abolition and

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the rise of a free Afro-Trinidadian laboring class to threaten the flow of sugar exports, and they immediately turned to the importation of indentured laborers from other parts of the Empire. Between 1838 and 1917, the colonial government authorized the importation of more than 145,000 Chinese laborers; yet, East Indians (mainly Hindus) constituted the largest contingency of these migrants. By 1900, East Indians constituted one-third of Trinidad’s population. Building on their success in preventing the rise of an Afro-Trinidadian laboring class through the creation of a class of indentured laborers, the British continued to enforce labor control policies as sugar cultivation gradually gave way to cacao production, a more profitable commodity. Administrators viewed African and East Indian aspirations and rituals as challenges to colonial rule. Carnival celebrations in Trinidad were closely monitored. In 1884, the Muharram Massacre chilled relations between the growing East Indian community and the British Crown. As Hindus and Muslims and many Afro-Trinidadians joined together to commemorate Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, colonial forces opened fire on a crowd and killed almost two dozen East Indians. In the 1920s and 1930s, labor unrest continued with the decline in prices for the colony’s agricultural commodities. Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian labor unions organized for better wages and working conditions in key sectors of the economy, including the burgeoning oil industry. These efforts later helped bolster the aspirations of many Afro-Trinidadian politicians, including Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, leader of the British Empire Citizens’ and Workers’ Home Rule Party, and Eric Williams, head www.abc-clio.com

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of the People’s National Movement (PNM), the most successful party. The variety of ethnic and racial groups resulted in significant overlap in the population’s cultural, religious, and social traditions. Influenced by the Afro-Trinidadian population, drum music emerged in the early nineteenth century and continued to develop into steel drum music by the 1940s. The Orisha (Shango) religion has its origins in African, Roman Catholic, Hindu, Protestant, and Kabbalah traditions. Food in Trinidad and Tobago, such as curried goat and roti, clearly has East Indian origins. The national musical style, calypso, originated in the late nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century, calypso performers such as the Lord Melody, Lord Invader, Mighty Sparrow, and Lord Kitchener had perfected the craft of inserting political critique into their entertaining lyrics and spreading news under the guise of song. By the early 1940s, support for political independence from the British gained momentum. The British were clearly declining as a world power as the United States looked to expand its markets in the hemisphere. When World War II ended, nationalist movements in Trinidad and Tobago mirrored those of the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. In 1956, the British allowed Trinidad and Tobago to join the West Indian Federation. This effort collapsed partly because Trinidad wanted to develop its petroleum industry, and Trinidad and Tobago ultimately decided together to declare independence in 1962. Eric Williams, author of the seminal work Capitalism and Slavery (1944), became the country’s first prime minister, and he had to cope with deep racial and ethnic divisions. He was a skilled politician who ably brought together disparate Afro-Trinidadian

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groups into the PNM; however, East Indian politicians and writers, such as Hari Prasad Singh, criticized Williams and other black leaders for excluding their interests. East Indian cultural retention remained high as the development of the communities of Banara, Chapra, Ballia, Gorakhpur, and Patna attests. Williams was also challenged by a Black Power movement, which had developed in the context of other movements in North America and the Caribbean. In 1970, Geddes Granger (now Makandal Daaga) and others led mass demonstrations sparked by the arrest of Trinidadian students in Canada. These demonstrations led to riots and looting, paralyzing the country until the Williams government declared a state of emergency. From the 1980s onward, racial divisions continued to affect the development of Trinidad and Tobago. Some Afro-Trinidadians have gravitated toward Muslim organizations, such as the Jamaat al Muslimeen. One of its leaders, Imam Yasin Abu Bakr, led a failed coup attempt in 1990. Jesse Hingson See also: British Empire; Orisha; Spanish Empire References Brereton, Bridget. Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Dudley, Shannon. Carnival Music in Trinidad. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Palmer, Colin. Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Regis, Louis. The Political Calypso: True Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago, 1962–1987. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. Yelvington, Kevin. Trinidad Ethnicity. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993.

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TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSIONS Since 1974, more than 20 officially sanctioned truth and reconciliation commissions have been established in various parts of the Americas and Africa in the aftermath of ethnic cleansings and conflicts, state terror, genocides, and widespread abductions, disappearances, tortures, and detentions. These commissions tend to be ad hoc tribunals that are granted a variety of extrajudicial responsibilities and functions, which include the investigation of past human rights violations or atrocities within a particular setting and historical time period. Yet, within these broad parameters, truth commissions may also investigate groups or individuals that have engaged in state-sponsored acts of widespread violence. In the last several decades, truth and reconciliation commissions have been initiated by several types of groups and organizations. They have emerged as a result of international pressure from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as in the case of Rwanda and Paraguay in the 1990s. International bodies, such as the United Nations, have also mandated the creation of commissions to investigate human rights abuses and atrocities (e.g., El Salvador in 1992). Truth and reconciliation commissions have also emerged as part of peace agreements between political groups in the final stages of long-lasting political conflicts. For example, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was charged with investigating abuses committed by the apartheid government. In 1995, this commission was officially sanctioned by the majority party, the African National Congress, when it gained control of the government. The leaders and members of these commissions are a diverse lot. They are

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usually prominent ex-politicians, academicians, grassroots leaders, lawyers, judges, human rights and peace activists, and leaders of international organizations. In some cases, religious leaders, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa and Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Brazil, have accepted prominent roles as heads of commissions of inquiries in their respective countries. Typically, truth and reconciliation commissions issue final reports that recount specific past episodes of violence committed against civilian populations, but the outcomes of these reports are just as diverse as the purposes of these commissions. Final reports usually include biographical information about perpetrators and victims and their testimony; statistical and demographic information about the dead, wounded, tortured, and raped; and an assessment on the political, psychological, and social impact that these events had on society. Yet, there is no requirement for what type of information is released to the public. Commissions in Argentina and Chile did not publicly issue the names of perpetrators, while South Africa’s commission did. Thus, truth and reconciliation commissions largely act as vehicles for officially recognizing past human rights abuses and atrocities and for disseminating this past to the public. The emphasis is usually on commemorating and remembering those who were victimized rather than seeking retributive justice against those suspected of committing human rights abuses and violations. In fact, truth and reconciliation commissions are rarely given full legal authority to subpoena, convict, punish, or jail suspects of human rights violations, although South Africa’s commission was given the power to grant immunity. www.abc-clio.com

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Because they vary in purpose and powers, truth and reconciliation commissions are difficult to assess and remain controversial. They usually are created within the context of dramatic political shifts, such as transitions from authoritarian to democratic regimes. Truth commissions often create high expectations that perpetrators of human rights abuses will be caught and punished for their crimes. However, these commissions are almost always plagued by pressures and limitations, such as the inexperience of commissioners, the capacity of processing hundreds or thousands of complaints, staff corruption, poor budgets, and military or police intimidation. In addition, testimony is very difficult to elicit from both perpetrators and victims. Eliciting cooperation is especially challenging when democratically elected leaders pardon those who participated in atrocities and human rights abuses. Perpetrators may escape judgment or decide not to testify without some agreement in place to provide blanket amnesty or immunity from future prosecution. If some type of immunity is granted, then victims and their supporters may feel betrayed by this and lose faith in the new regime and perhaps in democracy itself if the new regime is democratically elected. Perpetrators may also feel the need to justify what they did in the name of security, safety, anticommunism, nationalism, and war. Various military officials who appeared before the commissions in disparate places like South Africa and Argentina have justified their acts by claiming that they were fighting to save their countries from subversive elements and that they were vested with emergency powers to protect national security. The first truth commissions that appeared in Latin America were established in

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Bolivia and Argentina in the early 1980s. The most widely publicized truth and reconciliation commission occurred in Argentina after Raúl Alfonsín, the first civilian president elected after the military ruled between 1976 and 1982, appointed the National Commission of the Disappeared in 1983. What emerged was a seminal document titled Nunca Más (translated as Never Again), which recounted testimony of those who were tortured. A growing number of commissions in Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Panama, and Peru during the 1990s have also investigated past abuses. In most cases, the results of these investigations show that members of the government and the military committed most of the atrocities. In El Salvador, for example, the United Nationssponsored truth commission found that 85 percent of the 900,000 human rights violations and 95 percent of the thousands of deaths occurred at the hands of government-sponsored death squads. In addition, as with the cases of Argentina and Peru, most of the victims had little to do with the political conflicts of the time. In Africa since the 1990s, truth and reconciliation commissions have been set up in Chad, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. However, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the most widely recognized. It was headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and focused primarily on gathering testimony from victims and perpetrators alike on human rights abuses during the years of apartheid in the country. In a controversial move, Archbishop Tutu granted full immunity to those who committed human rights abuses in exchange for their testimony. This appeal to the Christian idea of forgiveness and reconciliation clashed with the local, www.abc-clio.com

alternative African value of ubuntu, which called for punishment. Still, the procedures of South Africa’s commission have been modeled in other parts of Africa and elsewhere. A variety of groups and individuals have called for new truth and reconciliation or similar types of commissions of inquiry to be established in a variety of Latin American and African countries including Angola, Cambodia, Colombia, Jamaica, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Sudan, Uganda, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. Recently, in the United States, leaders of grassroots organizations have asked the government for an official apology for past atrocities committed against American Indians or African Americans. However, since the end of World War II, the U.S. government has consistently decided to grant reparations rather than establish officially sponsored truth commissions as a means of making amends for past injustices. For example, millions of dollars have been given to Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. The state of Maryland has given more than $16 million to historically black colleges in order to correct past inequities in funding them. Still, many truth and reconciliation commissions have been founded as result of grassroots movements. While these efforts are not usually officially sanctioned, they have raised awareness about past injustices. In Oklahoma, for example, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission recommended that reparations be paid to the family members of those who were lynched during the Tulsa riots of 1921. In Greensboro, North Carolina, a truth and reconciliation commission, modeled after similar efforts in Peru and South Africa, met to hear testimony from perpetrators and victims in the 1979

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Greensboro Massacre, where 40 Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis opened fire on an anti-Klan demonstration and five people were killed. Thus far, the U.S. government appears unwilling to recognize these efforts. Jesse Hingson See also: Human Rights; South Africa, History and Politics References Barkan, Elazar. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Boraine, Alex. A Country Unmasked: Inside South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Grandin, Greg. “The Instructions of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala.” American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (February 2005): 46–67. Hayner, Priscilla B. “Fifteen Truth Commissions, 1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study.” Human Rights Quarterly 16, no. 4 (November 1994): 597–655. Hayner, Priscilla B. Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions. New York: Routledge, 2002. Kritz, Neil J., ed. Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes. 3 vols. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1995. Malamud-Goti, Jaime. Game without End: State Terror and the Politics of Justice. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Minow, Martha. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence. New York: Beacon Press, 1999. Rosenberg, Tina. Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America. New York: Penguin, 1991. Wilson, Richard. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001.

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TRUTH, SOJOURNER (1797–1883) Sojourner Truth (Isabella Braumfree) was an African American escaped slave, abolitionist speaker, and preacher. She was the second youngest child born to slave parents in Ulster County, New York, a Dutch settlement. She spoke only Dutch until she was sold at age 11 in 1806. She quickly learned to speak English, but never learned to read or write. She was sold numerous times, and many of her owners treated her poorly. When she reached adulthood she stood 5 feet and 11 inches tall. She was forced to marry Thomas, and bore him five children on the Durmont farm. When New York ended slavery in 1828, she feared her owner had no intention of following the freedom granted by the law. She fled

A poster celebrating Sojourner Truth’s fight for suffrage, and commemorating her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. It would not be until 1920 that women of all races received the right to vote through the Nineteenth Amendment. (Library of Congress)

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with only her infant son to New York City, where she found domestic work. During the next two years, she sued to regain her son who had been sold into slavery, found refuge from a couple who bought her and gave her freedom, and had a religious experience that she explained allowed her to talk directly to God. In 1843 she changed her name to Sojourner Truth and walked from Long Island to Connecticut preaching on antislavery and women’s suffrage. In 1851 she gave her most notable speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” After the Civil War, Truth worked with freed slaves. She died in November 1883 in Battle Creek, Michigan. Laura Madeline Wiseman See also: Tubman, Harriet References “Narrative of Sojourner Truth.” A Celebration of Women Writers. http://digital.library. upenn.edu/women/truth/1850/1850.html (accessed April 2005). Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: Norton, 1996.

TUBMAN, HARRIET (CA. 1820–1913) Harriet Tubman (Araminta Ross) was an abolitionist leader and conductor on the Underground Railroad. She was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland. As a child she worked as a house servant and field hand. At the age of 13 she suffered a vicious assault, which caused her to have fainting spells throughout the rest of her life. She married John Tubman, a free man, in 1844, who later died. Fearing she would be sold South, she made her escape to Canada in 1849 on the Underground Railroad, a system of safe holdings that allowed free persons and slaves to escape from the South to the North. Working with leaders of the antislavery movement, she successfully assisted www.abc-clio.com

Harriet Tubman, led or “conducted” over 300 slaves out of the South to freedom through the Underground Railroad, a set of secret routes, homes, and individuals that enabled slaves to flee northward. (Library of Congress)

members of her family in their relocation to St. Catharine’s, Canada. During her 19 returns to Maryland over a 10-year period as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, she helped free an estimated 300 individuals. During the Civil War, in 1861, she served as spy, cook, nurse, and soldier. After the war, she moved to Auburn, New York, and married Nelson Davis in 1869. From the Civil War period on, she spoke for the antislavery cause and the women’s movement. She died in poverty on March 10, 1913, and was buried in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. Laura Madeline Wiseman

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References Clinton, Catherine. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. New York: Little, Brown, 2004. Larson, Kate Clifford. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. New York: Ballatine Books, 2003.

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TUNISIA Tunisia, in North Africa, is bordered by Algeria to the west and Libya to the east, and has a population of about 9,975,000. Most of the population lives in the northern region around the capital Tunis and in the east along the Mediterranean coast. Most of the south is part of the Sahara Desert. Tunisia’s ties to the United States are historically distinctive as part of naval and diplomatic history. Tunisia has long ties to Mediterranean culture. In classical times, Tunisia was the center of the Carthaginian Empire, later conquered and occupied by the Romans. After the conquest of Rome by the Vandals in the seventh century, Tunisia became part of the Arabic world, and eventually the Ottoman Empire. In the 1780s, corsairs (considered pirates by Europeans and Americans) started seizing U.S. ships off the Tunisian coast. In 1790, the U.S. government signed a treaty with the Tunisian leader Hamuda Bey, paying $100,000 to prevent future attacks on their shipping. From 1801 to 1805, the United States was involved in the TripolitanAmerican War, fighting pirates operating from ports in North Africa. On August 1, 1805, Commodore John Rodgers in the USS Constitution sailed into Tunis and forced Bey to make peace. In 1881, the French occupied and colonized Tunisia. During World War II, after the fall of France to Germany in 1940, Tunisia was run by a Vichy French administration. British and American forces invaded in 1943. In Operation Torch, U.S., Canadian, and British soldiers attacked from the west, with British, Indian, and New Zealand soldiers from the east. Many U.S. soldiers were killed in the campaign, especially at the Kasseine Pass. A number of www.abc-clio.com

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the dead remain buried in the North Africa Cemetery at Carthage. Run by the American Battle Monuments Commission, it contains the graves of 2,841 U.S. servicemen. In a notable advance in the history of film-making, Allied soldiers in Tunisia during the war were filmed by the U.S. film producer Darryl Zanuck. After the end of World War II, Tunisia sought independence. It was granted on March 20, 1956, with Habib Bourguiba becoming the nation’s first president. Prior to independence, Bourguiba had visited the United States to get support for Tunisian independence, but the U.S. government was committed to supporting France. However, Bourguiba, after independence, received in total some $1 billion in U.S. aid. Bourguiba remained head of state for 30 years. He was deposed in a bloodless coup in November 1987. The prime minister, Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali, became the new president. A former student of electronic engineering at the School of Intelligence and Security in the United States, he created close relations with the Reagan and Bush administrations. Tunisia has maintained good relations with the United States in spite of tensions that arose from the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986. In recent years there have been some anti-U.S. demonstrations by Muslim radicals. Nonetheless, Tunisia has remained politically stable and continued to have strong diplomatic and cultural ties to the ties to the United States and Canada. Justin Corfield See also: Africa, North; French Empire; Terrorism; World War II References Bixler, Raymond W. The Open Door on the Barbary Coast. New York: Pageant Press, 1959.

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1078 TURNER, NAT Irwin, Ray W. The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with the Barbary Powers, 1776–1816. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931. James, Rupert. “Tunisia: Testing American Third World Diplomacy.” World Policy Journal 4, no. 1 (1986–1987): 137–157.

TURNER, NAT (1800–1831) In 1831, Nat Turner led one of the most famous and bloody slave rebellions in North American history. Turner had been born a slave in Southampton, Virginia, in 1800. He learned how to read as a child, and as an adult became a preacher among the local slaves. As he began to develop plans for an organized slave rebellion, his leadership role among the slaves was instrumental. Turner experienced a number of spiritual revelations he took as signs for a slave rebellion. Around midnight on August 22, 1831, his revolt went into action as a handful of slaves crept into the home of Turner’s owner, Samuel Travis, and killed the white family in their beds. From there, the group moved from farm to farm, attacking whites and gathering weapons and more rebels.

Over the next two days, Turner’s force skirmished with armed whites and local militia units. By August 31, most of the rebels had been captured, except for Turner who eluded pursuers until October 31 by hiding in the surrounding swamps. Once apprehended, he was executed less than two weeks later. Around 70 slaves had joined the revolt, and around 60 whites, many of them women and children, had been killed. seventeen rebels, including Turner, were executed, and 12 more were sent out of Virginia. Turner’s revolt caused a white backlash against blacks. White vigilantes rounded up hundreds of blacks for questioning and torture, killing many of them. Fear of further slave revolts swept across the South and led to increased tension. It also temporarily led some Virginians to openly question the future of slavery in their state, and a political debate ensued in 1832. However, Virginians voted to maintain slavery and enacted laws to further repress slaves and free blacks. Ian M. Spurgeon

Illustration of Nat Turner rebellion and massacre in 1831. (Library of Congress)

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TUSKEGEE AIRMEN 1079 References Foner, Eric, ed. Nat Turner. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Johnson, F. Roy. The Nat Turner Slave Insurrection. Murfreesboro, KY: Johnson Publishing, 1966.

TUSKEGEE AIRMEN The Tuskegee Airmen were African American officers who established distinguished flying records in the U.S. Army Air Corps. These men formed the first all-black flying units in the U.S. Armed Forces. In 1941–1946, more than 2,000 African Americans trained as military personnel at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Threequarters were pilots (Tuskegee Airmen), and the rest were navigators, bombardiers, gunners, radiomen, and mechanics (airmen).

These brave men countered the racist stereotype that blacks lacked the mental and physical acumen to fly combat missions. At a time when Jim Crow laws separated blacks from whites in the military, black civic leaders and organizations pressured the U.S. War Department to implement training for black pilots and personnel. On January 19, 1941, 13 African American men formed the first class of trainees. Fifteen grueling weeks later, only five men graduated at the Tuskegee Army Air Field. Among the new pilots was Benjamin O. Davis Jr., who later became commander of the 99th Fighter Squadron. In the five-year existence of the rigorous training program at Tuskegee, 992 black fighter pilots successfully graduated.

Negro Air Corps cadets, the Tuskegee Airmen undergo training in Tuskegee, Alabama, 1942. (National Archives)

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Once engaged in combat during World War II, these men garnered many awards, citations, and honors. Collectively, the Tuskegee Airmen, aided by their crews, flew 1,578 missions, 15,333 sorties, destroyed 261 enemy aircraft, and won over 850 medals, including 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. The 332nd Fighter Group holds the distinction of never losing an escorted bomber to enemy fire. Karen A. Chachere See also: Tuskegee Institute References Davis Jr., Benjamin O. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., American: An Autobiography. New York: Plume Publishers, 1992. Francis, Charles E. The Men Who Changed a Nation: The Tuskegee Airmen. Boston, MA: Branden Publishing Co., 1993. Homan, Lynn M. Black Knights: The Story of the Tuskegee Airmen. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co., 2001.

TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE On July 4, 1881, the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute opened on the grounds of the Butler Chapel AME Zion Church. Lewis Adams, a former slave, made a deal with state senator W. F. Foster to secure the vote of Macon County African Americans in return for a permanent coeducational school. Foster and fellow representative Arthur Brooks then drafted and passed Alabama House Bill 165, creating the institution and appropriating money for teachers’ salaries. That appropriation brought Booker T. Washington to the school. Washington soon purchased a nearby abandoned plantation to serve as the campus of the institute, an area that still serves as the nucleus of the school. Washington’s tenure lasted until his death in 1915, and during that time the institute’s principal www.abc-clio.com

expanded the faculty, student body, and campus. Washington helped develop African American education throughout the South, emphasizing the need for black self-sufficiency through the development of black business. He stressed the need for practicality in education, a philosophy exemplified by the institute’s botanist, George Washington Carver. Carver taught botany and agriculture, encouraging his students to replace cotton crops with protein-rich soybeans and peanuts. Along with agriculture, the institute had a pilot training program, which brought a contract from the U.S. Army to train African American aviators for military service. The program produced the Tuskegee Airmen, who were members of the 332nd Fighter Group that fought with distinction in the European theater of World War II. The institute became a National Historic Site in 1974 and changed its name to Tuskegee University in 1985. Thomas Aiello See also: Carver, George Washington; Tuskegee Airmen; Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment; Washington, Booker T. References Butler, Addle Louise Joyner. The Distinctive Black College: Talladega, Tuskegee, and Morehouse. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977. Thrasher, Max. Tuskegee: Its Story and Its Work. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery, edited by William L. Andrews. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS EXPERIMENT The “Tuskegee Syphilis Study” was a nontherapeutic study to examine the progression of untreated late-stage syphilis in African American men. It was conducted

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from 1932 to 1972 in Macon County, Alabama, by the U.S. Public Health Service in conjunction with Tuskegee Institute. Six hundred men were enrolled in the study; 399 suffered from late-stage syphilis and 201 were uninfected. The infected men were not informed that they had syphilis— they were simply told they had “bad blood”—nor were they offered any treatment for the fatal disease. They may also have been actively discouraged from receiving treatment from other physicians. When news of the study broke in 1972, the American public was outraged to find that therapeutic treatment, which had been readily available since at least the 1940s, had been withheld from participants, many of whom were poor and illiterate. For African Americans already wary of the medical community, the revelation of the Public Health Service’s apparent indifference to the health of these men inspired further distrust. The study did have one positive effect. Public concern about lax protocols and potential harm motivated the U.S. government to reevaluate standards for federally supported studies involving human subjects. The changes made included requiring proof of informed consent by subjects and mandatory review of all proposed studies by groups called independent review boards (IRBs). These new standards encourage ethical treatment of subjects, and help to make certain that people are aware of the potential benefits and risks of participation in research. Katherine Bobo See also: Tuskegee Institute Reference Jones, James H. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. New York: The Free Press, 1993.

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TUTSI Although a minority population in both nations, the Tutsi have largely dominated the central African nations of Burundi and Rwanda. In Rwanda, they constitute less than 10 percent of the population, and in Burundi, just over 10 percent. There has been considerable controversy about the origins of the Tutsi. Early scholars believed that the Tutsi had Hamitic origins, migrating into central Africa from an ancestral homeland in the Sudan or Ethiopia. But more recent researchers have discovered that there are few physical and cultural differences between the Tutsi and the Hutu, who are the majority population in both Burundi and Rwanda. They have largely discounted the superficial physical differences between the two peoples. The Tutsi do tend to be somewhat taller and leaner, but this difference in the body types has now been attributed largely to differences in diet. It is widely agreed that the Tutsi entered central Africa in the sixteenth century and fairly quickly dominated the much more numerous, loosely unified Hutu. The Tutsi placed a higher value on warrior skills. Whereas the Hutu were predominantly farmers, the Tutsi were herders. Indeed, under Tutsi rule, the Hutu also adopted Tutsi emphasis on cattle as a measure of wealth. The Tutsi dominated the central African hill country up until the Germans, and then the Belgians, asserted colonial control over the region. Favored by the colonizers with whom they made accommodations, the Tutsi maintained their privileged position after Burundi and Rwanda became independent in the early 1960s. In the late 1950s, the early 1970s, and the mid-1990s, the Hutu revolted violently

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1082 TUTU, DESMOND Maquet, Jacques Jerome Pierre. The Premise of Inequality in Ruanda: A Study of Political Relations in a Central African Kingdom. London: International African Institute/Oxford University Press, 1961. Melvern, Linda. Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide. New York: Verso, 2004. Nyankanzi, Edward L. Genocide: Rwanda and Burundi. Rochester, VT: Schenkman, 1998. Prunier, Gerard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Ress, David. The Burundi Ethnic Massacres, 1988. San Francisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press, 1991. Twagilimana, Aimable. The Debris of Ham: Ethnicity, Regionalism, and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003.

against Tutsi rule, but in each case were crushed by the Tutsi ability to marshal superior military force. In fact, while international sympathy may have been largely with the majority Hutu, the carnage of the mid-1990s reached the level of a genocide, and sympathies shifted largely to the victims, both the Tutsi and Hutus whose loyalties to their respective ethnicities had been brought into question. With a total death toll in the hundreds of thousands, the conflict between the Tutsi and the Hutu stands as one of the bloodiest ethnic conflicts of the post–World War II period. Martin Kich References Atterbury, Mary Catharine. Revolution in Rwanda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. Berry, John A., and Carol Pott Berry, eds. Genocide in Rwanda: A Collective Memory. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1999. Eltringham, Nigel. Accounting for Horror: PostGenocide Debates in Rwanda. Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2004. Evans, Glynne. Responding to Crises in the African Great Lakes. New York: Oxford University Press/International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1997. Fisanick, Christina, ed. The Rwanda Genocide. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2004. Freeman, Charles. Crisis in Rwanda. Austin, TX: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1999. George, Terry, ed. Hotel Rwanda: Bringing the True Story of an African Hero to Film. New York: Newmarket, 2005. Jennings, Christian. Across the Red River: Rwanda, Burundi and the Heart of Darkness. London: Gollancz, 2000. Kuperman, Alan J. The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2001. Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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TUTU, DESMOND (1931–) Desmond Mpilo Tutu is a South African priest who became the first African archbishop of Cape Town. He was a vocal opponent of apartheid as well as the chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the end of the apartheid regime. A charismatic speaker, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his leading role in the struggle against apartheid. Tutu was born in Klerksdorp, in the province of Transvaal. Tutu’s father was a teacher, and his mother was a domestic worker for white families. The family eventually moved to Krugersdorp, near Johannesburg, and Tutu attended Western Native Township High School, the only public high school for Africans in the area. During a lengthy convalescence from tuberculosis, Tutu was befriended by the Anglican priest Trevor Huddleston, who became a major figure in the struggle against apartheid, first in South Africa and then in

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Head of the Anglican Church in southern Africa and archbishop of Cape Town until mid-1996, Desmond Tutu received the 1984 Nobel Prize for peace for his nonviolent opposition to apartheid and was one of the major figures in the struggle for black liberation. (AFP/Getty Images)

his native Britain. Huddleston was one of Tutu’s role models, and they maintained a lifelong friendship. When Tutu graduated from high school, he became one of 0.5 percent of Africans to qualify for admission to university that year. He originally enrolled in medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand but was unable to afford the tuition. Instead, he pursued a teaching diploma from Bantu Normal College near Pretoria, enrolling there in 1951. This was around the time that the formal apartheid system was being implemented through such measures as the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949), the Population

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Registration Act (1950), the Group Areas Act (1950), the Bantu Education Act (1951), and the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953), all of which separated the races geographically and socially and insured the inferiority of public services provided to Africans. Tutu was not politically active as a student at Bantu Normal College, though he and his colleagues were concerned about the deepening divide in South Africa. He taught English and Afrikaans at his old high school upon finishing his diploma, but he continued his education via correspondence courses, earning his BA from the University of South Africa in 1954. The following year, he married Leah Nomalizo Shenxane, also a teacher. Both, however, resigned their teaching posts in 1958 in response to the implementation of the Bantu Education Act, which guaranteed inferior education for Africans. Following his resignation, Tutu decided to become a priest. He entered the Anglican St. Peter’s Theological College in Johannesburg. Shortly after being ordained, he received scholarships to attend King’s College at the University of London to pursue a degree in theology. He attended King’s College from 1962 to 1966, and also served as a curate at St. Alban’s Church, ministering to a predominantly white congregation for the first time. He credited his time in London with developing his confidence in interacting with whites on an equal basis. He also made an effort to educate his parishioners about the situation in South Africa. He left London with a master’s degree that focused on Islam, having set himself the objective to become more familiar with this important African and global religion.

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While Tutu was in London, the situation in South Africa had deteriorated. The African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) had both been banned, and many antiapartheid activists were either in jail or exile, or had been killed. Tutu’s first position on his return was teaching at the Federal Theological Seminary in Alice, in the Eastern Cape. He also became the Anglican chaplain at Fort Hare, the only university in South Africa open to Africans. Fort Hare was becoming a major center for the black consciousness movement, which held that blacks needed to develop their own ideas and take their own initiative in the antiapartheid struggle. Steven Biko, whom Tutu came to greatly admire, was the movement’s most famous leader. Tutu earned the respect of movement leaders by speaking against apartheid in his sermons and by supporting the students in a strike against the university administration. He also began thinking more deeply about the role of Christian churches in the struggle against apartheid, feeling that it was the responsibility of Christians to oppose the oppressive system of rule. In 1970, Tutu was invited to become a lecturer at an institution that became known as the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, which was located in Roma, Lesotho, a former British protectorate entirely surrounded by South Africa. During this time, Tutu began making contributions to black theology, which was developing in southern Africa as a way of addressing the needs of oppressed black populations. Tutu saw black theology as a means to restore the dignity and hope that many black South Africans had lost under apartheid rule. He developed a theological model based on Ubuntu, a word from the www.abc-clio.com

Zulu and Xhosa languages that refers to humans in community with each other, rather than the individualistic approach to salvation of Western theology. Tutu left Lesotho in 1972, when he was offered a position as associate director of the World Council of Churches’ Theological Education Fund in London. This move began a long association with the World Council of Churches (WCC), an organization that openly opposed apartheid and supported the ANC and PAC after they had been banned. Tutu remained in London until he was offered the position of Anglican dean of Johannesburg in 1975; he became the first African to serve in that position. He and his wife settled in Soweto, a black township near Johannesburg, rather than live in the dean’s residence in the wealthy white suburb of Houghton. Tutu used his new public position to become more politically outspoken, openly expressing his idea that white freedom depended on black freedom. Sensing growing unrest among Africans in Soweto and other townships, he wrote a letter to Prime Minister B. J. Vorster urging him to take steps toward making South Africa a more just society, but his suggestions were ignored. Shortly after this, in June 1976, the Soweto riots broke out and more than 170 people were killed, mostly young students. Just before the riots, Tutu had been elected bishop of Lesotho. He moved to Lesotho in July 1976, but returned to South Africa in 1978 when he was asked to become the secretary general of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), the country’s chapter of the World Council of Churches, a position he held until 1984. As secretary general, he traveled widely, although his passport

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was confiscated several times by the South African government. He advocated an international response to apartheid in the form of economic pressure and sanctions, particularly during his trips to Europe and the United States. Within South Africa, the SACC openly criticized apartheid and the specific government policies that supported it. Tutu’s profile rose dramatically during this time, both internationally and among black South Africans. His speeches emphasized racial reconciliation, rather than conflict or revenge, and the need for both blacks and whites to build a just society. Tutu took several trips to the United States in the early 1980s, educating Americans about the situation in South Africa. This was during the era of P. W. Botha’s “reform apartheid” and President Ronald Reagan’s policy of “constructive engagement,” under which the U.S. government supported the South African government economically and militarily. In his public speeches and meetings with American officials, Tutu emphasized that oppression of Africans in South Africa continued unchecked and that international pressure in the form of economic sanctions and private divestment was the best way to bring apartheid to an end. During a sabbatical at General Theological Seminary in New York City in 1984, Tutu received the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his work against apartheid. This award gave him much more international clout; he was even invited to meet with President Reagan, though the latter did not change his mind about the U.S. relationship with South Africa. Reagan continued to oppose sanctions against South Africa, though he was eventually overruled www.abc-clio.com

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when Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in October 1986. Tutu continued to speak out about apartheid, despite the South African government’s efforts to discredit him, and he continued to press for stronger economic sanctions. In the meanwhile, he rose through the ranks of the Anglican Church, becoming bishop of Johannesburg in 1985 and archbishop of Cape Town in 1986. In 1990, President de Klerk began the process of dismantling the apartheid system, paving the way for negotiations with the ANC, led by Nelson Mandela, for a new constitution and government. During the transition period, Tutu continued to speak in favor of racial reconciliation and against the government, whose sincerity he questioned. He retired as archbishop of Cape Town in 1996, and was appointed chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) by President Mandela. The purpose of the TRC was to bring about a process of reconciliation and forgiveness by granting amnesty to perpetrators of racial crimes under apartheid if they made a full disclosure. The TRC also offered reparations to victims of these crimes. Tutu led the commission until it submitted its final report in October 1998. While polls indicated that South Africans believed the TRC had worsened race relations in South Africa, Tutu maintained that reconciliation is a slow process that cannot occur without exposing the truth. Following his retirement, Tutu continued to travel the world and speak about South Africa as a model for conflict resolution. He was visiting professor of theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1998 to 2000, and visiting professor in postconflict societies at King’s College

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in 2004. He also opened the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre in Cape Town. Jericho Burg References Battle, Michael. Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1997. Du Boulay, Shirley. Tutu: Voice of the Voiceless. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988.

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Gish, Steven D. Desmond Tutu: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Mungazi, Dickson A. In the Footsteps of the Masters: Desmond M. Tutu and Abel Muzorewa. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2000. Tutu, Desmond. Hope and Suffering: Sermons and Speeches. Compiled by Mothobi Mutloatse. Edited by John Webster. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1984.

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U UGANDA Located in East Africa and landlocked, the Republic of Uganda has a population of about 26,405,000, most of whom are farmers or involved in the production of coffee and cotton. The British originally took over the region in search of the source of the White Nile, one of the two main rivers flowing into the Nile, under the leadership of General Charles Gordon (“Gordon of Khartoum”). The British in the region were also involved in suppressing the slave trade. General Gordon had, as his chief of staff, Charles Chaillé-Long from Somerset County, Maryland. Chaillé-Long had fought in the American Civil War and was the first American to reach Buganda. His accounts of the Upper Nile were published in a number of books, most important of which was Central Africa: Naked Truths of Naked People; An Account of an Expedition to the Lake Victoria Nyanza (1876). When the kingdom of Buganda was involved in dynastic disputes in the 1880s, the British East Africa Company started to exert its control over the region. In 1894, Buganda was declared a protectorate and had a privileged status in the colony of Uganda. Some people, including several Americans, came to Uganda for safaris. One, William Fitzhugh Whitehouse, wrote

about his time there in Scribner’s Magazine in 1902. The Africa Inland Mission sent missionaries from 1918; missionaries to Uganda have included Ellsworth Faris and Vincent J. McCauley, who worked with the Holy Cross Foreign Mission Society in Uganda 1958–1972. During World War I, because of the transatlantic span of the British Empire, a large number of Britons were posted to Uganda and Kenya from the Americas, including from Argentina. A number of British administrators in Uganda also had served, or later served, in the West Indies or South Atlantic. James Hayes Sadler, commissioner of Uganda from 1902 to 1905, later was governor of the Windward Islands; his successor, Henry H. J. Bell, the first governor of Uganda, came straight from being governor of Dominica and went on to be governor of the Leeward Islands. Bell’s successor, Henry E. S. Cordeaux went on to be governor of St. Helena, and then the Bahamas. Uganda’s wartime governor, Charles C. F. Dundas previously served as governor of the Bahamas, where he was replaced by the Duke of Windsor. Uganda’s last governor, Walter Fleming Coutts, had also served in the West Indies as governor of St. Vincent. On October 9, 1962, Uganda gained its independence from the British, and in

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the following year became the Republic of Uganda. Olcott Hawthorne Deming became the first U.S. ambassador to Uganda in the following year, and the U.S. Peace Corps started work in Uganda from 1964. Uganda’s first president, Sir Edward Mutesa, was deposed in 1966 and replaced by Dr. Milton Obote, who ran the country until he, in turn, was deposed in 1971 by Idi Amin Dada Oumee (most commonly known as Idi Amin), an army officer. Soon after coming to power, Amin began his campaign against the Indians living in Uganda, who made up the “merchant class.” Amin expelled them all from the country, and in 1973, expelled most British citizens. The work of the Peace Corps ended as well. Thomas Melady, who was U.S. ambassador to Uganda in 1972–1973, spent the first part of his posting writing about his previous ambassadorship in Burundi; he later coauthored with his wife Idi Amin: Hitler in Africa (1977). By 1977 Amin was notorious around the world for his tyranny, which included the forced expulsion of Israelis and Asians from Uganda in 1972. In July 1976, an Air France plane was hijacked to Entebbe, with U.S. citizens onboard. Eventually all but the Israeli passengers were released. On July 4, 1976, the plane was stormed by Israeli commandos. Amin, humiliated by world opinion, stepped up his murders and human rights abuses. He was denounced by U.S. president Jimmy Carter after the Anglican archbishop in Uganda was assassinated. Amin replied by rounding up all U.S. citizens in the country. He relented when the United States sent a naval force to Mombasa and released them all unharmed. Amin was overthrown in 1979 when Tanzanian soldiers invaded. www.abc-clio.com

Amin’s successor was Yusufu Lule who was ousted from power two months later by Godfrey Binaisa. Binaisa had spent many years in exile from Idi Amin’s regime, some of that period working for a law firm in New York. He himself was overthrown in May 1980, and went into exile, replaced by Paulo Muwanga, who set the scene for Milton Obote returning to power. Eventually a rebel force invaded Uganda and Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986, stabilizing the country. During the turmoil, many Ugandans fled overseas. In 1980, 3,804 Ugandans were documented living in the United States; by 1990, the figure had risen to 6,684. Sizable numbers of people from Uganda, including many Ugandan Indians, have also settled in Canada. Since the mid-1990s, Uganda has also become highly visible internationally for successes in preventing the spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), one of the leading public health issues in Africa. In 1990, Uganda had an infection rate of approximately 15 percent of its population. By 2001, this rate had declined to roughly 5 percent. Uganda’s success was due to a strong government and community-based education campaign, including sex education. In 2005, Uganda became the focus of significant controversy when the United States began promoting and funding abstinence-only education programs, forcing substantial changes in Uganda’s HIV prevention efforts. In the United States and internationally, researchers and activists have raised concerns that such a U.S. policy will undermine Uganda’s success at combating the spread of HIV. Justin Corfield

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See also: British Empire; Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Prevention; Peace Corps

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UNITED NATIONS 1089 References Melady, Thomas, and Margaret Melady. Idi Amin: Hitler in Africa. Kansas City, MO: Sheed Andrews & McMeel, 1977. Pirouet, M. Louise. Historical Dictionary of Uganda. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Kalipeni, Ezekiel. HIV and AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004. Kirungi, F. “Uganda Beating Back AIDS.” African Renewal (August 2005): 27–28.

UNITED NATIONS Founded in San Francisco, California, through an effort led by the United States after World War II, the United Nations (UN) is a multipurpose international organization with nearly universal membership among the world’s countries. Established on October 24, 1945, the original 51 UN countries committed to preserving peace through international cooperation and collective security. It has since grown to 191 participants. Emerging from World War II’s global devastation, the United Nations established three primary objectives: protect international peace, promote prosperity among nations, and publicize human rights. The United Nations is divided into six major organs: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat. It also has numerous subdivisions dedicated to economic development, humanitarian issues, women’s issues, arms control, and educational and cultural development and preservation. Both Latin America and Africa have been significantly involved in and influenced by the United Nations, but the nature of their interactions has diverged as a consequence of the history of colonialism. www.abc-clio.com

While many Latin American countries (notably Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Cuba) were among the original UN members, almost all present-day African states remained under colonial rule in 1945. Latin American states have frequently used the United Nations to expand their own independent voice by criticizing actions of more dominant countries such as the United States. African states have primarily viewed the United Nations as a source of financial and resource support, and to a lesser extent almost as a surrogate, but usually paternalistic, colonial power. In some cases, former European colonial powers have used their UN roles to perpetuate their political and commercial influence on their former colonies. In contrast to Latin America, which experienced far less direct UN political involvement, the United Nations actively supervised, encouraged, and implemented African decolonization. Justifiably, African states often view the United Nations’s existence as a contributing factor for successfully obtaining political independence. Another key difference between Latin American and African-UN relations involves direct diplomatic intervention. When plagued by military conflict, Latin American states have been less likely to rely on the United Nations to negotiate or settle the situation, whereas African countries will either ask or obtain UN assistance. These differences may be explained by several mitigating factors: the youthful state of African nations, African dependence on European and U.S. assistance to develop, and Latin America’s different colonial past: Spain primarily had the most power over the South America continent; Africa had been divided among many imperial nations.

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Since the Berlin West Conference in 1884–1885 that formalized European claims, Africa has dealt with many colonial masters. Though Latin America during that same period of time experienced substantial internal strife, it had relatively few foreign or colonial entanglements. While Latin American states had mixed emotions regarding U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere, they benefited from the Monroe Doctrine because it minimized European imperial ambitions. The Monroe Doctrine was a U.S. foreign policy that warned European and other foreign powers to keep away from the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War solidified the United States as a colonial power and effectively drove off any future foreign incursions into the Western Hemisphere. Keeping Latin America clear from European influence in the twentieth century allowed it to gradually develop more independently, which later contributed to less UN dependency. Though African states have benefited from UN support programs, critics of UN efforts, such as President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, have sometimes claimed that UN involvement with their domestic issues threatens their sovereignty and represents a new form of colonialism. However, though foreign assistance is sometimes resented, can be treated with suspicion, and is portrayed as imperialism, most African states view the United Nations as a reliable source of much needed assistance. The United Nations is often more popular with the people it most directly supports—those languishing in extreme poverty. Both African and Latin American states benefit from UN consultation efforts, www.abc-clio.com

which include actions to help build economies and stabilize markets. The United Nations also protects vulnerable groups such as children, women, refugees, minorities, the illiterate, and the disabled. For less developed countries in Latin America and Africa, these protection measures are much needed. Over the years, as an organization, the United Nations has received eight Nobel prizes for its humanitarian efforts, including one in 1974 that was involved with work in Namibia. In 2001, Ghana-born UN secretary general Kofi Annan shared his Nobel Prize for Peace with the United Nations. For Africa and the Americas, the United Nations is necessary also because it provides the machinery to establish international technical and legal standards. The United Nations is a catalyst for acting upon major global issues such as the environment. At the same time, the United Nations remains an instrument of its members, meaning that the United Nations serves but does not control its member states. The UN charter’s strong safeguards for sovereignty have unintentionally hindered some African democratic and political reform possibilities because it strongly discourages changes in political borders. The inclination to not more freely adjust political boundaries and to maintain the inherited status quo geographic structure has discouraged African political restructuring, which could have prevented and minimized ongoing ethnic conflict and violent tribalism. Instead, UN sovereignty safeguards effectively reinforce the Europeanimposed political boundaries. Within the UN’s structure, African and Latin American states can freely participate and present their views on global policies and issues. The UN’s General Assembly (GA)

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is a unique world forum that represents all member states. Sometimes referred to as a “parliament of nations,” the world’s most pressing problems, such as civil wars and global epidemics, are regularly addressed by the GA. Because all member states hold only one vote, the votes often accurately reflect world opinion. If the GA makes major decisions, such as the budget and admitting new members, it requires a twothirds majority. Minor decisions need only a simple majority. In recent years, administrative leaders have made special efforts to reach decisions through consensus rather than through a formal vote. Though the GA can meet for emergency sessions anytime, its regular sessions run from September to December. The Security Council’s primary role is to maintain international peace and security. It convenes whenever peace is threatened. Under the UN charter, all member states are obligated to carry out its decisions. The SC has five permanent members: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China. Every two years, the GA elects its ten rotating members. African nations that have served as rotating members include the Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and Ghana. Argentina and Peru have served as Latin American rotating members. The SC’s procedural matters decisions require an affirmative vote of at least nine of the 15 members. Decisions on substantive matters need nine votes, including the concurring votes of all five permanent members. This need for concurrence is the rule of “Great Power unanimity,” often referred to as the “veto” power of a single permanent member. Therefore, Security Council decisions cannot be made if any permanent member vetoes a vote. www.abc-clio.com

If the SC perceives a threat to peace, it may suggest forms of settlement or undertake acceptable remedies. During wars, the SC may attempt to secure a ceasefire, or it may deploy UN soldiers called peacekeepers. Some measures to enforce decisions include imposing economic sanctions, arms embargoes, or use of collective military action. A current African example is the United Nations Integrated Office in Sierra Leone (UNIOSIL), established on January 1, 2006, by Security Council resolution 1620 to effectively coordinate the UN system in Sierra Leone to help consolidate peace; to assist the government of Sierra Leone in strengthening state institutions, rule of law, human rights, and security; and to help hold “free and fair elections” in 2007. UNIOSIL succeeded a large Sierra Leone UN peacekeeping operation, UNAMSIL, which was deployed from October 1999 to December 2005. Prior to Sierra Leone, the United Nations has maintained African peacekeeping operations in the following countries: Angola, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Liberia, Libya, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Somalia. For Latin America, past UN peacekeeping operations have been in the following countries: Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, and Nicaragua. The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) coordinates the UN’s economic and social work system. The ECOSOC strives to foster international cooperation for development. It cooperates and consults with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to maintain vital links between the United Nations and civil society. Its subordinate bodies focus on a variety of socioeconomic issues. An example of ECOSOC’s most recent significant

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effort is the UN Millennium Development Goals. By 2015, all UN member states have pledged to meet eight common development goals: (1) eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; (2) achieve universal primary education; (3) eliminate gender disparity in education; (4) reduce child mortality; (5) improve maternal health; (6) combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; (7) ensure environmental sustainability; and (8) develop a global partnership for economic development. These efforts address many Latin American and African developmental problems. In years past, the Trusteeship Council provided international supervision for Trust Territories administrated by its seven members to ensure the territories’ preparation for self-government and independence. African countries that fell under Trustee Council supervision included Togo, Ghana, Somalia, Cameroon, northern Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. By 1994, when all the territories had gained selfrule, the Trusteeship Council amended its rules to meet only when the occasion may require. If future African and Latin American states experience severe autonomy issues, the Trusteeship Council may be reactivated. The UN’s main judicial organ is the International Court of Justice, otherwise known as the World Court. With 15 judges, the World Court decides international disputes. States voluntarily take part in proceedings, but if a state agrees to participate it is then obligated to comply with the World Court’s decisions. The World Court also writes advisory opinions to the United Nations. The Secretariat supervises the UN’s administrative work as directed by the GA, SC, and others. The secretary-general www.abc-clio.com

manages its administrative mission. Drawn from 170 states, the Secretariat consists of offices with a total staff of about 7,500 under regular budget, and a nearly equal number under special funding. UN staffing guidelines encourage hiring people from African and Latin American countries. People from all parts of the world, regardless of their country of origin’s wealth, work for the UN Secretariat. A significant accomplishment of the United Nations is its formulated historic Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document provides the foundation for all modern human rights efforts. Most African nations included parts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in their official constitutions. The strong influence of the UN’s human rights policies are also witnessed in the recent constitutional revisions throughout Latin America. To defend the ethics and values of the United Nations, peacekeeping operations are vital tools. Other UN activities include numerous social and development programs. UN environmental conventions resulted in reduced acid rain in Europe and America, lowered global marine pollution, and protected the ozone layer. UN agencies continue to implement numerous development projects in a variety of African and Latin American states. In addition to its constitutional influence on developing nations, the UN’s legal successes include more substantial development of international law than in all previous history. Regarding health issues, each year the UN’s immunization program saves three million children and its food program provides about a third of global food aid. Also, the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization ensures greater safety for global air

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travel. Finally, the United Nations provides a voice for Latin America and Africa’s smallest, most impoverished states to communicate their pressing needs. For the Americas, Haiti is an ongoing case. Despite its achievements, the United Nations still faces various future challenges. The UN constantly learns from its past difficulties and responds by improving its rules, methods, organization, and operations. These adjustments often address the changing dynamics of an increasingly interdependent world. Though the United States is not always pleased with all UN decisions, it needs UN support to succeed with many foreign policy goals. Some political analysts estimate that the U.S.’s and UN’s major objectives are roughly 75 percent compatible. The United Nations may be seen as Africa and Latin America’s great security net, benefactor, and promoter. In times of trouble and crisis, the most dependent African and Latin American states can call upon UN assistance without fearing another round of imperialism or nightmarish exploitation. This world governmental organization operates with a mixture of idealism and pragmatism. Africa and Latin America by most any measurement are net beneficiaries. Josiah Baker See also: Annan, Kofi; Berlin West Africa Conference; Environmentalism; Human Rights; Humanitarian Assistance; Monroe Doctrine; Neocolonialism; Peacekeeping and Military Interventions; United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; World Health Organization References Carpenter, Ted Galen, ed. Delusions of Grandeur: The United Nations and Global Intervention. Washington, DC: CATO Institute, 1997. Doyle, Michael W., and Nicholas Sambanis. Making War and Building Peace: United

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Nations Peace Operations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Knight, W. Andy. A Changing United Nations: Multilateral Evolution and the Quest for Global Governance. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Meisler, Stanley. United Nations: The First Fifty Years. New York: Atlantic Monthly Books, 1995. Osmanczyk, Edmund Jan, and Anthony Mango, eds. Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge and Taylor & Francis, 2002. Reinicke, Wolfgang H., and Francis Deng. Critical Choices: The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance. With Jan Martin Witte, Thorsten Benner, Beth Whitaker, and John Gershman. New York: Better World Fund, United Nations Foundation, 2003. Smith, Gordon, and Moisés Naím. Altered States: Globalization, Sovereignty, and Governance. New York: Better World Fund, United Nations Foundation, 2003.

UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATION The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was first discussed on November 16, 1945, and implemented on December 14, 1946. UNESCO was a direct response to the destruction of World War II. The mission of this new organization, part of the newly created United Nations, was to restore educational and cultural structures that were disrupted by war and neglect. UNESCO is divided into three branches: the General Conference, which is the decision-making body of UNESCO; the Executive Board, consisting of 58 member states; and the Secretariat, elected by the Executive Board to act as the face of UNESCO to the world. As UNESCO has

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evolved, it has become the only UN organization with National Commissions. These commissions function to communicate between the organization and the people of UNESCO member states. Within the first year of UNESCO’s existence, the organization sent missions to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Yugoslavia. UNESCO supported reforms in education that included revised curriculum and textbooks to end the glamorization of war, the free circulation of books, and the creation of the Center for Information Service. In 1948, UNESCO encouraged all of its member states to provide free compulsory education to every child. In 1980, UNESCO Publishing started a series of continental histories by publishing The General History of Africa. Though its immediate purpose was to help rebuild war-torn Europe, UNESCO drew the membership of countries from around the world. Central and South American nations have also engaged the assistance of UNESCO in tackling their educational and social needs. The similar political situations of Latin American and African nations have made these member states work in unison toward the substantial goals of the organization. Several scientific groups within UNESCO have helped improve scientific study and application to everyday life. In 1968, UNESCO held a conference on man and the environment, which led to the creation of the Man and the Biosphere program. This program consists of several hundred natural areas that attempt to find the best possible approach to sustainable development. UNESCO works to preserve cultural values and traditions throughout the world by protecting language and improving the dialogue of cultural diversity. The cultural www.abc-clio.com

branch of UNESCO has attempted to protect dying languages with the Atlas of Endangered Languages. Cultural diversity has also been promoted throughout the organization’s history and has taken form in the UNESCO Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity. Over the last 20 years, questions of bureaucratic indiscretions and inefficient management have been raised by some member states. In 1984, the United States, along with the United Kingdom and Singapore, pulled support from UNESCO claiming that their funds were not being used properly. Though these organizations would return as members, their protests have opened the organization to more scrutiny about its priorities and money management. Nicholas Katers See also: International Development; International Monetary Fund; World Bank References Finkelstein, Lawrence S. Politics in the United Nations System. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988. Herman, Edward, William Preston, and Herbert Schiller. Hope and Folly: The United States and UNESCO: 1945–1985. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Valderamma, Fernando. A History of UNESCO. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 1995.

UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS The United States Colored Troops (USCT) was a group of black soldiers who served in the Civil War and struggled for official recognition. By the end of the American Civil War, around 180,000 black men had

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served in the Union Army. Official recognition and organization of black troops, however, had not begun until the second year of the war. The first black units raised for the Union cause were individual and unauthorized attempts by federal officials in South Carolina and Kansas. During the summer of 1862, Congress began paving the way for official black military service. The first recognized black unit was the First Regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards, a free black militia unit, which was sworn into Union service in September 1862. Still, black military service was minimal, as no large effort to place the thousands of willing black men into uniform had yet gone into effect. This changed with enforcement of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, which included a special provision for black soldiers. Tens of thousands of black volunteers were placed in all-black units with white commissioned officers. Black soldiers faced particular hardships and circumstances unlike those of white soldiers. They were originally paid less and confronted other discrimination from white Union soldiers. They were primarily used for laboring duties. And, if captured, black soldiers faced possible execution or enslavement as the Confederacy originally refused to recognize black soldiers as legitimate combatants. Still, thousands of black men served the Union faithfully, taking part in as many as 449 separate battles and demonstrating bravery that often won praise from fellow white soldiers. Approximately 38,000 black soldiers died during the war—over 2,800 from combat, most others from disease. Ian M. Spurgeon See also: Emancipation Proclamation

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References Cornish, Dudley T. The Sable Arm. New York: Longmans Green, 1956. Trudeau, Noah. Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865. New York: Little, Brown, 1998.

UNIVERSAL NEGRO IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION, THE On August 1, 1914, Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica. Armed with the slogan “Africa for Africans,” the organization aimed at freeing Africa from European colonization and arranging the return of all blacks to Africa. Beyond its idealism, the UNIA had concrete goals such as improving the social and economic life of all black people through self-reliance and nationhood. In North America, the UNIA had successes in both its labor and economic struggles. However, due to strategic problems in and outside the organization, its success in the United States was short-lived. The UNIA came to the United States during the turbulent decade of the 1910s when racial violence against African Americans in northern cities was rampant. Garvey established a branch of the UNIA in New York at some point between the summer of 1917 and early 1918. From the late 1910s to the early 1920s, the UNIA developed social and economic projects that had positive impact on the African American community. In 1919, the organization created businesses in trucking and owned buildings located in New York and in other cities in the United States, South America, and the Caribbean. By the end of the 1920s, UNIA corporations in the

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United States employed more than 1,000 African Americans. In addition, the UNIA helped train black professionals. The coalition formed nurses and veterans who supported their local community through charity and entertainment projects in social clubs and churches. In Boston, the association focused on education of the masses. It created a Literary and Publicity Club to educate its members in literary and oratory skills and in the standard history of the world. The aim of this education was to give blacks a way to social success and political awareness. Furthermore, the UNIA sponsored programs that sought to improve the working skills of local black communities. In New York and other larger cities, the association taught young and adult black females how to practice military drills and driving. These women handled cars, taxis, and ambulances operated by the association. In the South, the UNIA had a special Committee on Social Conditions that exhorted adult blacks to build secure homes where the young could be taught courtesy, clean speech, correct manners, and good character, which are elements that Garvey perceived as the hallmarks of true leaders and gentlemen. The success of the UNIA in the United States was jeopardized by various circumstances. First, due to internal mismanagement of funds, the UNIA was bankrupt by the mid-1920s “with liabilities of over $200,000.” Second, because of his success among black people to whom he told that “Africa is for Africans” and that “being black is beautiful” Garvey was soon targeted as a troublemaker in America and abroad. In January 1922, he and three of his aides had been arrested and convicted on accusations of mail fraud. These events www.abc-clio.com

precipitated the downfall of the UNIA in the United States. Babacar M’Baye See also: Civil Rights Movement; Garvey, Marcus; Pan-Africanism References Levine, Lawrence. The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Lewis, Rupert. Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988. Stein, Judith. The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

URUGUAY Since the sixteenth century, Africandescended peoples have profoundly shaped the historical development of the Banda Oriental region, today known as Uruguay. The first Africans arrived as acculturated servants in 1534 with Pedro de Mendoza, one of the most well-known Spanish explorers of the River Plate. A century later, Spanish colonial administrators relied heavily on African slave labor in establishing settlements. In fact, the very survival of these colonies depended on slaves as soldiers who fought with Spaniards against hostile indigenous groups. The colony’s growing demands for workers in the fields, mines, and households of the Banda Oriental forced settlers to turn to African-born slave labor even more. This need for labor encouraged smuggling, which is the principal reason why it is so difficult to count with any precision the number of slaves imported into the region. Locating the place in Africa where Uruguay’s slaves originated is difficult at best. Records of slave shipments reveal that they hailed from all parts of West, Central, and East Africa. Until

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1810, the port city of Buenos Aires attempted to monopolize the supply of slaves to inland Spanish settlements, including the one at Montevideo, now Uruguay’s main port city and capital. However, Portuguese slave traders based in Colônia do Sacramento, a colony situated directly west of Montevideo, provided an available yet expensive supply of African slaves to the region in spite of the Spanish Crown’s best efforts to stop this practice. Colonial administrative records show that between 1606 and 1628, only 288 out of 12,778 African slaves were licensed to be sold within the River Plate. Contraband slave trade continued well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the Dutch and the British established a greater commercial presence. Spain eventually adopted a free trade policy in the late eighteenth century. As a result, Montevideo evolved as a key center for the slave trade, and between 1751 and 1810, more than 20,000 slaves were sold legally in the port city. While slaves were transported to other regions, many remained in the area, altering the country’s demographic situation. Historian John H. Williams calculated that Africandescended peoples remaining in Montevideo only numbered 817 by 1800 but grew to over 2,500 within just a decade later. Afro-Uruguayans worked in a wide array of occupations. Most were employed as domestic slaves and day laborers in Montevideo’s meat-salting plants, slaughterhouses, workshops, bakeries, and general stores. Female slaves tended to work as seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, wet nurses, and duennas, while males often engaged in artisan work, tailoring, shoemaking, pest control, and various jobs at the docks of Montevideo. Some urban slave owners allowed their slaves to contract themselves www.abc-clio.com

out and earn a free wage, which allowed many to buy their freedom. This is why the urban slavery of Montevideo is often described as relatively benign compared to other regions of the Americas. In the hinterlands, the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, bought African slaves to work in their missions and sugar plantations throughout the River Plate. Consequently, the Jesuits eventually became the largest slave owners in the region. Slaves not owned by the missionary groups on the frontier were employed as peons and gauchos on large ranches. The most well-known is Patricio de Belén, who, in the early nineteenth century, achieved the status of foreman and eventually became the administrator of a lucrative cattle ranch. Although a few African slaves achieved some upward social mobility, this does not mean that slaves were content with their condition. Various forms of resistance were practiced. Enslaved and freed blacks, for example, stole cattle in order to earn income and subsistence. African slaves resisted culturally as they preserved their own mixed forms of ancestral rites, music, and dance. More violent expressions of resistance, such as those in the size and scope of Haiti, Brazil, or the southern United States, were uncommon in the River Plate. A notable exception is a slave rebellion that occurred in Montevideo in 1803 when almost two dozen enslaved and freed blacks conspired to leave the port city and settle on a small island in the River Yi. The Spanish governor responded by attacking the settlement, which was ultimately defeated. Slavery ended gradually in Uruguay with the establishment of so-called “free womb” laws in the early 1810s. These decrees guaranteed that subsequent generations of slaves in Uruguay would be born

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free; however, slavery and slave trading persisted into the 1840s and 1850s despite lawmakers passing laws against these practices. Loopholes in these laws existed because the period of servitude for slaves born under free-womb legislation was often extended. The loopholes allowed for abuse to occur as slave owners extended this time as they saw fit. Final emancipation for Uruguayan slaves did not happen until 1853 when abolitionist principles were incorporated within the national constitution. Following independence and the abolition of slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century, African-descended peoples gradually assimilated into Uruguayan society. Afro-Uruguayans joined the ranks of the colonial and national militaries. Military service provided a viable yet risky path to freedom, especially since the region was constantly embroiled in a variety of civil wars and foreign invasions during the early nineteenth century. Black fighters typically sided with José Gervasio Artigas, one of the founders of the Uruguayan nation, against the Spanish during the independence struggles between 1816 and 1820. They also helped Uruguayans regain their independence after Brazil’s occupation of the Banda Oriental region in 1821. By 1825, Uruguayan insurgent leaders, or the socalled “Immortal 33,” accomplished a key victory against the Brazilian invaders, and among this group were several AfroUruguayan slaves. Other lower-ranked Afro-Uruguayan soldiers fought heroically with General Artigas. Considering these sacrifices, their socioeconomic conditions did not improve greatly. Although legal restrictions of the colonial period and slavery had been dismantled by the mid-nineteenth century, Afro-Uruguayans continued to

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face various degrees of alienation and discrimination. If they lived in Montevideo, they tended to live in conventillos, or poor tenement houses, such as Medio Mundo, Palermo, Reus, and Sur. The arrival of European immigrants also added to their socioeconomic marginalization. Despite this marginalization, AfroUruguayan leaders began to form their own institutions. Founded in 1917, the journal Nuestra Raza was published widely and continued in print until the middle of the twentieth century. The political party Partido Autóctono Negro (PAN) was formed in 1937 by Ventura Barrios, Elemo Cabral, and Salvador Betervide. Considered more a movement than a political party, PAN never developed a specific political program nor was able to mobilize its Afro-Uruguayan base. As a result, Afro-Uruguayans never voted for the party as a bloc and chose from the traditional Colorado or Blanco parties. By 1944, PAN disbanded amid divisions over the direction of the party. Another notable Afro-Uruguayan cultural institution was the Teatro Negro Independiente, founded by playwright Andrés Castillo in the 1950s and enduring until 1982. The theater company sought to celebrate black cultural contributions to Uruguay. Even though Afro-Uruguayans constitute only about 6 percent of the total population of Uruguay, they have profoundly influenced Uruguay’s language and culture. Linguists have noted African influences in the nation’s speech patterns. Words such as cacunda, mandinga, and quilombo have been incorporated within the everyday Spanish language of the country. In music, African influences are also evident in the payada, or a “chant and response” type of

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singing similar to contrapuntal and satiric African songs known as makawas or ibiririmbo on the African continent and common among black communities throughout the Americas. Prominent AfroUruguayan artists of the twentieth century include Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, Juan Julio Arrascaeta, Carlos Cardoso Ferreira, Cristina Rodríguez Cabral, José Emilio Cardoso, and Julio Guadalupe. Black Uruguayans either created or helped shape Platine music and dance, especially the candombe, the milonga, and the tango. Music and popular religion intersect in Montevideo during particular holidays, especially during carnival and the festival of San Baltasar. Furthermore, folklore also reflects uniquely African elements. The legend of Mandinga is common to the River Plate’s folklore. Mandinga is a devil, usually represented as a black cowboy or gaucho, who roams the Platine frontier in search of souls to steal. Black writers have written on the African experience. Pilar Barrios wrote a powerful drama of racism in Piel morena (1947). Virginia Brindis de Salas stressed black pride, liberation, and accomplishment in Pregón de Marimorena (1974). Visual artists have long been fascinated with African themes in their works. The nineteenthcentury Impressionist Pedro Figari, a white painter, was enamored with the culture of the conventillo and the candomble. Furthermore, Afro-Uruguayan entertainers, such as Rey Charol and Rubén Rada, and athletes, especially soccer players, have proudly represented the Uruguayan nation on the world stage. On a general level, blacks throughout Uruguay have assimilated into the general population, and the slow but steady influx of Afro-Brazilians into the country means

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the constant presence of African-descended peoples. Popular histories are slow to recognize the far-reaching impact of AfroUruguayans, but this is changing. Jesse Hingson See also: Brazil; Brindis de Salas, Virginia; Cabral, Cristina Rodriguez; Colonialism; Santos Arrascaeta, Beatriz; Slavery (History); Soccer References Chasteen, John C. Heroes on Horseback: A Life and Times of the Last Gaucho Caudillos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Goldman, Gustavo. ¡Salve Baltasar! La fiesta de reyes en el barrio Sur de Montevideo. Montevideo, Uruguay: Impresora Federal Nuevosur, 1997. Mayo, Carlos A. “Patricio de Belén: nada menos que un capataz.” Hispanic American Historical Review 77 (1997): 597–617. Montaño, Oscar D. “Los afro-orientales. Breve reseña del aporte africano en la formación de la población uruguaya.” In Presencia africana en Sudamérica, edited by Luz M. Martínez Montiel. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995. Montaño, Oscar D. Umkhonto: la lanza negra. Historia del aporte negro-africano en la formación del Uruguay. Montevideo, Uruguay: Rosebud Ediciones, 1997. Montaño, Oscar D. “Ansina: la senda del guerrero.” In La herencia cultural africana en las Américas, edited by Beatriz Santos. Vol. 1. Montevideo, Uruguay: EPPAL, 1998. Pacheco, Roberto. “Invisible but Not Forgotten: The Afro-Argentine and AfroUruguayan Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries.” MA thesis. Florida International University, 2001. Pereda Valdés, Ildefonso. El negro en el Uruguay: pasado y presente. Montevideo, Uruguay: Revista del Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay, 1965. Petit Muñoz, Eugenio, Edmundo M. Narancio, and José M. Traibel Nelcis. La condición jurídica, social, económica y política de los negros durante el colonaje en la Banda Oriental. 2 vols. Montevideo, Uruguay: Talleres Gráficos “33,” 1948.

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1100 URBANIZATION Rama, Carlos M. Los afrouruguayos. 3rd ed. Montevideo, Uruguay: Editorial “El Siglo Ilustrado,” 1969. Rout, Leslie B. The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Scheüss de Studer, Elena F. La trata de negros en el Río de la Plata durante el siglo XVII. 2nd ed. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Libros de Hispanoamérica, 1984. Williams, John H. “Observations on Blacks and Bondage in Uruguay.” The Americas 43 (1987): 410–428.

URBANIZATION Urbanization, the movement of people into cities in North America, Latin America, and Africa, as in other regions of the globe, is related to a range of economic activities involving the concentration of people being affected by processes such as industrialization, whereby large numbers of people gather in cities in order to engage in manufacturing jobs and services. In the African and Latin American experience, cities were often tools for colonialism since they operated as links for international economic networks as well as serving as local centers of political dominance. For instance, cities in western Sudan were founded in connection to trans-Saharan trade in the ninth century, and the Guinea coastal cities in response to the transatlantic slave trade and later in relation to the colonial rule. Tenochtitlan in Mexico was a regional center for trade in the same manner that Chan Chan and Cuzco were in Peru. More broadly, cities played a major role in both capital accumulation and the generation of dependence, structural inequality, and poverty, which are part of a broader history of asymmetric relations existing within and www.abc-clio.com

between societies. Cities in Africa and Latin America share a common history in which land use structures have been strongly influenced by colonial planning practices. In North America, urbanization and the growth of cities is closely related to the growth of capitalism through industrial development, technological changes such as the growth of mass transit, and demographic changes, including immigration. During the precolonial period, ancient cities in Africa were, on the one hand, inextricably related to international longdistance trade, especially through the Sahara Desert or the Indian Ocean. Some early kingdoms developed into major empires in the twelfth century until the early eighteenth century, where cities served as trade and administrative centers, such as in the Songhay Empire in Sudan, Mali, and Benin. Ancient Ghana is credited for having drawn its wealth and power from transSaharan trade of gold, salt, and slaves. However, in the thirteenth century it was conquered and incorporated into the Mali kingdom, which would be later eclipsed by the Songhay Empire, but nevertheless remaining as an autonomous kingdom. The lasting influence of the Arabs in Africa started with their initial conquest around the seventh century that spread Islam; however, it was not until the twelfth century that most North African cities were converted. The conquest extended across the northern part of the continent and into the sub-Saharan region of the medieval kingdoms of Sudan, later southward along the Nile Valley and into the eastern coast of the continent. Arabs normally established their settlements outside existing ancient cities along the fringes of the Sahara Desert (like Timbuktu), at the intersection of water and land routes (in the Niger and Nile

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Valleys), or at the seafronts where trade would flourish. Important trade centers and state capitals were laid out around mosques and markets, including Kano, Katsina, and Maiduguri in the Hausa region of Nigeria as well as Lamu, Zanzibar, and Mombasa on the eastern African coastline. European domination of Africa started with Portuguese attempts to find a safe route to India in order to attract the lucrative Sudanese trade of gold, slaves, and ivory controlled by Arabs and Swahili for centuries. Later, maritime powers like England, France, and Holland established coastal trading stations under which slave trade rapidly expanded. During Portuguese rule, urbanization expanded during the seventeenth century, and, in Ghana, it was a result of the process of land privatization. Moreover, slave trading and merchant capitalism had a considerable imprint on Portuguese colonies such as in the cities of Mozambique, Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, and Goa in the Indian Ocean, speeding even further their urbanization. Precolonial cities in North Africa were densely populated, reaching their peak in the fourteenth century when Cairo had more than half a million inhabitants, whereas Fez and Marrakech counted 150,000 and 200,000 people, respectively. These urban concentrations favored European trade expansion in the fifteenth century commanded by the Portuguese and carried on by a class of merchants who traded gold and later slaves. The slave trade has been credited for having had a devastating effect on the economies and political structures of the coastal kingdoms, since an estimated 12 million slaves were taken from Africa to America. Further on, the Portuguese extended their trading networks down the www.abc-clio.com

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west coast and eventually to eastern Africa, where in the sixteenth century they founded Bissau in Guinea; Luanda, Benguela, and Sao Salvador in Angola; various towns in Mozambique; and even struggled to take over Zanzibar and Mombasa from the Arab traders. In the meantime, the French and the British established a number of city ports in West Africa like Accra, Conakry, and Cape Coast, while the Dutch founded Cape Town. In America, the Spanish conquistadores seized the Aztec’s capital city of Tenochtitlan in 1521 and founded the colonial center under the same layout that the capital of the Aztec Empire had. The conquest was violent and complex, and later Nueva España became the regional center for conquering and establishing new domains. In 1534, Pizarro reached Cuzco in Peru, but its inaccessibility made him decide to establish the viceroyalty’s capital in Lima, which had a coastline suitable as the operations center for the conquest of the rest of South America. Around 1540, the Portuguese established an urban network along the west coast of Brazil, establishing Bahia as its first capital and later founding Rio de Janeiro and Paraiba as secondary cities. The colonial period in the Americas extended from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century and brought different development stages. It is arguable whether to credit the Spaniards for introducing urbanization to America since the Aztec, Maya, and Inca settlements already featured monumental architecture, advanced infrastructure networks, highly specialized manufacturing workers, and sophisticated administrative urban structures. However, it has been acknowledged that a European city planning framework was implemented

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following Spanish regulations and building codes (Leyes de las Indias and the Ordenanzas), which dictated a basic land use zoning, street orientation and width, as well as forms of land tenure. In Brazil, as the Portuguese did not find such an advanced and large indigenous population as the Spanish did, they brought slaves from Africa to work in agriculture, and it was only at the beginning of the eighteenth century that they were able to develop a mining economy comparable to the Spanish colonies that demanded larger urban centers. Therefore, in 1762 Rio de Janeiro replaced Bahia as the capital and became the center of the flourishing mining region of Minas Gerais, as well as the focal point for the Crown in its expansionism and colonization. The colonial period in Africa extended from 1880 to 1912 and, apart from the exceptions of Liberia and Ethiopia, the entire continent fell under the control of European powers. The colonial powers in Africa restructured and reorganized labor, introducing new administrative systems and transforming the patterns of urbanization in urban centers. As a general policy, colonial cities were established on existing settlements already engaged in international trade. However, rather than stressing the role of cities as instruments for local development, they were used instead as administrative control centers for the extraction of commodities and unprocessed materials for industrial use in European cities while preventing local development. Transportation infrastructures followed the same principle, favoring accessible and productive urban centers over existing settlements, therefore concentrating jobs, services, economic activities, amenities, and commercial districts in a limited www.abc-clio.com

number of cities, and polarizing and exacerbating regional differences. After the 1920s, industries in Africa required workers to live in urban areas for the duration of their extended working life. However, having a stable working force entailed a considerable impact on urban policies, such as the need to secure land for urban development, setting an effective tax system, and providing basic infrastructures and services. Therefore, land tenure and urban legislation were put in place in order to consolidate city control and administration of the urban economy and the built environment. Nevertheless, when commodity prices collapsed in the 1930s, living conditions deteriorated in cities to the extent that citizens were forced to go back into their former rural communities. By the 1950s only 15 percent of the population lived in urban areas, even when a number of cities held large concentrations of people such as Cairo (2.41 million), Johannesburg (915,000), as well as middlesize cities such as Cape Town, Durban, Tunis, Casablanca, and Ibadan, which each accounted for slightly under half a million inhabitants. During the colonial period of both Africa and the Americas, colonizers had to create the infrastructure (markets, housing, railways, etc.) for the occupation forces, which provided the occasion for developing urban centers. In Latin America, previous settlements were used to establish the colonial cities since their locations already had a symbolic significance, which facilitated the transfer for the new powers (for example, Mexico City, Antigua, and Cuzco). However, in many cases dual cities were created in which sharp divisions between classes (Spaniards, Creoles, Mestizos, Indians), hierarchy, and condition (colonizers or

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colonized), or economic activity marked the spatial segregation of the cities. In this sense, colonizers in Africa and the Americas used and adapted existing networks and hierarchies to serve the interests of the elites controlling the political and economic centers of trade. In Africa a dual urban scheme consistently opposed the traditional built environment to an urbanized modernization, creating the ancient-modern dichotomy for years to come; the novel areas of the city were largely built as places to organize the flow of resources and constructing the mechanisms through which broader territories could be administered. Several emerging urban models were experimented in colonial cities, such as “the garden city” scheme, which, from Dakar to Lubumbashi, was implemented on grounds by prominent European architects and planners. In Latin America, the garden city was also envisioned as a solution to the contradictory opposition between growing industrial cities, unhealthy conditions, and the countryside. However, during the second phase of colonization, urban planning schemes admitted some adaptations in order to soften the colonial rule, such as considering the historical context for urban interventions as well as their role for socializing urban colonialism. An interesting cross-fertilization between Africa and the Americas was the Brazilian house known as a sobrado, which accounts today for 90 percent of the actual Yorubaland housing in Nigeria. Former slaves trained in Brazil as skilled construction workers went back to Nigeria and started a rapid diffusion of the Brazilian housing method. Furthermore, these people asserted their authority, status, and prestige by replicating their former masters’ scheme of occupying the first floor while www.abc-clio.com

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letting the ground floor be for servants (in Brazil it would be the place for slaves). Another parallel between cities in Africa and the Americas is that modern urbanism maintained and even accentuated the socioeconomic and spatial contrast between the formal or institutionalized part of the city and the segregated, marginal, and uncontrolled territories, which were, however, generated on a structural basis. This dual view of the city could only be sustained through a class-related approach, for which only the settlements governed by some sort of official power (being colonial, regional, or municipal) were to be recognized as legitimate. Even when this dual scheme already existed in precolonial times, colonial urban policies portrayed this historical trend as inherent to development in order to maintain social control within the structural inequality. Traditionally, South African cities have been considered as particular cases, even if segregation was used as a tool of domination just as in other African colonial cities. In any case, planning was clearly used as a weapon for apartheid, since it justified segregation as the only way to prevent race frictions, which were said to produce conflict itself. Some scholars claim that South African and Latin American cities have similar levels of social and economic development and inequality, and that market forces are increasingly the dominant forces behind urban processes. Latin American countries gained their independence in the 1800s, when cities were already consolidated as the socioeconomic and political centers of the continent. However, Mexico City and Salvador were the only cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants at the time, which showed the limited economic development

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and diversity they had achieved when mining became no longer profitable. At the end of the nineteenth century, French urbanism was very influential all over the continent, especially after Baron Haussmann’s interventions by 1860 in Paris to transform that city’s infrastructure, plans which were considered compelling high-profile urban operations to transform cities such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Caracas into world-class cities. In the twentieth century, the continent experienced considerable economic expansion, the modernization of infrastructure, and a process of urbanization without precedent. In the 1930s, the industrialization of Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Peru, and Brazil took place and increased right after World War II, when national policies to substitute imports fostered development. The economic centralization of power was to overtly favor national capitals as engines of growth. Industrialization policies in Latin American cities followed the North American urban model of introducing industrialized construction technology as well as automobileoriented urban schemes, which epitomized the ultimate instruments of modernity. Urbanization in North America followed the pattern of industrial development and expanded when electric mass transit systems were developed and implemented at the end of the nineteenth century. Mass transit permitted the expansion of suburbs within 10 miles of the urban core. The mobility created by cars further fostered urban decentralization and created a new form of metropolitan sprawl. Moreover, in the United States, the Federal Highway Act of 1956 allocated $105 billion to create 42,500 miles of freeways, boosting road construction industries, car-making, oil, and tire industries. After World War II, the www.abc-clio.com

Federal Housing Authority in the United States released home loans that are credited for having fostered the construction of an estimated 2 million houses per year, a production scale that made buying more convenient than renting a dwelling. Concurrently, large housing developments were built to house the post–World War II baby boom generation; Levittown, Long Island, became home to more than 70,000 white residents in a new suburban compound. Urbanization did not benefit all equally. Even after the passage of civil rights legislation, segregation persisted due to housing policies in which Afro-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans were excluded from the minimal bank guarantees for loans and mortgages. To a limited extent, the racial segregation of U.S. cities in post–World War II America might be said to have resembled some forms of colonial segregation. In the United States, use of automobiles over collective transportation such as trolleys, subways, and urban buses suited suburban rather than urban growth. Job structures also reflected the drive from the urban core to the suburbs: while 37 percent of all jobs were located outside the central city in the 1960s, by the end of the 1980s nearly 70 percent had already been transferred to the outskirts. This trend is credited for driving downtown depopulation and economic decline, concentrating poverty, and reinforcing segregation patterns in the central city. In the 1960s, urban renewal operations were credited for bulldozing “blighted” areas and displacing Italian, Hispanic, and African American communities elsewhere. Since the mid1990s, urban policies for rehabilitating, revitalizing, and preserving the urban fabric have capitalized on the culture and historic

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architecture of the central city for the gentrification of traditional neighborhoods. Socioeconomic segregation is not a new phenomenon in African and American cities. In fact, zoning and urban planning itself emerged as an instrument designed to maintain privileges for a certain segment of the population through the regulation of land uses and construction densities. In the United States, the segregated structure of cities—and subsequent segregation of resources, political power, property values, and educational access—has been an important focus of civil rights activism up to the present day. Even though colonial rule ended for the large majority of African countries during the 1960s, cities remain centers for the consolidation of political power and the centralized management of economic resources. This concentration of power has often led to autocratic governments, corruption, inequality, and social repression. Since the mid-1990s, cities in Africa and Latin America have experienced substantial economic restructuring measures under the International Monetary Fund schemes, emphasizing the decentralization of formal political authority and responsibilities, if not necessarily actual decisionmaking powers. Alfonso Valenzuela-Aguilera See also: Cities; Colonialism References Ambe, J. N. “African Cities and Regional Trade in Historical Perspective: Implications for Contemporary Globalization trends.” Cities 23, no.1 (2006): 18–29. Chandler, T. “Urbanization in Medieval and Early Modern Africa.” In Urbanization in Africa: A Handbook, edited by J. D. Tarver. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Gilbert, A., and Owen Crankshaw. “Comparing South African and Latin American Experience: Migration and Housing

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Mobility in Soweto.” Urban Studies 36, no. 13 (1999): 2375–2400. King, A. D. Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System. London: Routledge, 1990. Mabounje, A. L. “Urban Planning and the Post-Colonial State in Africa. A Research Overview.” African Studies Review 33, no. 2 (1990):121–203. Skinner, E. P. “Urbanization in Francophone Africa.” African Urban Quarterly 1 (1986): 191–195. Weber, M. The City, translated and edited by Don Martindale and G. Neuwirth. New York: The Free Press, 1958. Wirth, L. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” In On Cities and Social Life: Selected Papers, edited by Louis Wirth and Albert J. Reiss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act on September 4, 1961, creating the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and President John F. Kennedy organized the agency on November 3, 1961, as part of the State Department. Like the Marshall Plan before it, USAID was to be sensitive to the realities of the Cold War, targeting aid to nations that might otherwise capitulate to communism. Unlike the Marshall Plan, USAID was to make foreign aid a permanent feature of U.S. policy. Moreover USAID consolidated in a single agency the relief efforts that had been part of disparate federal agencies. At least since the Monroe Doctrine, the United States had singled out Latin America as something akin to an American protectorate. Africa had been part of Europe’s colonial empire, but after World War II the United States sought to guard African nations in their fledgling independence

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against communism. In both continents the United States proposed to use foreign assistance to align these regions with itself. The United States did not propose through USAID to revolutionize the economies of Latin America and Africa but rather to reinforce traditional patterns. Agriculture remained the foundation of the economy in both Latin America and Africa. In fiscal year 2004, USAID spent $134 million of its $1 billion budget for Africa on the development of agriculture. Moreover the commitment to cash crops remained adamantine. In fiscal years 2001 and 2002, USAID granted more than $57 million to coffee growers in 18 countries in Latin America and Africa. In fiscal year 2003, USAID extended $5.7 million in trade credits to farmers’ cooperatives that grew coffee in Latin America. USAID extended aid to 230 coffee growers in El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, and in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. Where plantations once dominated production, USAID has targeted aid to small farmers in hopes of replicating the Jeffersonian model of a polity of yeomen. USAID has sought to buoy small farmers by diversifying agriculture. The agency funds the growing of broccoli in Ecuador, sweet potatoes in

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Honduras, bamboo in Haiti, oregano in Bolivia, and plantains in Nicaragua. In addition to funding the development of agriculture, USAID has through fiscal year 2004 spent $118 million in the Caribbean to rebuild institutions and infrastructure after Tropical Storm Jeanne and $1 million for similar efforts in Guyana. USAID apportions money to protect forests and fauna in Bolivia, Haiti, Panama, and Guatemala. In fiscal year 2004, USAID spent $125.6 million on education in twenty African nations, $82.2 million on the restoration of the environment in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo, and $67.8 million on political reform throughout Africa. Christopher Cumo

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References Butterfield, Samuel. U.S. Development Aid— An Historic First: Achievements and Failures in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004. Hanna, Nagy, and Robert Pocciotto, eds. Making Development Work: Development Learning in a World of Poverty and Wealth. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Nowels, Larry. Millennium Challenge Account: Implementation of a New U.S. Foreign Aid Initiative. Washington, DC: CRS, 2005.

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V VESEY, DENMARK (1767?–1822) Denmark Vesey was the author of an intricate, but failed, 1822 slave rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina. The abolitionist later known as Denmark Vesey was most likely born on the Danish sugar island of St. Thomas. In the fall of 1781, at approximately the age of 14, the boy was purchased as part of a cargo of 390 slaves by Joseph Vesey, a Bermuda-born slave trader. The child’s “beauty, alertness and intelligence” caught the captain’s eye, and during the voyage to Saint Domingue, the crew adopted him as a “ship’s pet and plaything.” In 1782 Vesey rechristened the young slave with the name of Telemaque and employed him as a cabin boy. Shortly thereafter, when the British evacuated South Carolina, Vesey relocated to Charleston in 1783 to work as a ship chandler. For the next 17 years, Telemaque— whose name was first corrupted into Telmak, and then Denmark—served Vesey in a number of capacities. Fluent in both English and French, Denmark was evidently a manservant, yet on occasion he traveled to the docks to sign in the captain’s consignments, which on occasion included slaves. At some point during these years he married Beck, later a bondwoman of grocer

John Paul’s, who bore him at least three sons: Polydore, Robert, and Sandy, the last of whom would be the only one of his children to be implicated in his 1822 conspiracy. On November 9, 1799, in an amazing stroke of luck, Denmark won $1,500 in the city’s East Bay lottery. Mary Clodner, the captain’s common-law wife, agreed to manumit Denmark for $600. Joseph Vesey witnessed the deed on December 31, so Denmark Vesey began the first day of the nineteenth century as a free man worth $900. Beck’s owner, however, would not sell at any price, and his first wife and children remained slaves. After his marriage to Beck ended, Vesey married a much younger slave named Susan, who later became free and took his adopted surname of Vesey. She lived in Charleston after his death until at least 1830. After Vesey established himself as a carpenter, he rented a home at 20 Bull Street from attorney George Cross. Despite later reports that he died a rich man worth $8,000, there is no evidence that Vesey ever owned a single piece of property. Susan Vesey took in laundry, and Denmark persisted in playing the city’s lottery in hopes of winning again. Despite this, Vesey stubbornly refused to defer to white privilege. Upon seeing a companion bow to a white man in the street,

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the physically imposing carpenter observed that “all men were born equal, and that he was surprised that anyone would degrade themselves by such conduct.” Although briefly a member of the Second Presbyterian Church, around 1818 Vesey joined the city’s new African Methodist Episcopal congregation. Sandy Vesey also joined, as did three of Vesey’s closest friends, Monday Gell, Peter Poyas, and Jack Pritchard. As a lay preacher in the church, Vesey turned his back on the New Testament and what he regarded as its false promise of universal brotherhood. As former Charleston slave Archibald Grimke put it, Vesey found “in the stern and Nemesis-like God of the Old Testament” a suitable vision “for a day of vengeance and retribution.” The temporary closure of the church by city authorities in June 1818, and the arrest of 140 congregants, one of them presumably Vesey himself, only reinforced the determination of black Carolinians to maintain a place of independent worship. At the age of fifty-one, Vesey briefly considered emigrating to the English colony of Sierra Leone. But as Beck’s children remained slaves, Vesey resolved instead to orchestrate a rebellion followed by a mass exodus from Charleston to Haiti. President Jean-Pierre Boyer had recently encouraged black Americans to bring their skills and capital to his beleaguered republic. Vesey planned the escape for nearly four years. His chief lieutenants included Poyas, a literate and highly skilled ship carpenter, Gell, an African-born Ibo who labored as a harness maker, and Rolla Bennett, the manservant of Governor Thomas Bennett. Vesey’s inner circle also included “Gullah” Jack Pritchard, an East African priest purchased in Zinguebar in 1806. Although there are no reliable figures for the number www.abc-clio.com

of recruits, Charleston alone was home to 12,652 slaves. Pritchard, probably with some exaggeration, boasted that he had 6,600 recruits on the plantations across the Cooper and Ashley Rivers. The plan called for Vesey’s followers to rise on the night of Sunday, July 14—Bastille Day, and the day blacks in Boston celebrated their freedom—slay their masters, and sail for Haiti and freedom. As one southern editor later conceded, “The plot seems to have been well devised, [and] its operation was extensive.” The plot unraveled in June 1822 when two slaves, including Bennett’s friend George Wilson, a fellow class leader in the African Church, revealed the plan to their owners. Mayor James Hamilton called up the city militia and convened a special court to try the captured insurgents. Vesey was captured at the home of Beck, his first wife, on June 21 and hanged on the morning of Tuesday, July 2, together with Bennett, Poyas, and three other rebels. According to Hamilton, the six men collectively “met their fate with the heroic fortitude of Martyrs.” In all, 35 slaves were executed. Forty-two others, including Sandy Vesey, were sold outside the United States; some, if not all, became slaves in Spanish Cuba. Charleston authorities also demolished the African Church and banished its leaders. The state assembly subsequently passed laws prohibiting the reentry of free blacks into the state, and city officials enforced ordinances against teaching African Americans to read. Robert Vesey lived to rebuild the African Church in the fall of 1865. Douglas R. Egerton

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References Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1999.

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VOODOO Jones, Norrece T. Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1990. Lofton, John. Insurrection in South Carolina: The Turbulent World of Denmark Vesey. Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1964.

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Reference Nelson, Michael. War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997.

VOODOO VOICE OF AMERICA Voice of America (VOA) began broadcasting on the radio in 1942 as part of the U.S. war effort against the Axis powers in World War II. VOA is funded by the U.S. government; the fiscal year 2005 budget was $158 million. VOA transmits more than 1,000 hours of news and programming every week in 44 languages, distributed by radio, television, and the Internet, but only to foreign countries: the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 prohibits VOA from broadcasting to the United States. Besides news broadcasts, VOA programming includes shows about sports, music, and other cultural topics. Since 1959 some VOA programs have been broadcast in “Special English” which aims to communicate with people whose first language is not English through use of a limited vocabulary and short sentences. Although VOA believes itself to be an accurate, reliable, and unbiased source of news, some foreign governments have considered it to be an instrument of American propaganda and have responded by jamming the VOA signal (broadcasting noise at the same frequencies used by VOA so that the VOA signal cannot be heard). VOA shortwave radio signals were commonly jammed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and the Cuban government regularly jams the VOA television signal today. Sarah Boslaugh See also: Cuba; Film (North America); Radio Marti

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Voodoo is a form of magic and witchcraft derived from syncretic African and Catholic beliefs and practiced in African American and Caribbean communities. The religion flowered in Haiti, being formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through blending elements of certain West and Central African beliefs and practices with those of Catholicism. A variant of Voodoo also flourished in New Orleans in the nineteenth century. From the 1880s, the term came to be used more generally—often interchangeably with “hoodoo”—to refer to (often unrelated) forms of magic and witchcraft practiced in African American communities in the United States. For a long time the subject of inaccurate and sensationalist reportage, Voodoo is now more widely understood by outsiders as a result of the studies of anthropologists and its reappraisal by creative artists. Slaves in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue came from many areas of Africa, from Senegambia to Mozambique. But the majority came from two regions: the Slave Coast (roughly corresponding to present-day Togo and Benin) and Kongo in Central Africa. During the colonial period, the religious beliefs from each area may have existed side by side, for even today the ethnic provenance of the main deities (or loa) worshipped in Haiti are reflected in their twofold classification: Petro (of Kongo origin) and Rada (a name

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derived from Allada, a major kingdom on the Slave Coast before the rise of Dahomey in the early eighteenth century). Although Kongo slaves outnumbered those from the Slave Coast by three to one, the Rada gods seem to have been predominant. Already, in his classic Description topographique de la partie Française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1797), M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry’s attention was drawn to the cult of vaudoux, an all-powerful god represented by a snake, and whose name clearly derives from vodun, the generic word for deity or spirit in Fon and related languages spoken on the Slave Coast. Vaudoux was used in English-language accounts to refer to both the religion and its adherents until it was domesticated as “Voodoo” in the 1880s. Tradition has it that the slave revolt that began on the night of August 22–23, 1791, was inaugurated with an African—possibly Dahomean—religious ceremony involving the slaughter of a pig and the drinking of its blood. But if Voodoo played some role in mobilizing the insurrection and the military forces that eventually expelled the British, French, and Spanish, the independent republic—Haiti—that emerged in 1804 declared Catholicism the official religion, and apart from a brief period during the reign of Emperor Soulouque, Voodoo was suppressed. However, this probably only intensified the cross-fertilization between the two religions as Voodoo ceremonies appropriated Catholic ritual and many of the loa became identified with Christian saints. Voodoo ceremonies are presided over by a houngan (priest) or mambo (priestess). They may be private family affairs convened on priestly advice, or regular public dances. In each case, spirit possession may take place, participants adopting the www.abc-clio.com

behavior characteristic of a loa, to whom offerings (including animal sacrifices) are made. There is no evidence that human sacrifice and cannibalism were ever a part of religious practice in Haiti, despite the sensational claims made in travelers’ accounts. But the much-discussed zombie—a person poisoned so as to appear dead, and later disinterred, revived, and put to work—is a figure of symbolic importance in Haitian folklore. Waves of refugees from SaintDomingue from the 1790s left their mark on the Afro-Creole culture of New Orleans. Dances in Congo Square and other gatherings on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain or at the private residences of “Voodoo Queens,” such as Marie Laveau, attracted much prurient interest in the press at the time and left a rich legacy of Voodoo tales of often dubious authenticity. Some dances and songs address spirits that have unmistakable counterparts in Haiti, but the evidence suggests that if Voodoo was an organized religion in Louisiana, it quickly mutated into a number of separate cults associated with charismatic (and often unscrupulous) individuals. By the end of the nineteenth century, in the United States “Voodoo” would refer exclusively to the business of competing “root doctors” or “conjure men and women” offering advice and paraphernalia to clients seeking to influence or harm others—or protect themselves from such influence or harm. Also known as “hoodoo,” this informal and somewhat clandestine practice (which overlaps with fortunetelling, spiritualism, and herbal medicine) is found across the rural South and any large cities where there are significant African American populations, although it attracts a substantial white clientele too.

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Opponents of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies and the southern United States often invoked lurid misrepresentations of Haitian Voodoo in attempts to demonstrate the unsuitedness of blacks to self-government. Apologists of U.S. imperialist ventures in the Caribbean, including the occupation of Haiti, recycled many such stereotypes. The tradition continues in travelogues, Hollywood film, and the use of the word as a metaphor for anything sinister, inexplicable, unlucky, or simply wrongheaded, with “voodoo economics” being a fairly recent prominent example. Unfortunately such a usage may have found some renewed justification with the appropriation of Voodoo by the dictatorship of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier (Papa and Baby Doc), who recruited many houngans to the muchfeared civilian militia known as the tontons macoutes. For that reason, there are those who recommend the adoption of non-English spellings that render more closely Haitian and Louisiana Creole pronunciations: vodun, vodoun, voudou, and vodou (in the absence of official orthography, there are plenty of options). But at least since the 1920s, there has existed an alternative tradition that has sought to represent Voodoo in a more positive light. During the U.S. occupation, Haitian intellectuals such as

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Jean Price-Mars sought to challenge the reluctance of the country’s Francophile elite to recognize the value of Creole folklore. Meanwhile, African American authors—from Zora Neale Hurston to Ishmael Reed—have woven traditional hoodoo themes into their fiction, drama, and poetry. In music, such themes, already present in blues and jazz, were selfconsciously reworked in the 1960s by New Orleans singer-songwriter Mac Rebennack, known as “Dr John” (named for an associate of Marie Laveau). Voodoo is now widely invoked across many popular cultural forms from acid house to cyberpunk science fiction. Alasdair Pettinger See also: Duvalier, François; Duvalier, JeanClaude; Haiti; Hurston, Zora Neale; Obeah; Price-Mars, Jean; Religion (Africa); Santería; Transculturation References Blier, Suzanne Preston. African Vodun. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. Cosentino, Donald J., ed. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995. Davis, Rod. American Voudou. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1999. Geggus, David. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Métraux, Alfred. Voodoo in Haiti. London: Andre Deutsch, 1959.

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W WALCOTT, DEREK (1930–) Derek Walcott is one of the most wellknown and important Caribbean writers of the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries and a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been as wide-ranging in his work as he has been prolific. Perhaps most famous for his poetry, Walcott is also an essayist, painter, critic, and playwright, founding the Trinidad Theater Workshop. He was born in 1930 in the former British colony of Saint Lucia. After he studied there at St. Mary’s College and in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies, he moved to Trinidad in 1953. Committed to his Caribbean roots but compelled by Western literary conventions, Walcott’s work investigates the conflicts between and complexities within West Indian and European cultures. Propelling the theme of exile in this manner, his poetry frames characters like Robison Crusoe and Ulysses in Caribbean contexts. Perhaps the most famous example of this is his epic Omeros; however, practically all of his verse references Homer. For Walcott, Ulysses represents the Caribbean subject, spliced between constant migration and a desire for home. Walcott’s emphasis on the restless searches and journeys and the resulting

hybrid identities have, at times, placed him at odds with Black Nationalism. His essay “What the Twilight Says,” for example, rejects a singular liberation on the basis of race. An unabashed look at the anxieties and advantages of pluralism has remained consistent throughout his work. His first collection of poetry, 25 Poems, was published when he was 18; however, he became known only after the poems in In a Green Night came out in 1962. The recipient of many honors and awards, including the Royal Society of Literature Award and the 1988 Queen’s Medal for Poetry, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. Still a journeyer, Walcott divides his time between Trinidad and the United States, where he teaches at Boston University. Merinda Simmons Dickens See also: Caribbean Literature References Breslin, Paul. Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Ismond, Patricia. Abandoning Dead Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001. King, Bruce. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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WALKER, ALICE (1944–) Alice Walker is an African American novelist, womanist, and activist best known as the author of the novel The Color Purple. She was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944. At a young age she was blinded in one eye accidentally. However, the injury did not impede her success as a writer. She attended Spellman College and Sarah Lawrence College where she completed a collection of poetry, Once: Poems (1968). This collection begins many themes that Walker continues in her later work, such as Africa, the South, and love. Shortly after, Walker gave birth to her only daughter as she continued to write her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970). This text explores racism, economic oppression, the civil rights movement, and African American folk culture. Walker continued to write, publishing collections of short stories, poetry, nonfiction essays, and children’s books until the acclaimed Book Award, Townsend Prize, and Pulitzer Prize– winning novel The Color Purple (1982) launched her literary career. The Color Purple, which was made into a Steven Spielberg film in 1985, tells the story of Celie, an abused woman living in the South. Entirely composed of letters written in black folk English (also referred to as vernacular), the book explores women’s relationships with men, sexual assault, domestic abuse, and women’s sexuality. In 1984, Walker published In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, a collection of essays, interviews, and speeches. In this text she defines “womanist” as her term for black feminism. In many of Walker’s works, a transatlantic context is achieved as Walker’s characters make connections between Africa and the United States. For example, in Possessing the www.abc-clio.com

Secret of Joy (1992), Tashi chooses to have female genital mutilation performed on her before moving from Africa to the United States. The novel focuses on the aftermath of this ritual and how it ultimately affects Tashi and her ties to both countries. Walker currently writes and lives in northern California. Laura Madeline Wiseman See also: African Literature; English, African American Vernacular; Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, Transatlantic; Hurston, Zora Neale References Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Lauret, Maria. Alice Walker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. White, Evelyn C. Alice Walker: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

WARNER-VIEYRA, MYRIAM (1939–) Born at Pointe à Pitre in Guadeloupe in 1939, Myriam Warner-Vieyra is a leading writer of the Francophone transatlantic experience, writing about Guadeloupe, Senegal, and France. She lived on the Caribbean island, which was a French overseas department, for only about 12 years. Leaving her home, she moved to France where she spent her teenage years and met her future husband Paulin Vieyra. By age 22, she had married Vieyra, and they settled in Senegal, West Africa. Warner-Vieyra’s relocations from her native Caribbean to France, and finally Senegal, account in part for the transatlantic influence and popularity of her literary achievements. In an interview conducted by James Gaasch, the author recalls her time in France as a “transition très importante qui a laissé une empreinte profonde: l’éducation,

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la vie parisienne, ma rencontre avec des jeunes filles de mon âge, . . . et surtout ma découverte de «l’Afrique sur Seine» . . . ” [“very important transition which left a deep imprint: education, the Parisian lifestyle, my encounter with young ladies my age, . . . and especially my discovery of ‘Africa on the River Seine’ . . . ”]. Likewise, she later found Senegal to be a warm and welcoming place: “Les Sénégalais étaient tous souriants, heureux, la joie de vivre se lisait sur les visages dans les rues. Les contacts étaient faciles, l’accueil chaleureux” [“The Senegalese were all smiles, happy, the joy of living could be seen on their faces in the streets. Contacts were easily made, the welcome was warm”]. Nevertheless, Warner-Vieyra contends that she was always an outsider even with her French identification card. She notes, “vous restez une étrangère, avec votre nom d’ailleurs, votre parler, votre comportement empreint d’étrangeté” [“you’re always a foreigner, with your name from elsewhere, your speech, your behavior imprinted with foreignness”]. Such personal isolation figures in the daily circumstances of the lives of her fictional female characters as well and is perhaps another aspect that gives her texts transatlantic significance. Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit, written in 1980, and Juletane, written two years later, address these themes of identity, isolation, and the search for a homeland as Suzette and Juletane, respective characters from the novels, embark upon physical voyages from Guadeloupe to France or Africa that are simultaneously psychic, spiritual journeys of self-discovery. Françoise Lionnet remarks that Warner-Vieyra presents a bleaker vision than other authors such as Bessie Head and Gayl Jones because of her depiction of postcolonial social realities in three different countries. Similarly, her collection of short www.abc-clio.com

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stories, Femmes échouées, published in 1988, features female characters who face doubt and uncertainties regarding their lives and relationships. It is clear that Warner-Vieyra’s texts echo themes of women’s writing that have reverberated in Africa and in Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic. Outside of her literary pursuits, she has served as the representative to Senegal for the AfricaAmerica Institute, which oversees educational issues, and she has served three times as president of a service club, Zonta International, that is based in Chicago and strives to ameliorate difficult life situations for women and children around the world. Warner-Vieyra continues to produce intriguing stories and poetry that invite examination by feminist readers and critics and offer illuminating insights regarding lives lived within varying contexts and stages of colonization on three continents. Walt Collins References Gaasch, James. “Entretien avec Myriam Warner-Vieyra.” In La Nouvelle Sénégalaise, texte et contexte, edited by James Gaasch. Saint-Louis, Senegal: Xamal, 2000. Lionnet, Françoise. “Geographies of Pain: Captive Bodies and Violent Acts in the Fictions of Gayl Jones, Bessie Head, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra.” In The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature, edited by Obioma Nnaemeka. London: Routledge, 1997. Mortimer, Mildred. “An Interview with Myriam Warner-Vieyra.” Callaloo 16, no. 1 (1993): 108–15.

WASHINGTON, BOOKER T. (1856–1915) Born a slave in southern Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was a prominent black educator, author, and political leader in the late nineteenth and early

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Booker T. Washington, a leading African American educator and writer after the Civil War. Rising to prominence prior to W.E.B. Dubois, Washington is most known for advocating African American selfreliance and self-improvement. (Library of Congress)

twentieth centuries. After a brief spell as a salt-packer and as a coal miner in his youth, Washington entered the Hampton Agricultural Institute in 1872. Here Samuel Armstrong, the principal of the institute, significantly influenced him. Armstrong’s emphasis on the importance of practical education would later have an enormous impact on Washington’s philosophy of education. After his graduation from the Hampton Agricultural Institute in 1875, Armstrong recommended Washington to take charge of the newly founded Normal School for Colored Teachers in Alabama, which later became Tuskegee University. As the president of Tuskegee Institute, Washington emphasized the benefits of industrial training along with liberal education. www.abc-clio.com

Washington outlined his discovery of this philosophy in his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901): “I soon learned that there was a great difference between studying about things and studying the things themselves, between book instruction and the illumination of practical experience.” Besides being a leading educator, Washington was author of several books and speeches. His Atlanta Convocation Address (1895), delivered before the Cotton States Exposition, was widely influential in shaping white majority attitudes toward black advancement. In this speech, he urged the whites to provide jobs to blacks, as he believed that economic prosperity would help blacks to improve their social condition; at the same time he reassured his audience that blacks and whites would remain separate. Washington counseled that “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” In Up from Slavery Washington described his successful life story and his approach to “the Negro problem,” or the question of black advancement, uplift, and assimilation in America. This text, combined with Washington’s public persona, exerted an enormous influence on black Americans and consolidated his image as a black leader. Washington’s emphasis on the African American’s loyalty to the United States through hard work and his philosophy of black accommodation of American segregationist values incensed political and social activists of that period. Particularly his difference of opinion with W. E. B. Du Bois is well known. Reacting to Washington’s accommodation of segregation, Du Bois, in his essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” in his critically acclaimed

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The Souls of Black Folk (1903), labeled Washington as “The Great Accommodator.” Washington’s public acceptance of racial segregation and voting discrimination ultimately meant his support of the Southern white racist and segregationist rule of law, one which perpetuated the economic and political voicelessness and invisibility of black Americans. Even though his leadership became supremely controversial within the context of his times, Washington indubitably influenced the African American and American political consciousness. He became the first black to be invited to the White House as the guest of a president, Theodore Roosevelt; through Roosevelt’s Progressiveera administration, Washington was able to place well-positioned blacks in a host of federal positions previously reserved for whites only, such as state tax collectors and diplomatic posts. Washington became the first black to be featured on a coin and later to be depicted on a United States postage stamp. Washington died on November 14, 1915, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Sathyaraj Venkatesan See also: Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Tuskegee Institute References Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: Morrow, 1967. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: McClurg, 1903. Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. 1901. Reprint. New York: Quiet Vision Publications, 2001.

WEDDERBURN, ROBERT (1762–1834?) Robert Wedderburn was a Jamaican-born radical campaigner who raised awareness of the plight of black African American www.abc-clio.com

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slaves among lower-class citizens of early nineteenth-century London and created empathy for the slaves by comparing their plight to that of the exploited poor in England. Wedderburn was born in 1762 in Kingston, Jamaica. He was the result of nonmarital miscegenation between a Scottish sugar planter, James Wedderburn, and Rosanna, a slave. Rosanna was sold by Robert’s father when pregnant, but Robert was born free and was baptized as an Anglican. After some education, and after serving as an enlisted person in the Royal Navy, Wedderburn arrived in England in 1778. He scraped a living through legal and illegal means, sometimes working as a tailor. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Wedderburn embraced Unitarian preachers’ encouragement of nonconformist, individualistic qualities. Wedderburn became a preacher, earning renown for fiery, politically charged sermons and speeches. He met the agrarian reformer, Thomas Spence, just before Spence’s 1814 death. By 1815, Wedderburn was a leading figure of the diverse group of loosely affiliated radicals— the Spenceans—who commemorated and sought to bring to fruition the reforming intent of Spence. He associated closely with the Spencean leader Thomas Evans, remaining loyal to him when Evans was imprisoned in 1817, but falling out with him subsequently. Wedderburn continued to preach and pursue political agitation, campaigning for actual revolution rather than mere reform. In 1819, Wedderburn opened a Unitarian church in Hopkins Street, Soho. Spurred by enthusiastic, change-seeking audiences, he became a perceived threat to the status quo. Government spies (John Castle was the most significant) often reported on

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his antiestablishment tirades. He was charged with blasphemy and libel on a number of occasions, spending several short spells in prisons. One supportive associate, William Dugdale—who was notorious as a seller of pornographic materials— published Wedderburn’s seminal work, the unambiguously titled autobiographical polemic The Horrors of Slavery. Wedderburn claimed to have seen his mother and grandmother being whipped by slave owners. He insisted that this dehumanizing maltreatment of African Americans differed little from the Industrial Age exploitation of Britain’s laboring poor in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (A revolution led by radicals from the lower orders would crush the twin brutalities of American slavery and British class-based exploitation.) Wedderburn’s ultraradicalism became less and less palatable to even previously sympathetic reformers in the 1820s, causing a reduction in his influence, if not his notoriety. An isolated figure at the end of his life, he died sometime between 1834 and 1836. Latter-day scholars maintain that Wedderburn was not only an energetic radical, a dedicated abolitionist, and a serious religious thinker but also a determined advocate for democracy, general emancipation, and free speech. Kevin De Ornellas See also: Britain: People of African Origin and Descent; Slavery (History) References Chase, Malcolm. “Robert Wedderburn.” In American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. 20 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Edwards, Paul. Unreconciled Strivings and Ironic Strategies: Three Afro-British Authors of the Georgian Era: Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Robert Wedderburn. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Centre for African Studies, 1992.

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McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Wedderburn, Robert. The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, edited by Iain McCalman. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. Worrall, David. “Spenceans.” In An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, edited by Iain McCalman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 716–7.

WEIMAR REPUBLIC, BLACK ENTERTAINERS IN THE African, African American, and German cultural and artistic exchanges in the early twentieth-century period preceding the Nazi takeover took advantage of new forms of mass communication, including radio and recordings. Entertainers of African descent were a common sight by the end of the nineteenth century in Europe. African Americans in particular enjoyed an environment which, although not free from racial discrimination, was much preferable to even the somewhat more liberal North of the United States. The several hundred African American entertainers who toured Germany, as well as England, France, Russia, and other countries, year after year, were neither socially nor economically felt to be a threat; exotic as they were in appearance, they could lead a normal professional life. World War I was to bring about a sudden and lasting change. Black entertainers left Germany, Germany lost its African colonies, and the never clearly defined legal status of Afro-Germans led to social segregation and exodus. Black colonial troops and Afro-Americans not only served in uniform in the French, British, and American

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armies but were part of the forces that occupied the Rhineland after the war. Black people were now considered the “black threat” and the “black shame” in Germany. A defeated Germany was plagued by poverty, political chaos, and inflation. The war was over, but peace had not yet arrived. After the unprecedented atrocities of the Great War, there was an almost licentious and decadent longing for amusement and stupefaction. But at entertainment venues there was no opportunity for foreigners: it was not until 1924, after monetary reform and introduction of the Rentenmark that entertainers could be paid in currency that could be taken out of Germany. Then, all of a sudden, cultural life virtually exploded in Berlin, Germany’s capital city. By 1927 some 270 movies were filmed annually—more than in all the other countries of Europe combined. Broadcasting was introduced in 1923, and in 1930 there were 3 million subscribers—more than in any other country in continental Europe. In a period of just over eight years, 1925–1933, Berlin became the focal point of the modern world, the center of industrial culture and mass media. Music, theater, sport, commerce, painting, film, and poetry all made the Golden Twenties happen in Berlin. Seventeen airlines connected Berlin and its more than 40 theaters with distant provinces of the republic and other parts of the world, and the daily newspapers produced up to four issues a day. In this environment there was acceptance for black entertainers again. The production of three black revues—Chocolate Kiddies, Revue Nègre, and Black People—were important events in the Weimar Republic, as they exposed audiences all over Germany to black, and especially African American, arts and artists and caused a long discussion of their merits. www.abc-clio.com

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On May 25, 1925, the Berlin Admiralspalast theater treated invited guest to a gala premiere of the Chocolate Kiddies revue, the first authentic black production to perform in Germany since the war ended. The music was provided by Neger-Jazz-Orchester, an 11-piece orchestra under the direction of Sam Wooding. The music was a shock. The influential music critic Hans Stuckenschmidt referred to it as “orgies of hot style”—in other words, jazz. In autumn 1924, impresario Ivan Leonidow (Russian born but operating from Berlin) visited New York. While there he was exposed to black revues, heard Sam Wooding, and contracted Duke Ellington, Joe Trent, and Arthur James Johnston to write the music for a new revue to be titled Chocolate Kiddies. By 1925 interest in black performers was less enthusiastic in London and Paris, where black musicians had worked through and after the war years. But for Berlin, Leonidow’s scheme worked. The opening enjoyed an enthusiastic response, and for the next five years right up to the worldwide economic depression, jazz was truly en vogue in Germany. The literary magazine Das blaue Heft noted the rhythm in the performance’s song, dance, comedy, and movement. The black artists were adored. Their dances—Shimmy, Black Bottom, Charleston, and Foxtrot—become fashionable and were being promoted widely by innumerable instruction books. Their music influenced not only entertainment circles but also serious composers. Jazz in Weimar inspired the now-legendary composers Paul Hindemith as well as Ernst Kˇrenek and Kurt Weill. Yet in spite of their readiness to accept Americanisms, the Germans lacked any experience and any understanding of the sociocultural environment that gave

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birth to blues as a rural, and jazz as an urban, black music. Rhythm, harmony, melody, or intonation of black musicians were difficult to comprehend. The tones, approach, and informality were far outside the experience of critics for social reasons, and in the Weimar era, jazz was being artificially transposed to the level of art and Gebrauchsmusik, or utility music intended for performance by an amateur musician rather than a virtuoso. At best, the result was only a quasi-symphonic pseudo-jazz. Apart from a few months in Argentina and New York, Sam Wooding continued his musical activities in Europe. Under the influence of European music and musicians, including Paul Whiteman’s saccharine and popular “symphonic jazz,” Wooding denied his African American roots and reoriented his group from a hot jazz band to a concert orchestra, trading in his signature instrument, the muted trumpet, for the violin. In 1926 Caroline Dudley Reagan went to New York, saw the black revue Shuffle Along, and employed orchestra leader Claude Hopkins and composer Spencer Williams to assemble a revue that was to open in Paris as Revue Nègre. The revue went to Brussels and 10 weeks later arrived at the Nelson Theater in Berlin where, at last, it created a sensation. The star attraction was a young, unknown girl who had been engaged for the show because she could not demand a top salary in New York City. Josephine Baker could dance a little, was not a good comedienne, but she had a perfect body. Her spectacular stage appearance—clad in little more than a skirt of bananas—her electrifying presence, and her suggestion of sexual availability made her an irresistible attraction in a prudish German environment. Baker became an enduring favorite as a performer, www.abc-clio.com

appearing on stage as well as in film, and obtaining an especially popular reputation in France, which granted her citizenship in 1937. On stage and on posters, the racial stereotypes of the late nineteenth-century minstrel shows were still employed in 1920s Europe: blacked-up Negro clowns in Chocolate Kiddies, banana skirts in the Revue Nègre, plantation overalls in Black People. Therefore, Baker’s performances, which emphasized song and dance and diminished supporting jazz structures, were used by her German audience to translate fears of black culture into a more palatable image of a primitive stereotype. In spite of modern mass communication technologies, the stage remained the most important medium. German record companies issued extremely little authentic jazz music, and no blues, although all of them had excellent business connections with American partner companies. The Sam Wooding orchestra recorded disc records for the Vox Company in Berlin, but sales dwindled after a few weeks or months when the band moved on; all of the recordings are extremely rare today. Thus, the reception of jazz in Germany was not so much influenced by recordings by black jazz bands, but rather by white American dance orchestras, which sold recordings in great numbers. Apart from disc records, another potential medium for the dissemination of jazz music was radio broadcasting. Between 1926 and 1930 the number of jazz broadcasts in Germany steadily increased. On close examination it becomes evident, however, that those broadcasts rarely offered hot jazz but rather modern Foxtrots in “jazz” or “symphonic jazz” instrumentation performed by normal dance bands, often

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with string sections. Only occasionally were there live broadcasts featuring visiting black orchestras. Wooding’s orchestra was transmitted in July 1928 and in June 1930. There were several live broadcasts by the Mississippi Jazzers, the orchestra of the Louis Douglas revue Black People. In 1931 German radio even exposed its listeners to a short-wave live radio transmission straight from the Harlem Cotton Club, featuring blues and Cab Calloway’s jazz orchestra (disc recordings of this event have been discovered, with a reporter’s comments in the German language). Less problematic than hot jazz to the German ear were folk songs and spirituals, which had been present in German concert halls since the 1870s. German radio stations repeatedly devoted programs to concerts and lectures about song and poetry, folk songs and spirituals, by black Americans. Classically trained American singer Marian Anderson recorded both arias and spirituals while studying in Berlin in 1930. Anderson was not alone, as traditionally many other black artists, singers, and instrumentalists came to Germany for further training. Among those was Roland Nathaniels, a representative of the Anlo-Ewe people of the Gold Coast, whose family moved there from the former German colony Togo. After the 1933 assumption to power by the Nazis, appearances by black ensembles ceased even though they were not formally forbidden. Individual black entertainers, musicians, artists, acrobats, and actors continued to work in Germany. Herb Flemming, extrombonist in the Wooding orchestra, had engagements up to 1937. Adelaide Hall was at the Etablissement Rex at the time of the Olympic Games in 1936. Una Mae Carlisle appeared at the Berlin Scala www.abc-clio.com

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revue theater until war was declared in September 1939. Rainer E. Lotz References Cook, Susan C. “Jazz as Deliverance: The Reception and Institution of American Jazz during the Weimar Republic.” American Music (Spring 1989): 30–45. Cook, Susan C. Opera for a New Republic. The Zeitopern of Kˇrenek, Weill, and Hindemith. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1988. Danzi, Michael. The Story of an American Musician in Berlin, 1924–1939: Memoirs of the Jazz, Entertainment, and Movie World of Berlin during the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Era—and in the United States, as Told to Rainer E. Lotz. Schmitten, Germany: Ruecker, 1986. Lotz, Rainer E. Black People: Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany. Bonn, Germany: Birgit Lotz, 1997. Robinson, J. Bradford. “Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany: In Search of a Shimmy Figure.” In Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, edited by Bryan Randolph Gilliam. Cambridge: University Press, 1994. Shack, William A. Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars. Berkeley: University of California, 2001.

WEST INDIES FEDERATION The West Indies Federation was a united system of island states of the West Indies that was established as a form of regional self-government. The West Indies Federation lasted from January 3, 1958, to May 31, 1962. The short-lived federation was the result of an important desire by many West Indian people to have a united system of island states. Some West Indians still argue for a renewed official federation. Even though the federation of 1958 was still part of the British Empire, it did initiate eventual West Indian independence from British rule. The terms “West Indian” and “Caribbean” are often used as synonyms,

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except in the context of discussing specific political histories within the region; in this context, “West Indian” is used to designate the British colonial islands, while “Caribbean” is holistically inclusive of the region. After World War II, island nations colonized by the British were asking for independence. By 1947, at a conference at Montego Bay, Jamaica, British representatives agreed to think further about these ideas. The British liked the idea of some changes; the idea they liked most consisted of a centralized system of government for the islands that would manage itself, instead of the British having to do business with the numerous individual Crown Colonies. Eventually, British Parliament passed the British Caribbean Federation Act of 1956. The West Indies Federation became official in 1958 as a form of regional self-government. The federation consisted of the majority of the British West Indies coming together in a unified government system within the British colonial system. The island nations that were part of this federation were Jamaica (which at the time included the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Cayman Islands as dependencies), Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, Grenada, Barbados, Montserrat, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. After some debate between Jamaica and Trinidad, the capital of the federation was proclaimed as Chaguaramas, Trinidad, just outside of Trinidad’s own capital, Port of Spain. Its national anthem was “God Save the Queen.” Grantley Adams from Barbados became prime minister. In hindsight, it is easier to understand that this mixture of colonialism and democracy were incompatible, and a federation existing within these limits www.abc-clio.com

could not last. The federation did not last mainly because of Jamaicans’ and Trinidadians’ problems with a couple of central tenets of federation. The first problem was the establishment of a customs union, which would create universal tariffs for all exports and imports of goods between the federation member nations. The second problem was that Jamaicans (especially) felt that they would be shouldering the burden of the federation on behalf of much smaller states; Anguilla and Montserrat were relatively small with 10,000 inhabitants compared to Jamaica’s more than 2 million population. In 1961 Jamaica passed a referendum to withdraw from the federation. Furthermore, Jamaica desired full independence from Britain. Within a year, Trinidad also withdrew from the federation and requested independence. Thus, the two major West Indian players in the federation had abandoned the project. The federation collapsed. British Parliament’s West Indies Act of 1962 formally reverted the remaining federation members back to colony status. Thus the British officially created and ended the West Indies Federation, but it was the West Indians’ federation to lose or keep. In the wake of the federation, the Caribbean holds numerous regionally integrative organizations. In 1962 the West Indies Associated States administered to the British islands’ reestablished colonial relationship with the United Kingdom. In the years following the breakup of the federation (1960s–1970s), islands throughout the Caribbean gained independence, beginning with Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in 1962. Through political independence, the region recommenced its integrative ideology. It created for itself the

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Caribbean Free Trade Area (CARIFTA), which lasted from 1965 to 1972. CARIFTA was replaced in 1973 by the Caribbean Community and Common Market, or CARICOM. CARICOM oversees, among other things, the regional import and export customs regulations initiated by the West Indies Federation so many years ago. CARICOM is a more regionally integrative system than the federation was because it is more inclusive of the nations in the Caribbean region; for instance, it includes island nations that were not part of the modern British colonial system, such as Haiti and Surinam. Through the power of regional integration, Caribbean nations have become more significant players in the wider world. Caribbean nations joined the group of African, Caribbean, and Pacific Countries (ACP), which has negotiated commerce with the European Community since the 1975 Lome Convention. During the 1970s, Jamaica became a leading representative of the ACP group. Besides opening the door to independence, one of the major benefits of the West Indies Federation was that it validated the pressing need for West Indians to concern themselves with the politics of regional integration. Cooperative regional integration still plays a significant role in each of the local island economies. David W. Hart See also: British Empire; Caribbean Community and Common Market; Jamaica; Saint Kitts and Nevis References James, C. L. R. “Appendix: From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” The Black Jacobins. 1938. 2nd rev. ed., 1963. New York: Vintage, 1989. Knight, Franklin W. The Caribbean: Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

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Manley, Michael. Jamaica: Struggle in the Periphery. New York: Third World Media, 1982.

WEST, CORNEL (1953–) Cornel West is noted for his interest in areas of academic study as diverse as religion, history, economics, politics, philosophy, and sociology. He has penned over a dozen books that engage his singular concern for rendering visible an African American ontology. One of America’s most charismatic academics, his best-known work, Race Matters (1993), has been credited by some with changing America’s dialogue on race, justice, and democracy. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1953, West’s academic potential was realized when he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures (1973). He went on to earn his MA (1975) and PhD (1980) degrees at Princeton while simultaneously beginning his teaching career at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1984 he took up an appointment at Yale Divinity School only to return to the Union Theological Seminary three years later. In 1988 West accepted the positions of professor of religion and director of the African-American Studies program at Princeton, positions he held until his departure to Harvard University and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research in 1993. However, after a public quarrel with Harvard’s then new university president, Lawrence Summers, West decided to return to Princeton and former positions in 2002. West is best known to those outside of academia for his direct involvement with

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community-based black empowerment events such as the Million Man March, his defense of hip-hop music, and his attempts to broker national summits to end gang violence. Yet, while many applaud his efforts to improve social harmony and mutual civility, and recognize the value of his attempts to make learning accessible to those on the streets through innovative schemes like his rap CD Sketches of My Culture, which narrates the history of some great African American leaders of the past, his unorthodox approach to social issues and his continued association with dissident figures of America’s contemporary civil rights struggle have led some to question whether West’s strong political convictions compromise the integrity of his academic work. However, such criticism fails to acknowledge that West’s entire academic career has been built in tandem with his involvement with antiracism organizations and civil rights activism. In an interview for National Public Radio, West recalled how he met the captivating figure of Randall Robinson at a Pan-African Liberation Committee meeting at Harvard in 1970. Robinson, a fellow student at Harvard, was an active antiracism campaigner who, at that time, was targeting the apartheid system in South Africa. For many African Americans, South Africa was indelibly linked to America because of its familiar history of racial and cultural oppression. Moreover, the operation of the apartheid system seemed to be the overt expression of the same kind of racism that simmered beneath the surface of American society. As such, any attempt to problematize South Africa’s apartheid system was also an attempt to further the liberation of the African American community. www.abc-clio.com

So it was that West, among others, pointed toward the Reagan administration’s policy of “constructive engagement” with the South African apartheid regime. For West, this policy amounted to a tacit approval of the apartheid system, an approval that consequently exposed the American government’s apathy toward all black suffering. Since such apathy betrayed the low priority that the American government gave to black suffering, West argued that the Reagan administration’s working relationship with the South African government stood as a thinly coded expression of racism. Indeed, West later argued that the American government’s ability to ignore the multitude of abuses perpetrated on blacks under the apartheid system in order to enjoy access to cheap labor markets and cheap resources was nothing less than a national disgrace and moral shame. Grant Hamilton See also: Race, History of; South Africa, History and Politics References Johnson, Clarence Sholé. Cornel West and Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2002. Yancy, George, ed. Cornel West: A Critical Reader. London: Blackwell, 2001.

WHEATLEY, PHILLIS (1753–1784) Phillis Wheatley was an African American poet and founding figure of an African American literary tradition. On July 11, 1761, the slave ship Phillis docked in Boston, after stops in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Isles de Los. From its cargo Boston tailor John Wheatley purchased a young girl, naming her after the vessel. While he did not record her origins, Phillis later assumed herself to be from Gambia. Later scholars have posited she was Wolof

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Poet Phillis Wheatley was born in Africa and brought to America as a slave. Gifted with extraordinary language abilities, she learned multiple languages, and, by the eve of the American Revolution, was famous in both the American colonies and England for her poetry. (Library of Congress)

or Fula and from a Muslim community; certainly her only recorded memory of Africa was of her mother’s morning libation to the sun. Finding her precocious, the Wheatleys educated her in subjects as diverse as grammar, history, geography, mathematics, Greek, and Latin, and she soon began to compose poetic works. In 1770 Wheatley’s poem on the death of Reverend George Whitfield brought her fame throughout the colonies. However, it also produced cynics who believed a black woman incapable of producing art. And so, in 1772, 18 prominent Bostonians examined her, later signing a letter which asserted she was a capable author. Still thwarted by American publishers, in 1773 Wheatley, with her master’s son, visited England to oversee the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, www.abc-clio.com

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Religious and Moral. The Countess of Huntingdon facilitated Wheatley’s introduction to society and endorsed her volume; famed abolitionist Granville Sharp served as her escort. Wheatley’s volume was prefaced by the Boston letter, which affirmed Wheatley as the author of the poems and identified her as a “Negro servant,” indicating her enslavement. But her success in England drew attention to her status, and she was freed. Though the Revolutionary War diminished her career prospects, it did enable her meeting with George Washington. While Wheatley’s poetry advocates black social, intellectual, and artistic equality, her social reality prevented her from explicitly condemning slavery, though she did so in private correspondence. Historically, some critics have condemned her reticence; others have celebrated her as a “shrewd accommodationist under Puritan petticoats” (Hull, cited in Flanzbaum, 74). Tellingly, her black contemporaries endorsed her: Jupiter Hammon and “Horatio” celebrated her in verse; Scipio Moorhead and the Briton Ignatius Sancho were admirers. Wheatley acknowledged her heritage, calling Africa “my country” and expressing concern about its spiritual state. In this she was a product of her Puritan upbringing, wishing to see Africa Christianized and thus saved not from sin but from “spiritual famine.” Yet she refused an invitation to return as the wife of a black missionary. Setting aside her health, her mistress’s, and that Wheatley did not know either of the men proposed as her suitors, she observed, “Upon my arrival how like a Barbarian shou’d I look to the natives; I can promise that my tongue shall be quiet, for a strong reason indeed, being an utter stranger to the Language of Anamaboe.” Even as she

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wholeheatedly endorsed the missionary enterprise, for Wheatley emotional affiliation and spiritual concern could not bridge cultural orientation. In 1778 Wheatley married a free black, John Peters, who later abandoned her. Of her children, two soon died; and Wheatley and her last child died impoverished in December 1784. While Peters absconded with her second manuscript, several previously unknown poems surfaced in the late twentieth century, most recently “Ocean” in 1999. Jennifer Harris See also: African Literature; Slave Narratives; Williams, Francis References Carretta, Vincent. ed. Complete Writings by Phillis Wheatley. New York: Penguin, 2001. Flanzbaum, Hilene. “Unprecedented Liberties: Re-Reading Phillis Wheatley.” MELUS. 18 (3) 1993: 71-81. Gates, Jr. Henry Louis. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Encounters with the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003. Isani, Mukhtar Ali. “‘Gambia on My Soul’: Africa and the African in the Writings of Phillis Wheatley.” MELUS 6, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 64–72. Quarles, Benjamin. “A Phillis Wheatley Letter.” The Journal of Negro History 34, no. 4 (October 1949): 462–464. Rawley, James A. “The World of Phillis Wheatley.” The New England Quarterly 50, no. 4 (December 1977): 666–667. Richmond, Merle A. Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974. Robinson, William H. Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Robinson, William H. Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings. New York: Garland, 1984.

WIDEMAN, JOHN EDGAR (1941–) Essayist, novelist, nonfiction writer, poet, college professor, and sports analyst John www.abc-clio.com

Edgar Wideman is a masterful storyteller in the tradition of African griots. An activist African American writer and social critic, he was born in 1941 in Washington, D.C. Wideman’s family moved prior to his first birthday to Homewood, Pennsylvania, an African American community of Pittsburgh—itself famous as a blue-collar steel town. Growing up, Wideman ignored the pitfalls of drugs or crime derailing other black youth and kept his eyes on scholarly and athletic achievements, as indicated by his Ivy League educational path: graduate of Peabody High School, Pittsburgh; Benjamin Franklin scholar, Phi Beta Kappa member, accomplished athlete, and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (BA. English, 1963); Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Oxford University, England (B. Philosophy, 1966); and finally, Kent Fellow and graduate of the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop (1967). Up to the Iowa experience, Wideman seemed destined to follow the traditional Eurocentric academic route. But, to paraphrase one of his heroes, Wideman recognized at Iowa that he had to “move forward in order to go backwards” to see the enriching resources of his own African American culture awaiting creative expression. The author’s reversed, self-reflective Afrocentric perspective materialized in Wideman’s 1967 first novel, A Glance Away, about the hazards of drug addiction for inner-city youth. Building upon the 1930s ideas of Richard Wright and the 1960s platform of the Black Arts Movement, Wideman continued over the next 30 years to script the ideological map defining the contours of Afrocentric writing. His reprisal and modifications of black nationalistic core themes of ancestry, home, and community attendant to the genocidal and schizophrenic

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slave experiences of African Americans he connects to the nihilistic experiences of the Black Atlantic Diaspora to expose the transhistoricity of racism. The artist is a masterful storyteller recalling African traditions while ingeniously connecting the deleterious effects of slavery to African American experience by utilizing his real-life Homewood community as a collective symbol for black culture’s metanarratives of dissolution, survival, and achievement. This technique has netted Wideman accolades of an American Book Award and two PEN/Faulkner Awards for his fiction. However, his convoluted, postmodern style of narration has often eluded his readers and delayed Wideman’s full public reception until the resurgence of black masculine studies in the 1990s. Wideman’s other novels include Hurry Home (1970), The Lynchers (1973), Hiding Place (1981), Homewood Trilogy (1981), Sent for You Yesterday (1985), Reuben (1987), Philadelphia Fire (1990), Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Son, Race and Society (1995), and The Cattle Killing (1996). His varied genres include four short story collections entitled Damballah (1981), Fever: Twelve Short Stories (1989), The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (1992), and All Stories are True (1992); two memoirs entitled Brothers and Keepers (1984) and The Island: Martique (2003); two sports critiques entitled Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race and Love (2001) and Motion: American Sports Poems (2001); and volumes of essays and televised speeches. The recipient of several honorary doctorates and numerous citations of distinction, Wideman currently holds the position of Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Virginia Whatley Smith www.abc-clio.com

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See also: African Literature; Afrocentrism; Wright, Richard References Bryant, Jerry H. “John Edgar Wideman: The Dark Side of the Black Power Hero.” In Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Byerman, Keith E. John Edgar Wideman: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Wideman, John Edgar. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman, edited by Bonnie TuSmith. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1998.

WILBERFORCE,WILLIAM (1759–1833) William Wilberforce was a British Member of Parliament, an evangelical leader, and an antislavery campaigner. Wilberforce, the son of a prosperous merchant, inherited considerable wealth in his teenage years. He studied at Cambridge, where he

William Wilberforce, a leader of British abolitionism, ca. 1884. (Library of Congress)

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acquired influential friends, including William Pitt the Younger, a future prime minister. In 1780 Wilberforce was elected Tory MP for his hometown of Hull; from 1784 to 1812 he represented Yorkshire in Parliament. During 1784–1785, Wilberforce experienced a spiritual conversion in which he abandoned what he called formal religion for real faith, evangelical Christianity. He determined to seek God’s will for his life and with the encouragement of the Reverend John Newton, the former slave trader, he came to believe that he was divinely called to undertake “two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” He devoted his life to achieve both aims. Wilberforce found support among Quakers and also Anglican evangelicals of the Clapham Sect for both his causes. His attempts to control and direct the religion and morals of people through the Society for the Suppression of Vice, formed in 1802, not surprisingly failed to be an effective means of changing the social and moral problems of society. His other passion, to abolish Britain’s brutal transatlantic trade in slaves from Africa to the West Indies involved a long struggle. In 1787 Wilberforce joined with the Anti-Slavery Committee recently created by Thomas Clarkson and Sir Charles Middleton. The extraparliamentary committee was one of the earliest and most influential popular lobbies in Britain, its campaign in the country greatly helped by the support of Wilberforce’s persistent voice in the House of Commons. West Indian economic interests vigorously opposed abolition, and Wilberforce’s initial attempts to secure legislation to ameliorate or end it failed. In the 1790s the antislavery cause was hindered by the threats posed by the French Revolution, the long war with www.abc-clio.com

France, the slave rebellion in St. Domingo, and Wilberforce’s often ill health. Eventually, in 1807, after Pitt’s death, and helped by the declining economic significance of the West Indies, a bill to abolish the slave trade passed through Parliament. In order to get the act passed, Wilberforce did not press for the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire, although that remained his ambition. The act, making it illegal for British subjects and ships to be involved in the slave trade, became law in 1808. Wilberforce’s opposition to slavery gave him an interest in Africa. This interest was marked by his support for various causes: the Church Missionary Society, formed in 1799, and in particular, the African Institution, created in the year of abolition in order to promote “the Civilization and Improvement of Africa.” The institution urged that abolition be pressed on other European countries, and also advocated for the establishment of a protectorate based on the colony of Sierra Leone that would introduce “industry and the arts of peace” to the interior of West Africa. In Parliament, Wilberforce argued that diplomatic and military pressure should be used to impose abolition on European states and also Brazil, the major slaving state in South America, as well as on African rulers who continued the trade. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, antislavery sentiment grew. In 1823, Wilberforce, along with Clarkson and others, formed the Anti-Slavery Society for “the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” a cause that became popular with local groups formed throughout Britain intent on lobbying Parliament for an end to slavery. Wilberforce’s views were laid out in An Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire on

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Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies, published in 1823. Opposition came from not only slaveholders and the West Indian lobby but also from William Cobbett, the radical journalist, who harshly and unfairly denounced Wilberforce in particular as ignorant of the condition of black slaves and indifferent to the harsh lives of working men in Britain. Wilberforce was conservative on many domestic political issues, supporting repressive legislation in the 1790s, but he was radical in his concerns and actions for the relief of suffering among the poor. In 1825 ill health forced Wilberforce to retire from Parliament. However, he continued to give his political and moral support to the antislavery cause. He died in 1833 with the knowledge that a bill to abolish slavery was passing through Parliament. David Killingray See also: Abolitionism, British; British Empire References Harrison, Brian, ed. New Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pollock, John. Wilberforce. London: John Constable, 1977.

WILLIAMS, FRANCIS (1697?–1762) Francis Williams was a Jamaican-born poet, legal manipulator, and symbol of black intellect. He was born sometime before December 26, 1697, when he was christened in Spanish Town, St. Catherine’s Parish, Jamaica. He was probably the youngest of the three sons of their free black parents, John and Dorothy Williams. His father was a prosperous merchant, planter, and exporter, with significant economic www.abc-clio.com

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and political influence in both Jamaica and Britain. By an act of Parliament in London in 1711, John Williams gained for himself and his family the right to be witnesses in civil cases and to be exempt from evidence against them by slaves in any part of the plantations. In November 1716, the Jamaica Assembly also approved “an act to prevent negroes being evidence against” any member of the Williams family. No doubt to enhance the family’s social status, John Williams sent Francis to enter Lincoln’s Inn in London, where he was admitted on August 8, 1721, though no record has been found of his having actually attained a law degree. Before the end of 1724, Francis Williams was back in Jamaica, where he inherited the family’s property, slaves, and debts owed them, together worth approximately £12,000 sterling. During the 1720s Williams had inherited and amassed so much land and power in Jamaica that he clearly posed a serious threat to the social, political, and economic status quo in Jamaica. On November 19, 1724, William Brodrick, a white gentleman, petitioned the Jamaica Assembly to reduce Williams’s legal status to that of other free blacks because Williams had insulted and struck him. Consequently, Williams was a particular target of “An Act for the better regulating Slaves, and rendering free Negroes and Mulattoes more useful” passed by the Jamaica Assembly on March 28, 1730. Williams showed his own power and influence by petitioning the Colonial Office in London to overturn the Jamaican vote. Williams spoke for all the free blacks and Indians affected by the new act. As the only free black in Jamaica who had the legal right to bear arms and wear a sword, a right the act would remove, he emphasized that his opposition was also personal.

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His petition further reveals that Williams had a history of relying on the law to protect his interests in Jamaica. Williams won his case, getting the Jamaica act repealed in November 1731. For reasons unknown, Francis Williams lost most of the wealth and property he had inherited. The register of St. Catherine’s Parish, Jamaica, records the burial of “Francis Williams a Negroe” on July 19, 1762. His will, proved on September 9, 1762, indicates that he died worth slightly less than £700, including the value of “a parcel of old books and furniture” and 15 slaves. During his lifetime, Francis Williams was a transatlantic celebrity because of his economic and social status in Jamaica, his learning, and his practice of greeting each new governor of Jamaica with a panegyrical poem in Latin. After his death, Williams’s fame led the philosophers David Hume and James Beattie to cite him as evidence in arguments, respectively, against and for the educability of Africans. In 1774, Edward Long included a brief biography of Williams and one of his Latin panegyrics in his threevolume History of Jamaica, published in London. Although Long intended to undermine any claims made for Williams’s literary merit, and his account of Williams is racist in tone and almost completely unreliable in content, Long made Williams more widely known than ever. Consequently, when organized opposition to the transatlantic slave trade developed at the end of the eighteenth century, Williams, often along with Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho, was frequently mentioned as an example of the intellectual abilities and literary achievements of people of African descent. Vincent Carretta See also: Jamaica; Wheatley, Phillis

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References Carretta, Vincent. “Who was Francis Williams?” Early American Literature. 38 (2) 2003: 213-237. Grégoire, Henri. On the Cultural Achievements of Negroes, translated, edited, and Introduction by Thomas Cassier and Jean-François Brière. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Hume, David. “Of National Characters.” In Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. London and Edinburgh: Andrew Millar and Alexander Kincaid, 1753–1754. Long, Edward. History of Jamaica. London: Thomas Lowndes, 1774. Ronnick, Michele Valerie. “Francis Williams: An Eighteenth-Century Tertium Quid.” Negro History Bulletin (April–June 1998): 19–29.

WILLIAMS, HENRY SYLVESTER (1869–1911) By organizing the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, the Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams laid the foundations for the Pan-African movement. He was born in Arouca in 1869 as the eldest child of Bishop and Elizabeth Williams, Barbadian immigrants of African descent. Through stories about black Barbadians who had risen to important positions, his parents instilled in him the goal of black freedom, dignity, and integrity, which became the motivating forces in his life. When he was fifteen, Williams enrolled at the Normal School in Port of Spain to train as an elementary teacher. In 1887, he became headmaster of a government school in San Fernando. In 1889, while in charge of the San Juan government school, Williams helped to found the Trinidad Elementary Teachers’ Union. In search of a profession that paid higher wages and accrued more status, he went to New York in 1891. Because of racial barriers and a

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lack of congenial work, Williams moved to Canada. In 1893, he entered Dalhousie University in Halifax, where he registered as a general student in the faculty of law. In 1896, Williams moved to England and enrolled at King’s College to finish his law degree. He earned a living as an official lecturer for the Church of England Temperance Society. In September 1897, he gave the term Pan-Africanism an organizational form when he founded the African Association. The association, which was dominated by West Indians and limited its scope to British subjects, aimed “to encourage a feeling of unity and to facilitate friendly intercourse among Africans in general; to promote and protect the interests of all subjects claiming African descent” through the dissemination of information and lobbying. In December 1897, he was admitted to Gray’s Inn to read for the bar. Not long thereafter, he married Agnes Powell, daughter of Captain Francis Powell of Gillingham, Kent, despite the captain’s refusal to give consent because of his skin color. Their first child, Henry Francis Sylvester, was born in 1899. In 1898, Williams gave a lecture on Trinidad in which he called for an elected legislative council. He reiterated this demand in his pamphlet The People’s Case (1899) and also in a meeting with liberal Members of Parliament (MPs) in April 1899. Gradually Williams turned his attention from Trinidad to Africa. On behalf of the African Association, he lobbied MPs to ask questions about conditions in South Africa; wrote to the colonial secretary about the welfare of Africans in Rhodesia; and wrote letters to newspapers highlighting the colonial policies that caused the suffering of millions of Africans. He soon realized that these measures were insufficient to www.abc-clio.com

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win sympathy for the cause of the association and suggested holding a world conference of black people. The first Pan-African Conference was held in London in July 1900. For three days leading race thinkers from Africa, the United States, the West Indies, and Europe, including W. E. B. Du Bois, discussed how to secure the freedom and justice of Africans in Africa and the Diaspora. On the last day, the conference adopted Williams’s proposal to issue a formal protest against the treatment of colored people in South Africa. It furthermore decided to turn itself into a permanent Pan-African Association (PAA) with headquarters in London and branches overseas. Williams was elected general secretary. Finally, the conference wrote “An Address to the Nations of the World,” which demanded an end to color and race prejudice and called on Britain to grant its colonies representative government and the United States to end the oppression of the American Negro. It contained the famous phrase “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” which later appeared in Du Bois’s The Soul of Black Folk (1903). In the spring of 1901, Williams went to Jamaica and Trinidad to arouse interest in the PAA. He held public meetings, which drew large crowds that included representatives of the colonial government. In both islands, hundreds of people joined the PAA and various branches were formed. He visited American PAA officers and executive members on his way back to London. On arrival home in September, he immediately restarted his lobbying on West Indian issues. He wrote a memorandum to the colonial secretary in which he raised the question of the franchise and the plight of the peasant proprietor and called for a

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federation of the West Indies. In October, he launched The Pan-African. This monthly journal, which was not the organ of the PAA but a private venture, survived for only six issues. The short life of the journal reflected that of the PAA, which was last heard of in 1902. In June 1902, Williams was eventually called to the bar. A year later he migrated to South Africa, where he became the country’s first African lawyer. He soon got involved in local politics. He was elected to the board of a school, which catered to the children of Cape Town’s colored elite. This school board served partly as a means to advance the status of South Africa’s colored population. In February 1904, Williams led a deputation of the board to put to the Cape Town attorney general the grievances that nonwhites had on trial by jury. A month later, he attended a mass meeting in protest against the treatment of colored people in the Transvaal. As a follow-up, the South African Citizens’ Defence Committee was established, with Williams as president. Probably because of his boycott by the Cape Law Society, which affected his earning power, Williams moved back to England in 1905. On his return, Williams lobbied actively on behalf of African issues. In 1907, for instance, he fought the case for two branches of the Basuto nation deprived of their lands in the Orange River colony. He furthermore tried to realize the idea, first mounted by the African Association, that there should be an African spokesman in Parliament. To increase his chances of becoming an MP, he joined the Fabian Society and the National Liberal Club, but failed to get a nomination. In 1906, however, he was elected to the Marylebone Council, which made him probably the www.abc-clio.com

first black man to be elected to public office in Britain. In January 1908, he visited Liberia upon the invitation of President Barclay, whom he had interviewed for the Jamaican in 1907. For reasons unknown, in August 1908 he moved to Trinidad with his wife and four children, where he set up a successful law practice. He continued to speak out on political issues until late 1910, when he was struck down with a kidney ailment from which he died on March 26, 1911. Williams’s legacy is manifold. The conference he organized became the model for the later Pan-African conferences, first organized by W. E. B. Du Bois and later by George Padmore and Kwame N’krumah, while his racial thinking inspired other black leaders, such as Marcus Garvey, who not only modeled his Universal Negro Improvement Association on the PAA but also espoused Williams’ theme of Africa for the Africans. Henrice Altink See also: Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt; Garvey, Marcus; N’Krumah, Kwame; Pan-African Conference (1900); Pan-Africanism; Universal Negro Improvement Association, The References Hooker, James Ralph. Henry Sylvester Williams: Imperial Pan-Africanist. London: Rex Collings, 1975. Martin, Tony. The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond. Dover, MS: The Majority Press, 1983. Mathurin, Owen Charles. Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origins of the Pan-African Movement, 1869–1911. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976.

WILLIAMS, JAMES (1818–?) James Williams was a Jamaican former slave and coproducer of A Narrative of Events,

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Since the First of August 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica (1837). He was born on a Jamaican pimento plantation to an African enslaved woman and an unknown black, and probably enslaved, father. Williams’s autobiographical narrative made him well known to British antislavery audiences. The Narrative describes the inequity and cruelty of the apprenticeship system, the four-year transitional system between slavery and emancipation, which slaves in most British colonies experienced prior to “full” emancipation in 1838. It recounts Williams’s sufferings at the hands of his vindictive owners, as a result of the corruption of the Jamaican stipendiary magistracy, and because of the unfairness of apprenticeship law. Williams was flogged and imprisoned on multiple occasions, and witnessed many abusive and violent incidents in the house of correction, which he recounts in the Narrative. A Narrative of Events was produced as a result of the Quaker abolitionists Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey’s investigative visit to the West Indies in 1837. They described their visit in The West Indies in 1837 (1838). Perhaps with the example of the earlier slave narrative The History of Mary Prince in mind, Sturge used his contacts with missionaries in Jamaica to find an apprentice with experiences that would be useful for anti-apprenticeship propaganda, who had the necessary narrative and memory skills to produce a worthwhile account, and who was willing to travel to England. Sturge located Williams with the help of Baptist missionary John Clark and black Baptist leader James Finlayson. Furthermore, he provided the money with which Williams purchased his freedom, and then brought him to England. There, Williams worked on the Narrative in collaboration www.abc-clio.com

with an amanuensis, Dr Archibald Leighton Palmer, a former stipendiary magistrate in Jamaica. The Narrative is one of a tiny handful of first-person accounts of the lives of slaves and former slaves from the Anglophone Caribbean. It is written in a version of Jamaican Creole, and is probably the only slave narrative to use Creole as the main narrative voice. In other ways it is more conventional, using traditional authenticating framing devices, in this case the words of Baptist minister Thomas Price. The Narrative’s publication was an important development in the campaign to end apprenticeship. It led to a governmental enquiry in Jamaica in which more than 100 apprentices gave evidence, and it formed part of a series of events prompting increased concern about prisons in the Caribbean colonies. Abolitionist publicity about poor conditions in West Indian prisons contributed to the ending of apprenticeship, two years earlier than planned, in 1838. James Williams stayed in England for only a few months. Letters from Joseph Sturge, ironically echoing the language of slaveholders, describe the older man’s belief that Williams was in danger of becoming “indolent” and needed to be “compelled to labour for his bread.” Williams returned to Jamaica in late 1837 with the promise that he would be apprenticed to a trade in Kingston. Almost nothing is known about what happened to him after his return, except that he was alive in early 1838 and in close contact with the apprentices living on his former plantation in the parish of St. Ann, Jamaica. Diana Paton See also: Abolitionism; Jamaica; Slave Narratives

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1134 WILLIAMS, JOHN A. References Hall, Catherine. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Williams, James. A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, edited by Diana Paton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

WILLIAMS, JOHN A. (1925–) Author of 12 novels, eight nonfiction books, one volume of poetry, two plays, 43 articles and essays, 10 edited/coedited volumes, and librettist for an opera, the American Book Award winner John A. Williams, in his various positions of Navy hospital corpsman, journalist, professional writer, and university professor, has traveled globally in the 40 years of his writing career to illuminate the conditions of racial disparity and struggles for freedom experienced by African Americans at home and abroad. As a politically conscious black intellectual whose nascent writing career started in the 1950s and progressed to coincide with the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Williams has worked diligently to expose and to ameliorate the transcendent effects of racial injustices to people of African descent. Like his freedom-fighter predecessors Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright, Williams believes that the struggle for black liberation is a lifelong commitment of the black intellectual. Born on December 5, 1925, in Jackson, Mississippi, John A. Williams found himself moved shortly after birth to Syracuse, New York, where his parents placed him and his four siblings in a seemingly racist-free environment. Quitting high school during World War II to join the Navy in 1943, www.abc-clio.com

Williams learned the contrary firsthand while playing the role of patriot in a racially charged military system. He returned to Syracuse after an honorable discharge in 1946 not only to complete high school and pursue his undergraduate degree at Syracuse University in 1950 but also to enter graduate school in 1951. He worked alternately as a manual laborer and social worker before he landed more lucrative stints with CBS and NBC as a journalist during the mid-1950s. During the latter part of this decade, Williams completed the two drafts of his first novel, One for New York (later retitled The Angry Ones), which was published in 1960. The 1960s was the angry period of black militancy, and Williams was angry but prideful, too. From 1960 to 1964, he traveled globally and domestically throughout Africa, Europe, the Mideast, and the United States as a broadcast journalist for CBS and NBC and a print journalist for Holiday, Ebony, and Jet magazines. The post–World War II era brought varied global crises—African and Asian peoples clamoring for decolonization, the race for power between the United States and the Soviet Union, and incipient civil turbulences from blacks in the United States; Williams wrote articles on the state of affairs of blacks scattered throughout the African Diaspora. Not accepting rising 1960s black nationalist platforms that excluded white scholars, critics, or writers from engaging in black cultural critiques, Williams, nonetheless, stood firm in resisting gross misrepresentations of black culture. In 1962, he began writing counter responses to negative images and distorted histories of blacks created by white historians through shifting the lens of representation to the perspective of a

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well-educated, well-traveled black intellectual. His style marked the trend of other black writers of the 1960s onward. Williams also began producing booklength works; he wrote Africa: Her History, Lands and People (1963) and edited the Angry Black (1962), later nominated for the Prix de Rome but then rejected by the American Academy in Rome. Not bitter by such outward American racism, Williams simply responded by becoming more vocal. He published three more nonfiction books, The Protectors (1964), This Is My Country Too (1965), and Omowale, The Child Returns Home (1965), reflecting black pride and cultural consciousness springing from his travels and emerging militancy. The acclaim of his second, third, and fourth novels earned Williams entry into academia around this time as a lecturer in writing at City College of New York. With the publication of Night Son (1961), a nihilistic novel loosely based on the life of Charlie Parker, and Sissie (1963), a counter-discourse novel exalting black culture traditionalism within cohesive black American families, Williams followed the trend of sociological writing established by Richard Wright, his predecessor. However, with The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), often viewed as the third novel in a trilogy, Williams not only established himself as a realist writer but also as a politicized writer critiquing the plight and dangers of the black intellectual through his character Max Reddick, a hero clearly parodic of Richard Wright and his electrifying rise and tragic fall as a man and writer. From the mid-1960s to the present, Williams has produced a book or work of art each year, whether fiction, nonfiction (both adult and juvenile), editions of www.abc-clio.com

books, a volume of poetry, or coauthorship of an opera. His fiction includes Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969), Captain Blackman (1972), Mothersill and Foxes (1975), The Junior Bachelor Society (1976), Click Song (1981), The Berhama Account (1985), Jacob’s Ladder (1999), and Clifford’s Blues (1999). Critics note Williams’s style synthesizes fact and fiction, denoting postmodernist writing, and illuminates the historical consciousnesses of his main male characters, sometimes allegorical figures, as in The Man Who Cried I Am, Captain Blackman, and Clifford’s Blues. Further, Williams writing recalls tradition, and namely the stylistics of slave narrator, playwright, and travel writer William Wells Brown. Following Brown’s lead, Williams challenges how truth is authenticated and/or legitimated as illustrated by his public outcry, along with nine other black writers, against white Southern writer William Styron’s gross distortion of slave hero Nat Turner’s militant character captured in Thomas Gray’s jailhouse transcript The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831). With Williams’s focus on the arbitrariness of fact and fiction as explored in the triptych of his historical novels, he ensures that his readers relive history with his characters by way of their interlocking past and present experiences. In Captain Blackman, the characters were black soldiers in the American Revolution through the Vietnam War, while in Clifford’s Blues, the exemplary character was a black civilian concentration camp victim at Dachau in World War II during the Nazis’ final solution to exterminate all vestiges of racial impurity. Williams has also written biographies for adult and children audiences, including The Most Native of Sons: Richard Wright (1970), The King God Didn’t Save (1970),

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Reflected in Malcolm: Living in The Time of X (unpublished), and If I Stop, I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor (1991). In 1998, Williams released a collection of poetry entitled Safari West, and in 1999 served as librettist for the opera Vanqui. He is at work on his autobiography, tentatively titled Over My Shoulder. Williams’s works are widely anthologized. Williams has been the recipient of two honorary doctorates and two American Book Awards, as well as inducted into the National Literary Hall of Fame. He held numerous lectureships and a chair as the Paul Robeson Professor of English at Rutgers University from which he retired in 1994. Virginia Whatley Smith See also: African Literature; Civil Rights Movement; Wright, Richard References Bryant, Jerry H. Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Bloom, Harold, ed. “John A. Williams.” In Modern Black American Fiction Writers. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Muller, Gilbert H. John A. Williams. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Williams, John A. “The Manipulation of History and Fact: An Ex-Southerner’s Apologist Tract for Slavery and the Life of Nat Turner; or, William Styron’s Fake Confessions.” In William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, edited by John Henrik Clarke. Boston: Beacon, 1968.

WOLOF Wolof, an African language, is spoken primarily in Senegal and the Gambia but can also be heard in France, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, and Mauritania. The total number of Wolof speakers in Senegal is 3,568,060, while the total number of Wolof speakers www.abc-clio.com

throughout the world is 3,612,560. Wolof is one of six national languages in Senegal, which means that it can be the language of instruction in schools where the majority of students’ first language is Wolof. The Wolof people themselves make up about 43 percent of Senegal’s population. Wolof has become a lingua franca in Senegal, thus other ethnic groups have adopted Wolof as their native language, and more than onehalf of the remaining population also speaks Wolof in addition to their first language. Because Wolof is used as a commercial language in Senegal, individuals in trading centers, who may be Lebanese or Moroccan, also speak it. Wolof is the language of the Wolof people as well as the Lébou. The language was first written using the Arabic alphabet with the addition of some letters that do not exist in Arabic. The language was first written with the Roman alphabet during the time of colonization. Today, Wolof written in the Arabic alphabet is seen in religious texts and is used by authors who have had a Koranic education. Because Dakar was the center of French West Africa during the colonial era, individuals from surrounding areas frequently migrated there; this contributed to the Wolofization of other languages. Additionally, Wolof borrows from French the names of goods manufactured in Europe, while the language uses Arabic words to discuss Islamic practices and traditions. Wolof is considered part of the West Atlantic language unit. It is characterized by a system of noun classes. There are also root words that remain the same while auxiliary words and adjacent pronouns indicate the specifics of that word; furthermore, a distinction is made between root words that involve actions and those that involve

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states of being. Relatively few dialectical differences can be found across regions where Wolof is spoken. However, the Wolof spoken in Dakar has more borrowed vocabulary from French than does the Wolof spoken in rural areas. Mahriana Rofheart See also: Africa, Precolonial; Senegal References Gamble, David G. The Wolof of Senegambia, Together with Notes on the Lebu and the Serer. London: International African Institute, 1967. Malherbe, Michel, and Cheikh Sall. Parlons Wolof: Langue et culture. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989. Rowe, Joy. “UCLA Wolof Web Site.” University of California African Languages. http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/aflan g/Wolof/.

WORLD ANTISLAVERY CONVENTIONS, 1840, 1843 On March 21, 1840, an American abolitionist, Joshua Leavitt, editorialized in the New York Emancipator: “We venture to suggest to our British fellow laborers the expediency of calling together, from all civilized nations, a general anti-slavery conference to be held in London in the months of May or June, 1840.” This initiative, intended to foster international cooperation in the struggle against slavery, culminated in the two World Antislavery Conventions that were held in London from June 12 until June 23, 1840, and from June 13 until June 23, 1843. Both conventions were organized under the rubric of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. After circulating preconvention questionnaires, the London Committee of the society sent out invitations to 35 different www.abc-clio.com

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countries. These countries included the United States, France, Spain, Switzerland, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, Demerara, Berbice, the Bahamas, Antigua, British Guinea, Mauritius, Sierra Leone, and Canada. The largest response came from the United States: 53 delegates excluding the women delegates whom the London Committee declined to seat. The next largest delegation, with six members, was from France. When the sittings commenced, in Freemasons’ Hall, Great Queen Street, the American women delegates were exiled to the gallery. The London Committee insisted, as it had indicated in a second summons to the convention issued in February 1840, only gentlemen delegates would be given seats on the convention floor as active participants. Voices of dissent to this decision came largely from the Garrisonian wing of the American delegation, with William Lloyd Garrison himself deciding to take his seat in the gallery with the women. The first day’s proceedings were taken up with controversy over this issue. Although British delegates highly praised women’s contributions within auxiliary female antislavery societies, they insisted that to allow the women’s participation in the convention as speakers would be contrary to custom. They had not anticipated the degree to which “the woman question” had divided the antislavery movement in America, and were concerned that the convention not become a platform for the debate of the controversial issue of women’s rights. Although never explicitly stated, the delegates implied that to allow the American women an active part in proceedings may expose the convention to ridicule and detract from its serious purpose. When invitations to the second convention were sent out with the same condition attached,

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Garrisonian abolitionists declined to attend. The American delegation to the 1843 convention was subsequently represented by members of the “new organization,” the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which had split from the Garrisoniandominated American Anti-Slavery Society over this issue in 1840. The opening address to the first convention, on June 12, 1840, was delivered by British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, author of The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808, 1839). Other delegates, shown in the painting by Benjamin Robert Haydon that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London, included Daniel O’Connell, James G. Birney, Joseph Sturge, Henry B. Stanton, Wendell Phillips, and Thomas Fowell Buxton, all British or American abolitionists. Among those exiled to the gallery were Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott, attending the convention with her husband James Mott, and feministabolitionist-in-the-making Elizabeth Cady Stanton, attending with her husband Henry B. Stanton, president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. While in London, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton conceived the idea for another convention, this time to debate the issue on the basis of which they had been excluded from the floor of Freemasons’ Hall. The idea came to fruition when eight years later the two women met again in a small town near New York for the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. The 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention is celebrated as the birthplace of this landmark event in nineteenth-century feminism. Papers presented at the Antislavery Conventions were followed by a general www.abc-clio.com

discussion, after which each matter was referred to a subcommittee for resolution. The resolutions of the subcommittees were then returned to the floor for approval by the convention as a whole. The topics of papers included the attitude of the churches to slavery, the boycott of products that involved the use of slave labor, emancipation in the British West Indies, sugar production in the colonies, slavery in Cuba and Brazil, the Atlantic slave trade, and also less debated topics such as Red Indian slavery in Canada and Egyptian slave hunts. Delegates from abroad emphasized the importance of links with the British antislavery movement. The American Garrisonian Wendell Phillips, for example, stressed the potential influence that British abolitionists may exert on American public opinion regarding the possibility of peaceful abolition. After 1840 Anglo-American relations became increasingly strained as British societies took up opposing allegiances in relation to the schisms that had developed within the American abolitionist movement. One subject on which there was general agreement, however, was the impracticability of the colonization scheme, which proposed to repatriate emancipated African Americans to Africa, and the need, therefore, to find other ways to achieve the transition from a slave to a free labor economy. The proceedings of the 1840 Convention, running to 600 pages and published by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1841, constitute a detailed record of the issues and debates that animated the antislavery movement in the early 1840s. The proceedings of the second convention, which focused more narrowly on American slavery, were published by the same organization in 1843, supplementing

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this emerging profile of an international antislavery vanguard. The two World Antislavery Conventions of 1840 and 1843 may be regarded as watershed events in the history of the abolitionist movement. With these events abolitionism moved onto a world stage, albeit one dominated by British and American abolitionists, and became recognizably global in its reach. Stephanie Munro See also: Abolitionism; Abolitionism, British; Human Rights References Bolt, Christine. The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction: A Study in AngloAmerican Co-Operation, 1833–77. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Filler, Louis. The Crusade against Slavery, 1830–1860. New York: Harper & Row, 1960. Temperley, Howard. British Antislavery, 1833–1870. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972. Tolles, Frederick B., ed. Slavery and “The Woman Question”: Lucretia Mott’s Diary of Her Visit to Great Britain to Attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840. Haverford, PA and London: Friends’ Historical Association and Friends’ Historical Society 1952.

WORLD BANK In July 1944, representatives from 44 countries meeting in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, created the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) to rebuild the economies of Europe. The Cold War led the United States to believe that this task exceeded the capabilities of the World Bank; in a massive effort to revive Europe, it embarked on the Marshall Plan. Bereft of its original purpose, the World Bank turned to shoring up the economies of Latin America and www.abc-clio.com

Africa against the encroachment of communism. In its early days, the World Bank differentiated itself from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Whereas the IMF provided short-term loans, the World Bank financed projects that enhanced the productivity of agriculture and industry. In pursuit of this aim, Mexico on April 29, 1947, applied for $208.9 million from the World Bank to build a hydroelectric plant, railroads, highways, a pipeline, and an irrigation system. On March 25, 1948, the World Bank offered its first loan to a country in Latin America, funding the construction of an electric power plant and an irrigation system and the production of trucks, tractors, harvesters, and threshers for use on farms in Chile. The World Bank approved a loan for Mexico, the second to a Latin American country, on January 7, 1949, but for only $24.1 million. In March 1949, the World Bank toured Egypt in the first mission to Africa; in March and April 1950, World Bank vice president Robert L. Garner visited South Africa and Zimbabwe; and on March 23, 1950, the World Bank dispatched advisors to Ethiopia. On September 13, 1950, the World Bank offered its first loan to an African nation: $7 million to Ethiopia for the construction of roads and the financing of banks. On January 23, 1951, in the first cooperative venture between the World Bank and private financiers, the World Bank and eight private U.S. banks loaned South Africa $80 million to increase its capacity to generate electricity. This loan marked the evolution of the World Bank toward the position that countries, so far as possible, should fund development with capital from private banks. The World Bank and IMF were to be lenders of last resort. In September 1962,

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the World Bank, in its first loan to education, funded the development of vocational training in Tunisia. In October 1962, the World Bank announced its commitment to funding education as a precondition to economic growth and in July 1963 published a study on public schools in Tunisia. In 1971, the World Bank joined the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Kellogg Foundations in creating the Consultive Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to spread the Green Revolution throughout the third world. In pursuit of this aim, the World Bank began to fund science in addition to the economy and education. In December 1971, the CGIAR pledged $15 million for research and on February 3, 1972, the World Bank granted $1.3 million to the International Center for Wheat and Maize Improvement in Mexico, the International Potato Center in Peru, and the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Nigeria. On October 28, 1975, the World Bank published a study on farming in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, and Tanzania. In August 1982, Mexico suspended repayment of its debt; over the next two years, nearly every other debtor in Latin America and Africa defaulted also. In January 1983, the World Bank created a type of loan similar to the short-term credit of the IMF to alleviate the debt crisis. This action drew the policies of the World Bank closer to those of the IMF. Between January 1983 and April 1984, the World Bank approved more than $4 billion in short-term loans but only four of the 16 recipients were in Latin America: Bolivia, Guyana,

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Colombia, and Panama. The IMF had loaned money to Bolivia, Guyana, and Panama as a precondition to their receiving a loan from the World Bank. In December 1987, the World Bank approved loans to the poorest countries in Africa to help them pay down debt and by 1990 had loaned money to 21 African countries. Famine in Africa led the World Bank in 1992 to grant $20 million to Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya and on November 29, 1993, to convene in Washington, D.C., the Conference on Agenda to Reduce World Hunger. To aid its efforts in Africa, the World Bank joined the United Nations in creating on March 15, 1996, the United Nations Special Initiative for Africa. Under this program the World Bank targeted loans to agriculture, water treatment, and information technology. To underscore the importance of knowledge in economic development, the World Bank convened with Morocco on May 12, 1997, the Mediterranean Development Forum and joined with the Institute de la Mediterranee on September 11, 2002, in a conference on the Middle East and North Africa. Subsequent initiatives include loans for debt reduction in Latin America and for AIDS education in Africa. Christopher Cumo

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References Mistry, Percy. The Present Role of the World Bank in Africa. London: Institute for African Alternatives, 1989. Onimode, Bade. The IMF, the World Bank and the African Debt. London: Institute for African Alternatives, 1989. Vera, Leonardo. Stabilization and Growth in Latin America: A Critique and Reconstruction from Post-Keynesian and Structuralist Perspectives. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2000.

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WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION World Health Organization (WHO) is the United Nations specialized agency for health, established in 1948. It is governed by member states through the World Health Assembly and has the mandate to promote the attainment of “the highest possible level of health” by all peoples. WHO is financed primarily from annual contributions made by member governments. WHO keeps member countries informed of the latest developments in vaccines, cancer research, nutritional discoveries, control of drug addiction, and health hazards of nuclear radiation. It also sponsors measures for the control of epidemic and endemic diseases and instruction in the use of antibiotics and insecticides. WHO encourages efforts to strengthen and expand public health services by providing technical advice in the preparation of long-term national health plans and offering aid in the development of national training institutions for medical and nursing personnel. The African continent and the Americas are faced with many severe health challenges and millions have died from malnutrition, malaria, and diarrhea diseases, and most recently from HIV infections. To curb this trend, WHO’s activities have focused on efforts to bring about improvements in health care to confront the epidemic of AIDS and other diseases. WHO, in collaboration with the United States, has contributed funds to fight AIDS and other health problems in ways that develop and support indigenous primary health care systems. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa (WHO/AFRO), which are the regional offices for the

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Americas and Africa, respectively, have been successful to a large extent in eradicating polio, measles, leprosy, smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera epidemics in these regions by promoting mass campaigns involving nationwide vaccination programs. Recognizing that HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death in adults and children, WHO, in collaboration with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is working to confront the frightening epidemic of AIDS, especially in Africa, by working in cooperation with the governments to study the causes and prevention of AIDS and HIV-related diseases. With the aim of reducing maternal and child mortality, WHO provides quality reproductive health services, including family planning, community-based maternity services, and accessible first-level referral services. To help people learn and practice improved health and disease prevention, WHO provides health education for people living in rural communities and also organizes effective advocacy, social mobilization, health campaigns, and other communication strategies to publicize its health programs. These campaigns have had significant success in eradicating tuberculosis, malaria, venereal disease, cholera, trachoma, and yellow fever in Africa and the Americas. WHO has also been instrumental in involving the support of leaders in Africa and the Americas to providing equitable access to basic health care, quality drugs, and vaccines; strengthening health information and surveillance systems; improving access to water and sanitation; and using technology to support health care. WHO has also played a leading role in coordinating health issues in these regions by ensuring that the

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leaders make commitments to health-sector reform, women’s health, and environmental issues so as to provide better health care for their citizens. Esther F. Ojo See also: Health, Public; Humanitarian Assistance; United Nations References Epstein, Daniel. “PAHO: A Century of Health Achievements.” Americas 54, no. 4 (July–August 2002). Kapp, Clare. “WHO and UNICEF Report Good News on Measles.” Lancet 363, no. 9420 (May 8, 2004): 1531. Sullivan, Louis W. “Africa’s Health Needs and U.S. Assistance.” TransAfrica Forum 8, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 3–8.

WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION In 1947 the United Nations enacted the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to promote free trade. In 1994 the signatories of GATT formed the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO requires unanimity among its members to act. Rather than attempt to forge consensus among all 142 members, the WTO conducts business in small committees. Several African nations charge that wealthy countries comprise a disproportionate share of the committees. These critics assert that the appearance of consensus masks the reality that a cabal of wealthy nations overrides the interests of the majority of developing countries. To increase their leverage, several developing nations have allied among themselves and with affluent countries to influence policy. Nearly half the more than 20 developing nations in the International Textile and Clothing Bureau, a group of clothing exporters that advises the WTO, are in Latin America. The same is true of www.abc-clio.com

nine of the 15 members of the Cairns Group, a confederation of developing and affluent countries that seeks to shape agricultural policy. The Cairns Group aims to reduce government intervention in the economy. Such a policy would in principle eliminate tariffs and subsidies. Proponents of trade liberalism hope to use the WTO to coax the United States to end its subsidies to agriculture, thereby driving up prices to a level at which Cairns Group countries can compete in the U.S. market. Caribbean nations oppose the Cairns Group in the belief that the elimination of tariffs would allow the United States to dump food in Latin America, lowering prices. Underlying this view is the premise that U.S. agribusiness benefits from economies of scale that would enable it to drive inefficient small farmers from the market. Accordingly, Caribbean nations wish to revise the Uruguay Round’s Agreement on Agriculture to permit developing nations to retain subsidies and a tariff on imports. The issue of trade liberalization pits the developing world against the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, which allows U.S. pharmaceutical companies to protect themselves against competition from generic drugs. In 1997 South Africa flouted the agreement by permitting its medical providers to shop worldwide for the cheapest drugs. Pharmaceutical companies challenged South Africa at the WTO’s Dispute Panel before withdrawing their complaint in April 2001. In an attempt at compromise, the WTO proposed to permit the poorest counties to suspend the agreement until 2016 but to require middleincome nations—Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa—to comply with it. The nations of

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Africa and Latin America are also wary of biotechnology firms using the agreement to patent plant varieties and thereby deprive farmers from growing a cultivar without paying a fee. These reservations have led one scholar, writing about the effects of WTO regulations on Kenya, to recommend that the WTO study the consequences of current policies on the nations of Africa before beginning a new round of talks. Christopher Cumo References Mangeni, Francis. African Influence in the World Trade Organization: A Study for a Programme on Assisting Member States in Negotiations in the World Trade Organization. Lusaka, Zambia: COMESA Regional Integration Research Network Project, 2002. Mangeni, Francis. WTO Negotiations on Rules on Regional Trade Agreements: African Perspectives. Lusaka, Zambia: COMESA Regional Integration Research Network Project, 2002. Oyejida, T. Ademola, and Dominique Njinkeu. African Countries’ Proposals and Objectives in the Post-Seattle Framework of WTO Trade Negotiations. Nairobi, Kenya: African Economic Research Consortium, 2002. Rich, Patricia Gray, ed. Latin America: Its Future in the Global Economy. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2002.

WORLD WAR I Although centered in Europe, World War I (1914–1918), or the “Great War,” profoundly affected Latin America and Africa as well as the United States. World War I is commonly seen as a conflict of the Entente Powers of Great Britain, France, and Russia, also known as the Entente Alliance (or “Allies”) against Germany and AustriaHungary, the two great powers of Central Europe, or the Central Powers. Beyond Europe, however, the war increased the U.S. presence in Latin America and placed www.abc-clio.com

Africa on a road toward decolonization and autonomy. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the United States exercised a semiproprietary interest in Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine (1823), which sought to contain and minimize European colonial influence in the Western Hemisphere, is the most recognized, though not first, expression of this caretaker view. Sixteen years before the start of the war, the United States had freed Cuba and the Philippines from the Spanish on the long-standing belief that freedom should be had by all; with the outbreak of the war, the United States felt it essential to reemphasize its hegemony in the Americas. Increased emphasis on the Monroe Doctrine was not well received in Latin America. Only Nicaragua immediately sided with the United States during World War I. Other countries feared that the United States might draw them into the war. Finally, Guatemala, out of economic necessity because its markets in Germany collapsed, supported the United States. As the war was ending, Honduras entered the war on the side of the Allies. El Salvador alone proclaimed neutrality. Costa Rica, under Federico Tinoco, sided with the United States hoping to gain recognition; Tinoco came to power through a 1917 coup that the United States never recognized. To further pressure the United States, Tinoco claimed that the Germans threatened the Panama Canal. However, two months after Tinoco gained power, he resigned at the arrival of U.S. ships at Limon. Costa Rica remained uncommitted to the Allies. By war’s end, many Latin American states were on the brink of war among themselves over issues unrelated to the Great War. U.S. intervention stayed the

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conflict, and the 1923 Latin American Peace Conference formalized the end of hostilities. The Latin American states were, for the most part, thoroughly frustrated with U.S. policies, interventions, and arbitrary control, but they nevertheless welcomed the peace they could not secure on their own. Africa witnessed military action in three main theaters: Cameroon and part of Nigeria (then Togoland and Kamerun), Tanzania and Zambia (German East Africa), and Namibia (German Southwest Africa). In addition, Allied forces were also based in Mozambique, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). There was no conflict in these areas, but troop mobilization affected the local population.

Britain’s first action in Africa began on July 31, 1914, against German Togoland, in advance of the declaration of war against Germany on August 4, 1914. French forces from French West Africa combined with the British to overrun Togoland in 27 days. Kamerun also fell quickly to British, French, and Belgian troops. The German defense was miniscule, and the Allies were heavily mechanized and able to blockade the region from resupply. The conflict in German East Africa was longer and more a running gun battle than a war. Both the German colony and British East Africa (Kenya and Uganda) declared neutrality, so no war was expected. However, a German colonel, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, effectively declared war on behalf of the German government by raiding British East Africa. He had 200 German officers and

A British expeditionary force sets out from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to attack the Port of Douala in the German colony of Cameroon during World War I. (Reynolds and Taylor, Collier’s Photographic History of the European, 1916 )

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2,500 African soldiers and created a tiny navy on Lake Victoria. The British sent two brigades from India and some gunboats via railway. They landed at Tanga Beach on November 2, 1914, but were repelled. The supplies abandoned by the British loss sustained the Germans through 1915. In 1916, the Allies sent General Jan Smuts from South Africa to crush the German presence. General Smuts had 20,000 troops: 13,000 Boer, English, and Rhodesians, and 7,000 Indians and South Africans. In addition, he had reserve Belgian and Portuguese troops. Colonel von LettowVorbeck, meanwhile, had increased his army to 15,500 troops: 3,500 Germans and 12,000 Africans. Smuts failed to achieve the expected decisive victory, and his troops suffered miserably from disease and the adverse terrain. One unit, the Ninth South African Infantry, dropped from 1,135 men to 116 in one year (averaging three per day) despite minimal fighting. Smuts was recalled to England in January 1917 to join the War Cabinet. He was succeeded by General Hoskins and then by South African General van Deventer. Van Deventer was the only one to show any success. He forced the surrender of 5,000 of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s men. Von Lettow-Vorbeck nonetheless continued to evade the Allies and even celebrated victories two days after the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. He finally surrendered, undefeated, on November 23. The third African theater was German Southwest Africa. The South African government prepared vigorously for campaigns against the Germans. However, Lt. Colonel Manie Maritz, a Boer in the South African army, took exception to attacking the Germans, and many South Africans

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agreed. Germany had assisted the Boers only eleven years earlier, providing arms to the Boers against British forces in the Boer War, and was considered an ally of a kind. Colonel Maritz urged whites of all nationalities to rise up and form an independent South Africa. Twelve thousand troops quickly materialized, but were just as quickly crushed. Martial law was imposed on October 14, 1914, and Maritz was exiled ten days later. Order was reestablished and a successful campaign against German Southwest Africa began in March 1915. Sixty-seven thousand South African soldiers completely occupied the German territory, taking the capital by May 12, 1915. All remaining German forces surrendered by July 9, 1915. The social ramifications of the Great War in Africa were far more important than the military operations. African involvement in the war caused the strengthening of regional colonial authority, the advancement of regional economies, and the rampant exploitation of black people through impressed service and in other ways. Furthermore, oppressed peoples were exposed to radically different social possibilities, while the British engaged in a systematic effort to prevent such influences. Finally, Africa saw the growth of the number of black Africans with European-style educations and knowledge. African colonial governments rushed legislation granting greater local control. Colonial governments geared up to meet the dramatically increased demand for minerals, rubber, petroleum, and nonedible crops such as cotton. The surge in exports greatly improved the colonies’ economic strength. In the Gold Coast (Ghana), the intense need for mineral resources resulted

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in a comprehensive survey of the country. New assets were discovered. These resources further added to the economic strength of the colonial administration of Gold Coast. In South Africa, the demand for labor on white-owned farms became so great that blacks who considered joining the military were told that their homes would be burned if they left. Conscription was considerable. The French brutally conscripted Africans to support the Third Republic during its seventy years of stumbling existence. Conscription intensified during the Great War, and thousands fled to Liberia and British colonies, with over 15,000 refugees to the Gold Coast alone. While the British were not brutal, salaries were poor or nonexistent, food and living conditions were not as promised, and black Africans were forced into subordinate roles. The British would not tolerate the possibility of blacks giving orders to whites. Black resistance to conscription was strong. This resistance strengthened tribes because the tribal groups became the means of hiding and protecting those who evaded service. Africans who had been recruited as soldiers and support staff were, at the end of the war, better equipped for independence. They had new language skills and educations. They observed new leadership techniques. In some areas, the war exposed them to a new religion, Islam, which could serve as a basis of unification against colonialism. As a result, the Great War strengthened Africa while weakening the grip of colonial powers. The stage was set for decolonization and independence in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century. Josiah Baker, Robert A. Baker, and Matthew Shannon www.abc-clio.com

See also: British Empire; Colonial Armies in Africa; Colonialism; Decolonization; Monroe Doctrine References Berman, Karl. Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United States since 1848. Boston: South End Press, 1986. Grove, Eric J. “The First Shots of the Great War: The Anglo-French Conquest of Togo, 1914.” Army Quarterly (July 1976). Killingray, David. “Repercussion of World War I in the Gold Coast,” in “World War I and Africa.” Special issue, Journal of African History 19, no. 1 (1978): 39–59. Langley, Lester D. The Banana Wars: An Inner History of American Empire, 1900–1934. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Leonard, Thomas M. Central America and the United States: The Search for Stability. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Page, Melvin E. “The War of Thangata: Nyasaland and the East African Campaign,” in “World War I and Africa.” Special issue, Journal of African History 19, no. 1 (1978): 87–100. Perry, John, and Cassandra Perry, eds. A Chief Is a Chief by the People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Plaatje, Sol T. Native Life in South Africa. 1916. Reprint. Harlow, UK. Longman, 1987. Rathbone, Richard. “World War I and Africa: Introduction.” Journal of African History 19, no. 1 (1978): 1–9. Willan, B. P. “The South African Native Labour Contingent, 1916–1918,” in “World War I and Africa.” Special issue, Journal of African History 19, no. 1 (1978): 61–86.

WORLD WAR II Lasting from 1939 to 1945, World War II (WWII) transformed diplomatic relations, economies, and social structures throughout the globe. Latin America and Africa were affected both indirectly and directly. Indirectly, regional politics and economies were shaped by their contributions to the war machines of the Allied and Axis powers

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and by their strategic locations. Latin America saw increased regional stability, at the price of the crushing of political dissent in certain cases, as a consequence of the war. Africa was put on the road to decolonization and independence. Africa alternately enriched its infrastructure and lost much capital, resources, and labor to distant powers. Directly, Africa saw considerable combat over strategic resources and geographic advantages. African soldiers were conscripted or recruited to both Axis and Allied forces. While the epicenters of WWII were in Europe, the Pacific, and East Asia, Latin America and Africa were influential in determining the war’s outcome. Latin America offered logistical support and a primary deployment point. Latin America’s internal matters during WWII were far more complicated than its general external relations. After World War I, the United States dominated trade and intergovernmental political relations. Formal recognition from the United States became important; without it countries could suffer from lack of aid, the inability to negotiate trade, and the absence of international representation. At the 1936 Inter-U.S. Peace Conference on War and Peace in Buenos Aires, Latin American nations felt that the war was too remote to be a concern and asked for the United States to abide by its nonintervention pledge. However, the strategic importance of the Panama Canal drew considerable attention and Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 led to Latin American leaders supporting Allied forces. The United States initiated two sets of measures to protect its Panamanian investment and shipping artery. It created high value land-lease agreements to provide naval yards, to defend against German www.abc-clio.com

submarines (U-boats), and to create longrange aerial operations for both Atlantic and Pacific theaters. Second, the United States provided an infusion of capital. U.S. military forces in Latin American nations modernized their hosts’ armies. Many formally unrecognized dictators showered U.S. troops with support, hoping that the show of solidarity would result in U.S. approval for their regimes. The foreign military presence in Latin America, coupled with prior unresolved diplomatic issues and the desire to reduce political conflict, led many Latin American leaders to portray dissidents as “communists.” Often, the United States was not concerned enough to notice the difference between political dissent and communist insurgency. As a result, the United States often gave approval to the eradication of such dissidents or provided the means of removal. The fear of market disruption combined with the search for stability during WWII promoted the modernization of local military forces and reinforced the power structures that existed in Latin America for some time. Attempts to change social and political structures and to improve the livelihoods of people through redistributions of wealth or power were viewed as threats. These trends continued throughout the war and afterward, during the Cold War. In Africa, combat took place over the control of supply routes and the control of war resources and commodities produced in Africa. Military strategies for African campaigns were tied to the production of war material, strategic points of transshipment, and the recruitment of officers. Many forces were drawn into Africa. The most well-known conflict occurred on the southern shores of the Mediterranean between

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British and German forces, the latter led by Irwin Rommel. North African battles were intense. Italian forces stationed in Libya raided Egypt in order to obtain oil, suffered great losses, and were reinforced by the Deutsches Afrikakorps (Germany), the corps-level command group for the operation of Panzer and light infantry divisions. British forces also sustained great losses repelling them. A costly and exhausting back-and-forth desert conflict took place between Allied and Axis forces, coming to a conclusion when U.S. military forces eventually landed in Tunisia to cut Italian supply lines to German forces. British Commonwealth forces and the arriving American troops proceeded to work in tandem on both sides, resulting in the surrender of the German forces in the region. Rommel led a remarkable defense. Early

on, Rommel had come within a hairbreadth of capturing Alexandria, which would have brought Egypt under Axis control and provided fuel for Hitler’s armies in Europe. Had Rommel succeeded, Hitler would have had less motivation to attack Russia for her petroleum and the course of the war would have been quite different. The war in West Africa included armed conflicts in Gabon and the Battle of Dakar. Allied forces also attempted to gain control of Gabon, French Equatorial Africa, and French West Africa, initially freeing all but the last. Blurring the lines between West and North African campaigns, attacks were launched from Free French Chad against Italian-controlled Libya, which was the principal supply route for the Deutsches Afrikakorps.

General Erwin Rommel with his troops in the desert at El Alamein, Egypt. The Allied forces under Bernard Montgomery won the battle of El Alamein in 1942. (Library of Congress)

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In Italian East Africa, a large military force of about 250,000 African recruits was present. This army threatened the supply routes through the Suez Canal and outlying areas. British Commonwealth forces based in Egypt, Sudan, and British Somaliland were too few to combat this threat. By recognizing the authority of Haile Selassie, the local leader and representative of the indigenous Ethiopian forces, the Allied Forces harnessed enough manpower to advance against the Axis. Italian forces saw an initial success in capturing British Somaliland. However, their naval forces became irrelevant because of fuel shortages. After a failed attempt to attack an Allied convoy, Italian naval forces in the region were all but neutralized. With the threat of shipping interference resolved, conventional ground warfare resumed by British Commonwealth forces, including troops from Australia, India, South Africa, Nigeria, and Gold Coast territories. Indian and Australian forces attacked from northern fortifications and supply lines in Egypt. South African, Nigerian, and Gold Coast forces rolled in from the south. Finally, Indo-Free French forces made amphibious assaults on Italian East Africa. These battles eliminated Italy’s threat to the surrounding areas. In an important political change, the Allied victory also established Ethiopian sovereignty. Though not claimed by colonial powers in the Berlin Conference, many European powers had previously refused to accept Ethiopia as a self-ruling African state. The success of the Allied alliance with Haile Selassie helped recognize Ethiopia as an independently sovereign nation. Ethiopia offers a case of WWII furthering the process of African political independence. Africa’s location was of strategic importance also to the war of Allied forces against www.abc-clio.com

Japan. Japanese influence dominated much of Asia and the Pacific theater, and the fall of south Asian nations to imperial rule would have granted the Japanese greater access to the Indian Ocean. This led to the fortification of Madagascar by Vichy French forces, in an attempt to create a forward base of operations so that Japanese long-range submarines could travel into Atlantic waters. During and after the war, colonial economies in Africa experienced a variety of changes. African economies saw development and diversification, the recognition of their global role as exporters of exotic, conventional, and strategic mineral resources, and further class stratification. Portuguese Africa (Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique) offers an important case of such changes. During the war from 1939 through 1943, German U-boats intercepted shipments from North America to the United Kingdom. The battle between U-boats and shipping is often called the “Second Battle of the Atlantic.” British trade with the United States, Africa, Spain, and Portugal was severely affected. Prior to the war, Portugal had restricted industrial growth in its colonies to maintain their dependence on Portugal. Now, a lack of British transports meant that Portugal could not transport raw materials from its African colonies. Manufacturing was consequently encouraged inside its colonies, with rubber and steel as the main products. Roads, training, and processing plants were built to support the new industries. Management skills were developed and created a new type of labor force. Laborers prospered, including native peoples despite the biases they faced. This industrial prosperity in the Portuguese colonies set the stage for independence and economic growth following the war.

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The resulting growth in smelting operations, steel manufacturing, rubber production and processing, and other industrial fields expanded resources and markets and allowed for infrastructure development. The latter included the construction of shipment conduits, ports, and the creation of a clerical infrastructure for quality control, customs, and the enforcement of quotas. A skilled workforce was created to operate advanced industries. Increases in capital and commodity reserves resulted in an infrastructure that could operate after wartime. In general, colonial powers across Africa could not remotely manage such operations and regional authority was deemed crucial during the war. Consequently, colonial territories experienced a greater, if still limited, degree of self-rule. Labor shortages brought better terms for potential workers, including local peoples. While Africans remained subjected to classist and racist colonial policies, opportunities arose for a few to make substantial personal advances. Overall, WWII increased the stability of many regimes in Latin America through U.S. support of dictatorships that opposed political dissidence. This would set the stage for anticommunist politics in the Western Hemisphere during the Cold War. For Africa, more steps toward political independence were created; however, the disparity between rich and poor continued. The battles in Africa set the stage for subsequent battles for independence and between conflicting African groups in the postcolonial era. While Latin America’s remoteness from the war reinforced its stability, Africa’s proximity created an increasingly unstable political environment that would unravel in the decades of decolonization after the war. Josiah Baker, Matthew Shannon, and Robert A. Baker www.abc-clio.com

See also: British Empire; Cold War; Colonial Armies in Africa; Decolonization; Democracy, Latin American; Industrialization; Portuguese Empire; World War I References Andrews, Cyril W. Portuguese East Africa. London: H. M. S. O., 1949. Crowder, Michael. “World War II and Africa: An Introduction.” Journal of African History 26, no. 4 (1985)287–288. Fynes-Clinton, D. Portuguese West Africa, Economic and Commercial Conditions. London: 1949. Grundlingh, Albert. “The King’s Afrikaners? Enlistment and Ethnic Identity in the Union of South Africa’s Defence Force during the Second World War, 1939–35.” Journal of African History 40, no. 3 (1999): 351–365. Harrison, E. D. R. “British Subversion in French East Africa, 1941–42: SOE’s Todd Mission.” English Historical Review (April 1999): 339–369. Hurstfield, Joel. “The Control of Raw Materials.” In Official History of the Second World War, edited by W. K. Hancock. London, 1953.

WRIGHT, RICHARD (1908–1960) Richard Wright was an African American novelist, essayist, and social critic of modern America, and is best known for his novel Native Son (1940). The early life of Richard Wright did not portend his destiny to emerge in the twentieth century as the foremost black writer in America during the 1940s, and the leading global humanist in the fight to relieve worldwide oppression of people of color in the 1950s. Author of six novels, two collections of short stories, seven nonfiction works, a collection of essays, and a host of unpublished works now housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the poet, fiction and nonfiction

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Novelist Richard Wright, photographed in 1939. Wright introduced a new realism to literary treatments of race and racism in American literature. (Library of Congress)

writer, playwright, essayist, journalist, bluesman, and social critic Richard Wright gave to the world a deluge of words during the 52 years of his short life. Born on September 4, 1908, on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, located 15 miles from Natchez—the Deep South city boasting dual reputations as the locale containing the largest number of antebellum millionaires and the second largest slave auction site during the 1850s—Wright stayed briefly in the backwoods until his parents moved into town with Wright’s maternal grandparents. When Richard was four, Nathaniel Wright, an illiterate sharecropper unable to find work, moved his family to Memphis, Tennessee, in an effort to find www.abc-clio.com

employment. It was here that Wright’s life fragmented and deteriorated between 1914 and 1920, starting with Nathaniel Wright’s desertion of his family and Ella Wright’s immediate struggles as a single parent earning low wages from domestic work that resulted in young Wright’s experience of years of transient housing and disruptive moves between Memphis; Elaine, Arkansas; and Jackson, Mississippi, where his maternal grandparents now resided. Despite the Deep South’s social, political, and religious edicts supporting race codes that insisted upon Negro inferiority and staunch Jim Crow separatism in every aspect of life, young Wright thrived, but his food was knowledge. The fables of literature were Wright’s salvation, despite disapproval from his family. Literature gave the young self-taught writer reason to live and to hope. At age 16, Wright wrote his first short story entitled “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre,” which was published in a Negro newspaper. The story garnered the wrath of his zealous grandmother for its sacrilegious language. Graduating as class valedictorian from ninth grade at 17 in 1925, Wright, with little hope of a better future, cast his eyes North. From the distance of the South, it appeared a promised land. However, his arrival in Chicago, Illinois, in 1927 after a two-year stint of manual labor in Memphis, dissolved his optimism. He worked many manual positions as a cook, janitor, and hospital worker after he brought his mother and brother North, while stealing moments to continue his voracious reading habit begun in Memphis and to embark upon efforts to teach himself the craft of writing. His efforts were rewarded when his short story “Superstition” won a writing contest sponsored by Abbott’s Monthly

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magazine, literary journal of the Chicago Defender, and was published in 1931. Still craving for the finer arts, not pulp fiction or romance writing, Wright got a major break while working as a postal worker in 1933 that opened the door to his writing career. A coworker took him to a meeting of the John Reed Club of the Chicago Communist Party, at which Wright met the great white intellectuals and leftist writers of New Masses and other party organs who changed his philosophies of life and writing into a Marxist perspective. It was after that meeting that Wright, like other Marxists, saw the solution to racial inequities through a class war against capitalism. The young recruit went home and wrote his first poem, “I Have Seen Black Hands,” reflecting his new proletarian ideology. Starting out as a respected poet, Wright plunged enthusiastically into his writing apprenticeship with party intellectuals. Wright, by 1934, was gaining popularity as a poet, publishing his works in party organs such as New Masses, Left Front, International Literature, and The Anvil magazines. At night, however, he worked steadily on his first love, writing fiction. In two years he had completed a novel and a series of short stories, all but one of which met with rejections: “Big Boy Leaves Home.” This story earned him the Story prize in 1936 along with a contract with Harper and Row. At this juncture, not only had Wright become independent of the Communist Party by working for pay as a writer for the Federal Writers Project, but he openly broke with the Communists because they insisted upon controlling his intellectuality and dictating the politicization of his art, which Wright dismissed as rote dogma. Thus, Wright moved to New York in 1937 to not only remove himself from www.abc-clio.com

the tensions and attacks of the Chicago Communist Party and to take on writing for the Communist Daily Worker but also to fulfill his contract with Harper and Row and to hire a literary agent. The consequence of these decisions proved to be wise; through his literary agent, Wright earned a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete the first draft of his novel Native Son, which would be published in 1940. Native Son garnered Wright both national and international acclaim that earned him the mantle of foremost black writer in America since W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass. The Book-of-the-Month Club selection of Native Son in March 1940 was the beginning of multiple accolades accorded to Wright, as well as public speaking engagements and travels beyond America’s boundaries. While turning out his novelturned-short-story “Almos’ A Man” (1940), his novella The Man Who Lived Underground (1941), and his photographic text 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History in the United States (1941)—which still holds its position as a “classic” in the genre— Wright worked with Paul Green to adapt Native Son for the stage and began writing his autobiography American Hunger. Dorothy Canfield Fisher of the Book-ofthe-Month Club insisted that Wright alter the title of his autobiography, which appeared as Black Boy (1945) and remains in print to the current year of 2007. Yet the United States, with its entrenched racism and Jim Crow policies and growing surveillance and intimidation of Communists, remained unrelenting in its reach. So Wright bid farewell to America in 1946 and moved with his Jewish wife Ellen and daughter Julia to Paris, France, where he remained until his death in 1960. And

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while American critics deemed Wright’s exodus to distant shores as the end of his skillfulness at critiquing America’s race problems, he, on the other hand, was gaining broader intellectual grounding in French existentialism. Moreover, at this juncture in history with the end of World War II, the emergence of the Soviet bloc, the Cold War and race for world dominion with the United States, and the clamoring for independence of African and Asian countries, Wright was taking on global concerns as a Pan-Africanist humanist affiliated with African nationalist Kwame N’krumah and West Indian nationalists C. L. R. James and George Padmore. All these leaders were at the Manchester Conference of 1946 in England to spearhead initiatives for decolonizing Africa. Europe and Africa were Wright’s global playgrounds in the 1950s, and here he developed his existentialist, sometimes Freudian-grounded, Pan-Africanist philosophical critiques. He wrote three novels with American settings of The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), and The Long Dream (1957). He also wrote three travel books Black Power: Record of a Land of Pathos (1954), about N’krumah’s reforms in Ghana; The Color Curtain: Report on the Bandung Conference (1955), about African and Asian race leaders meeting in Indonesia and voting not to align themselves against the West; and Pagan Spain: A Report of a Journey into the Past (1957), about Franco’s fascist policies and persecutions of Protestants whom Wright labeled as “white Negroes.” A collection of essays entitled White Man, Listen! (1957) provided Wright’s assessment of the criteria required of black literature, echoing “A Blueprint for Negro Writing,” an essay he had published

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in 1937. The collection has additional commentary about the political affairs of Africa and Asia not published in his travel books. A fourth travel book entitled French West Africa that was circumvented by Wright’s untimely death of a heart attack in a Paris clinic on November 28, 1960, would have illuminated the expansion of the author’s mind in terms of his PanAfricanist visions for West Africa from his position as a rootless, self-appointed global humanist fighting white imperialism and oppression for people of color worldwide. Since Wright’s death, his works have continued to remain popular, especially since black masculine studies and gender studies gained new footing in the 1990s, but most importantly, because, as Wright forecasted in The Color Curtain, postcolonial studies have emerged and prevailed as well. Moreover, his estate has released posthumously his novels Lawd Today (1963) and Rite of Passage (1994), and the second half of his autobiography, retitled American Hunger (1977), that enable more ways for scholars and students to study Wright since only a select number of the author’s private letters have been released. Virginia Whatley Smith See also: African Literature; Pan-Africanism; Travel Writing References Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Kinnamon, Kenneth, Ed. New Essays on Native Son. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Smith, Virginia Whatley. Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001.

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Y YORUBA Yoruba people mainly live in southwest Nigeria: Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, Kwara, and part of Bendel states. They speak Yoruba language and are linked together by culture, language, and history. The Yoruba consist of many kingdoms: Oyo, Ijebu, Egado, Ekiti, Ijesha, and Egba. Yoruba people originated from Ile-Ife, today’s capital of Ondo State. According to the Yoruba creation myth, Oduduwa, the founder of the Yoruba, landed at Ile-Ife after his descent from heaven. Ile-Ife remained the first capital city of the Yoruba until Oyo became the capital city in the nineteenth century. Major cities in Yorubaland include Lagos, Abeokuta, Ibadan, Ijebu-Ode, Oyo, Oshogbo, Ogbomoso, Ile-Ife, Ilesha, and Ondo. Hausa people used the name Yoruba for the people of Oyo kingdom. Yoruba are people of great culture, unique traditions, and the most social group in West Africa, as evident in their arts, music, and religions. They earn their social status through hard work and service to their community. Their population is 25 million. The Yoruba are extremely religious. Religion is the core governing principle of their lives. They believe in one Supreme God (Olorun/Olodumare) and many lesser gods (orishas), including Sango (the god of

thunder and lightning), Ifa or Orunmila (the god of divination and knowledge), Ogun (the god of war and iron), and Oya (the goddess of the sea). The lesser gods function as intermediaries to the Supreme God. Orishas’ powers are sought after for protection and blessings. The Yoruba are tolerant and accommodative of other religions and live peacefully with them. Many Yoruba have converted to Islam or Christianity; yet they often fall back onto their orishas in difficult times. The Yoruba political structure is based on democracy. They select and appoint their traditional rulers and kings through electoral committees of chiefs. They unseat or exile their leaders when they fail to serve them. Women also play essential roles in the political, religious, economic, and social lives of the Yoruba, especially on trade and market issues. Yoruba interaction with the outside world began with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, with the British in the nineteenth century, and with the Muslim traders in the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Yoruba engaged in transatlantic slave trade and sold their own people to Europeans who shipped them to the New World. They found themselves in slavery in Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica,

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and South and North America. Their experiences in slavery were tragic. However, before their emancipation and the return of some of them to Liberia, they left behind aspects of their culture: music, religions, arts, storytelling, and tribal medicine. They created their own feasts, drama, painting, dance and entertainments, which still dominate the daily life of people in the countries where the Yoruba were slaves. The main occupations of the Yoruba are farming and trading. They produce cocoa and kola nut for exportation, and yams, maize, plantains, beans, and peanuts for local consumption. They engage in blacksmithing, textile manufacturing, and woodworking, and invest heavily in education. The missionaries introduced Western education into Yorubaland in the 1860s the through the ex-slaves. Before Western education, there were local Islamic schools in Yorubaland. The Yoruba’s value of education is evident today in the many universities,

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colleges, schools, and technical institutions in Yorubaland. Due to their advancement in Western and Middle East educations, The Yoruba work and serve in all disciplines in Nigeria, West Africa, Arabia, Europe, and America. Finally, they exhibit a very strong sense of right and wrong. Good character and high moral standards are of paramount importance to them. Yoruba are proud of their culture, history, and arts, which have won international recognition. Yushau Sodiq

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See also: African, Precolonial; Nigeria; Ogun; Orisha References Biobaku, S. O. The Origins of the Yoruba. Lagos, Nigeria: University of Lagos Press, 1971. Eades, J. S. The Yoruba Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Lawal, Nike S.; M. N. O. Sadiku, and P. Ade Dopamu, eds. Understanding Yoruba Life and Culture. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004.

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Z ZAMBIA With a population of about 10,462,000, Zambia, in southern Africa, is dominated by the copper industry and farming. Originally under the control of the British South African Company, the area that is now Zambia was administered as NorthEastern Rhodesia and North-Western Rhodesia from 1895 until 1911, when the two regions were brought together to form Northern Rhodesia. The most important factor in the colony’s economy was copper. Its discovery is partly owed to an American, Frederick Russell Burnham. In the United States, he had worked copper mines and saw many similarities when he was near the Kafue River in Northern Rhodesia. In 1895, financed by British and South Africa businessmen, he began a massive exploration project that found rich deposits of copper. Railways were established to take the copper through Mozambique to the coast where it could be shipped overseas. In 1924, the first governor of Northern Rhodesia was appointed. The fourth governor, from 1934 to 1938, was Hubert Winthrop Young, who, after his term ended, was appointed governor of Trinidad. He was succeeded by John Maybin; Maybin’s successor, Eubule John Waddington, had

previously been governor of Barbados. By this time plans had been drawn up for a proposed merger of Northern Rhodesia with Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. This plan followed from the meeting of the 1938 Rhodesia-Nyasaland Royal Commission that included in its members Patrick Ashley Cooper, who later moved to Argentina where he became a prominent businessman and chairman and managing director of the Buenos Aires Waterworks Company Ltd. The merger finally came about in 1953 with the creation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. When the federation was dissolved in 1963, Northern Rhodesia gained its independence as Zambia on October 24, 1964, and remains a republic within the British Commonwealth. The first president of Zambia was Kenneth Kaunda, who had been chief minister for nine months until independence. He remained president until 1991. During that time he became a major figure in the British Commonwealth, establishing strong links with Canada. Kebby Musokotwane, who was prime minister from 1985 until 1989, later served as high commissioner to Canada. There has been a steady migration of people from Zambia to the United States.

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In 1980 there were 1,346 Zambian-born people living in the United States, rising to 2,954 in 1990. Justin Corfield See also: British Empire; Kaunda, Kenneth References Barns, T. Alexander. “The Tanganyika Pirate.” Northern Rhodesia Journal 5, no. 1 (1962): 63–68. Grotpeter, John J.; Brian V. Siegel, and James R. Pletcher. Historical Dictionary of Zambia. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998.

ZIMBABWE Geography The Republic of Zimbabwe is a landlocked nation located in southern Africa. Formerly known as Southern Rhodesia and then Rhodesia, its name, Zimbabwe, means “great house of stone” in Shona and refers to the country’s many monumental stone structures. Harare is the capital. Zimbabwe is bordered by South Africa to the south, Mozambique to the east, Zambia to the north, and Botswana to the west. The total area of the country is 242 square miles (390,580 square kilometers), which makes it slightly larger in area than the state of Montana. The terrain is mostly high plateau with the majority of the country at altitudes between 984 feet (300 meters) and 4,101 feet (1,250 meters). There are three major elevation levels: an elevated ridge called the high veldt which runs from the southwest to the northeast, a middle veldt which slopes down from either side of the high veldt, and a low veldt that reaches as low as 531 feet (162 meters) in the southeast of the country, and includes the Zambezi River valley in the northwest. The eastern highlands form the border with Mozambique to the east, and the www.abc-clio.com

highest point in this range is Mount Inyangani, at an elevation of 8,503 feet (2,592 meters). Other important geographical landmarks are the Victoria Falls, bordering Zambia, which are considered the world’s largest curtain of falling water at a width of 1 mile (1.7 kilometers), and Lake Kariba, the world’s second largest manmade dam, also on the Zambezi, which was opened in 1960 after a four-year building process that cost 87 workers’ lives and displaced hundreds of inhabitants. Due to its high elevation Zimbabwe has a modified tropical climate. The rainy season runs from November to March, although rainfall can be unpredictable and droughts are common. Average temperatures range from 60.8°F (16°C) in July to 69.8°F (21°C) in January, although average temperatures in the months before the rains start can run higher, and the low veldt often sees temperatures above 95°F (35°C) toward the end of the rainy season. The most widespread ecosystem in Zimbabwe is savanna grassland, although indigenous woodlands are also prevalent. Mineral resources include coal, chromium, iron, asbestos, gold, nickel, lithium, tin, and platinum. Large outcroppings of dolomite and granite led to a distinctive landscape, particularly where erosion has led to the formation of balancing rock formations, such as the Matobo Hills in the southwest.

People According to July 2005 census estimates, Zimbabwe’s population is 12,746,990 and the population growth rate is 0.51 percent. Youth make up a significant portion of the population: 39.2 percent are under the age of 15 years. The vast majority of the population is comprised of Bantu-speaking

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black Africans. Shona make up 82 percent of the population, Ndebele 14 percent, other African ethnic groups 2 percent, mixed race and Asians 1 percent, and whites less than 1 percent. Zimbabwe’s official language is English. The most prevalent religions in Zimbabwe are indigenous beliefs and Christianity. Fifty percent of the population practices a syncretic mixture of indigenous traditional belief and Christianity, 25 percent are Christian (with Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and various Protestant denominations represented), 24 percent practice indigenous traditional religion, and another 1 percent are Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or other. The 2003 estimates place the Zimbabwean literacy rate in English at 90.7 percent for the total population, with a rate of 94.2 percent for males and 87.2 percent for females. Education is free and compulsory for children between the ages of 7 and 15.

History and Politics The earliest inhabitants were the San (Bushmen), whose rock paintings can still be seen. From the first century BCE Bantuspeaking immigrants, likely from East Africa or the Congo, began to arrive and peacefully coexisted with the small, dispersed San population. They brought innovations in iron working and pottery, and introduced crop cultivation and animal domestication. By the end of the fourth century CE there were two geographical clusters, the Ziwa culture centered at Nyanga and the Gokomere, which covered the southern area. This latter group may have migrated, or a third group arrived to form another cluster at Leopard’s Kopje, which introduced mining, particularly for gold. By 900 CE there were important trade www.abc-clio.com

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links with East Africa: ivory, gold, and copper were exchanged for cloth, beads, china, and seashells. From about 1075 CE the Karanga civilization became dominant. They introduced important innovations: building in stone without mortar, organizing a centralized state, and a monotheistic state religion, the Mwari cult (which coexisted with ancestral worship). The Karanga kingdom expanded rapidly in the fifteenth century under the rule of King Mutota, who became known as Mwene Mutapa (the one who pillages), which the Portuguese corrupted to Monomutapa. He established an empire that eventually included all of modern-day Zimbabwe and parts of Mozambique. The Monomutapa empire began to shrink with the arrival of better-armed Portuguese and the rise of the Rozvi dynasty under its first leader, Changa. The Rozvi remained a political hegemony until 1831. From the 1830s a series of invasions, first by the Ngoni people from the south, and then by the forces of Mzilikazi (who had founded the Ndebele state in 1821), brought the Shona under domination. When Mzilikazi died in 1868, his son Lobengula was installed as king. In 1888 Lobengula granted the Brit Cecil Rhodes the Rudd Concession. The document appeared in two versions, and the translation given to Lobengula misrepresented the rights sought as limited mining access for a small number of European prospectors. Efforts to repudiate the concession failed. The first collective resistance to European invasion was the Ndebele and Shona uprisings known as the first Chimurenga in 1896–1897. The uprisings began in March 1896 in Matebeleland, and by June, the Shona had also started a war of resistance, inspired by the leadership of two

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spirit mediums, Sekuru Kaguvi and Mbuya Nehanda, and Chief Makoni. All three were eventually executed. After the Shona uprising was suppressed, settlers began to arrive (although in limited numbers, due to the limited mineral wealth). The 1930 Land Apportionment Act formalized the dispossession of indigenous Zimbabweans by granting 50 percent of the country’s land to white settlers (and the most fertile land at that) and 30 percent to Africans. When European settlers began to arrive in greater numbers after World War II, Africans were forcibly removed to the Special Native Areas and reserves. In 1953 the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was formed to include the territories of modern-day Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. Frustration with discriminatory colonial policies fostered several underground resistance groups and by the mid-1950s it was felt that a common front was needed. In 1957 the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress was formed but was banned within two years. Other parties would follow. Meanwhile, in 1963, the federation dissolved and Malawi and Zambia gained independence. However, in Southern Rhodesia, the new prime minister, Ian Douglas Smith, of the Rhodesian Front, made a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI). This brought international condemnation and further fueled the resistance. By 1964 the leading resistance groups were the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). These groups began armed struggle against white rule, gathering momentum in the 1970s. By 1976 it was clear that majority rule was simply a matter of time, and the patriotic front, which opposed the more reformist www.abc-clio.com

approach of the African National Council under Bishop Abel Muzorewa, was formed. In 1979 Muzorewa became prime minister of the transitional state ZimbabweRhodesia. The Lancaster House Conference paved the way for the first elections with universal suffrage in 1980. On April 18, 1980, Zimbabwe became independent, with Robert Mugabe as its first prime minister and Canaan Banana as its first president. Mugabe has remained the country’s only ruler, as executive president since 1987. In the early 1980s relations between ZANU and ZAPU deteriorated rapidly. ZAPU was portrayed as supporting dissidents in the western provinces and Matebeleland, and its activities were suppressed. Between 1982 and 1988, a low intensity war was conducted by the government in Matebeleland, which was brought to an end by the unity accord of 1988, which absorbed ZAPU into ZANU, and made Joshua Nkomo a vice president of Zimbabwe. Drought and economic structural adjustment policies of the 1990s slowed the pace of improvement in the postindependence standard of living, and between 1994 and 1999 women’s and worker’s groups held strikes. In 1997 Mugabe announced plans for a land redistribution program to resettle black Zimbabweans on land owned by white commercial farmers. In spite of the rejection of a referendum to change the constitution and enable the confiscation of this land from farmers without compensation, the government proceeded on a fast track plan for land redistribution. Meanwhile, a new political party, the Movement for Democratic Change, led by trade-unionist Morgan Tsvangirai, posed a new threat to ZANU’s monopoly of political power,

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winning 57 of 120 elected seats in parliamentary elections in 2000. An increasing climate of political repression, acute economic problems (due in large part to the collapse of commercial agriculture), and the undisclosed extent of Zimbabwe involvement in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have made the nation a subject of international controversy since then. Tsitsi Jaji See also: Africa, Precolonial; Ndebele; Religion (Africa) References Banana, Canaan S., ed. Turmoil and Tenacity: Zimbabwe 1890–1990. Harare, Zimbabwe: College Press, 1989.

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Campbell, Horace. Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 2003. Chanaiwa, David. The Zimbabwe Controversy. Syracuse, NY: Eastern African Studies Program, 1973. CIA World Factbook. “Zimbabwe.” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/ the-world-factbook/index.html (accessed June 30, 2005). Mutambirwa, James. The Rise of Settler Power in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), 1898–1923. Cranbury, NJ, London, and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1980. Rasmussen, R. Kent, and Steven C. Rubert, eds. Historical Dictionary of ZIMBABWE. 2nd ed. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990.

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INDEX Note: bold page numbers indicate main encyclopedia entries; italic page numbers indicate pictures. A Carne, 680 Aaron, Hank, 742 Abacha, Sani, 1027 Abakuá, 327–328 Abayudaya, 661 Abbott, Robert S., 438 Abeng, 276–277 Abercromby, Ralph, 448 Abjua Proclamation, 934–935 Abolição, 478 Abolition Act of 1833 (UK), 114 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 (UK), 40, 45, 68, 615 Abolitionism, 39–43 in Africa, 42–43 and the African Institution, 64–65 British, 43–46, 44. See also Apprenticeship (British Empire) and Central American Federation, 90 and Colombia, 288 in Paraguay, 866 and Quakers, 910, 911–912 See also African Squadrons; American Missionary Association; Douglass, Frederick; Equiano, Olaudah; Garrison, William Lloyd; Royal

Navy; Slave trade; Slavery; Wilberforce, William Abomey, 155 Abyssinia, 378 Acadia, 486 An Accented Cinema, 468 Accra, 265 Acerca de un personaje que unos llaman San Lázaro y otros llaman Babalú, 473 Acheampong, Ignatius Kutu, 520 Achebe, Chinua, 46–48, 63, 335, 597, 825 and Ekwensi, 411 and Okigbo, 846 Things Fall Apart, 46–47, 335, 597, 825 Acholonu, Catherine Obianuju, 424 Acoli, Sundiata, 983 Acquired immune deficiency syndrome. See HIV/ AIDS ACS. See American Colonization Society Act for International Development of 1950 (U.S.), 624 Adams, Abigail, 458 Adams, John Quincy, 100, 766 Adams, Lewis, 1080 Adams, Robert, 725, 774 Adamson, Joy, 668 Addis Ababa, 265, 427, 429 “Address to the Nations of the World,” 1131

Address to the Slaves of the United States of America, 437 Ade, “King” Sunny, 63, 792, 889 Adebajo, Adekeye, 400 Aden, 370 Adhidjo, Ahmadou, 226 Adolphe, Madame Max, 392 Adoy, Frederick, 912 Adu, Freddie, 35 Adventures in Black and White, 1068 Aetna insurance, 936 Afram, Silvana, 478 Africa and abolitionism, 42–43 and CARICOM, 236–237 and Castro, 248 and Christianity, 56 and CIA, 254 civil war deaths, 365 and Cold War, 282–286 and colonialism, 21 economic development and decline (20th century), 27 European exploration of, 56 and globalization, 527–528 and Green Revolution, 530–531 and IMF, 626–627 most populous countries, 5 regions, 5, 8 relations with people of African descent in Western Hemisphere, 6–7

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1164 INDEX Africa (continued) and sustainable agriculture, 79 total and regional populations, 4–5 western sports in, 33–34 and World War I, 1144–1146, 1144 and World War II, 1147–1150, 1148 Africa, Eastern countries, 8 population, 5 Africa, Middle countries, 8 population, 5 Africa, North, 48–50 countries, 8 and French Empire, 488 population, 5 and U.S. aid, 625 Africa, pre-colonial, 50–57 Africa, Southern countries, 8 population, 5 Africa, West, 57–64 and Blyden, 179, 180 countries, 8 population, 5 See also Berlin West Africa Conference Africa: Mother of “Western Civilization,” 71–72 Africa en el Río de la Plata, 969 “Africa for Africans,” 1095, 1096 Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission, 214 Africa Rising (African Burial Ground, New York City), 211, 769 The Africa Times and Orient Review, 629 African American Dance Ensemble, 538 African American Pageant, 855–858 African American soldiers and American Civil War, 272–274, 273 and George Washington, 97 African Americans feminists, 461–462

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life expectancy and death rates, 364–365 See also English, African American vernacular African Association, 1131, 1132 African Association of England, 56 African Broadcast Media Partnership Against HIV/AIDS, 575–576 African Canadians, 364–365 African Character Concert Company, 611 African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 587 African Communities League, 501 African Company of Merchants, 517 African Development Fund, 342 African Diaspora, 3–4, 7, 360–362 and Black Power Movement, 176 demography of, 362–365 as sixth region of African Union, 7 See also Afrocentrism; Afrofuturism; Pan-Africanism African Feminism, 451–452 African Game Trails, 668 African Heritage Dancers and Drummers, 538 The African Institution, 64–65, 1128 African Jazz (soukous group), 1020 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, 65–68, 1108 bishops, 66 See also Colored Methodist Episcopal Church “African Morning,” 572–573 African National Congress (ANC), 808, 987, 1024, 1025, 1084 approach to violence, 1053, 1055

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Freedom Charter, 508 and Kaunda, 665–666 and Mandela, 726–727 and Sisulu, 991 African soldiers and World War I, 291, 292–293 and World War II, 291–292 African Squadrons, 45, 68–69 African Standby Force, 871 African Theater Ballet of Keita Fodeba. See Les Ballets Africains African Union, 7, 69–71, 70, 740, 871, 909 and Comoros, 305 and Darfur genocide, 870 definition of terrorism, 1054–1055 See also Organization of African Unity African Women’s Self-Improvement Association, 454 Africana: The Encyclopedia of African and African American Experience, 113 Africans global dispersion of, 3–4 life expectancy and death rates, 363–364, 365 post–World War II migration to North America, 4 Africanus, Leo, 440, 724–725 Africare, 7 Africville, Nova Scotia, 228–230 Afrika Bambaataa, 564, 565–566 Afrikaners, 1023–1024 Afrique Occidentale Française, 977 Afro-American Dance Company, 985 Afro-beat, 652, 792 Afro-Cuban All Stars, 320 Afro-Cuban jazz, 320 “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite,” 843 Afro-Cuban music, 152. See also Brouwer, Leo; Cruz, Celia

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INDEX Afro-hip-hop, 792 Afro-Jazz de Ségou, 726 Afro-Latin jazz, 152 Afro-reggae, 792 Afro-rock, 792 Afrobeat, 63. See also Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela The Afrocentric Idea, 71 Afrocentrism Afrocentrism, 71–72, 701–702. See also African Diaspora; Afrofuturism; Black Power Movement; Pan-Africanism Afrofuturism, 13, 72–73. See also African Diaspora; Afrocentrism; Pan-Africanism Afwerki, Isaias, 426, 430 Agaja, King of Dahomey, 60 Agard, John, 102 Aggrey, James, 682 Aggro seizeman, 478 Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954 (U.S.), 591–592 Agriculture, 73–77 ancient, 19–20 cash crops, 21, 23 sustainable, 77–79 U.S., 24 See also Colored Farmers National Alliance; Columbian Exchange Aguiyi-Ironsi, J. T. U., 161 Ahermarke, Abdirashid Ali, 1016 Ahmad, Ghulam, 630 Ahmad, Muhammad. See Madhi Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, 82, 629, 630 Aideed, Muhammad, 514 Aidid, Mohammed Farah, 872, 1017 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 63, 79–81 AIDS. See HIV/AIDS Aiken, George, 380 Ailey, Alvin, 29 Ain el Ghezal, 466 “Ain’t I a Woman?,” 458–459, 1076

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Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 461 Ainsi parla l’Oncle, 831, 903 Akan, 81–82, 213 and Ghana, 516 See also Ananse Akinola, Peter, 508 Akomfrah, John, 251 Akram, Wali, 82, 630–631 Akuffo, Frederick, 520 Amin, Jamil Al-, 632 Alarinjo Theatre, 826 Alawma, Idris, Mai of Kanem-Bornu, 665 Alcock, John, 139 Aldridge, Ira, 198 Alencar, José de, 680 Alexander, Roberta, 171 Alexander the Great, 405–406 Alfassa, Mathieu Maurice, 725 Alfonsín, Raúl, 1074 Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, 92 Algarin, Miguel, 907 Algeria, 82–83 and Black Panther Party, 173, 174 and Cuba, 283, 286 and Fanon, 444 and Islamic insurgency, 623 Algerian Revolution, 621 Algiers Convention, 1054–1055 Ali, Duse Mohammaed, 629 Ali, Mohamed (Egyptian black leader), 501 Ali, Muhammad (boxer), 17, 84–86, 85 as African cultural hero, 923 bout with Foreman in Zaire, 318 Ali, Noble Drew, 86–87, 630 Ali, Sunni, 1018 Ali Bey, 51 ‘Ali Pasha, Muhammad, 51, 83–84, 290, 406 All for Oil, 861 All-African Peoples’ Conference of 1958, 344 Allen, Richard, 65, 66, 66

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1165

Allende, Salvador, 254 Almagro, Diego de, 261 Almeida, Rafael, 320 Almoravids, 523 Along This Way, 653 Alpha Blondy, 314, 794, 891, 923 Alvarado, Pedro de, 87, 678 Alvarez, Julia, 240 Alves, Rubem, 689 AMA. See American Missionary Association Amadu, Seku, 61 Amaku, Ekpo, 404 Amalia, 680 Amazon rain forest, 188 Amazon River, 188 Ambrose, David, 686 AME Church. See African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church Amenemhat III, King of Egypt, 405 America, Central, 87–93. See also Pre-Columbian America American African Squadron, 68–69 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1138 American Anti-Slavery Society, 40, 994 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 493, 763, 764 American Civil War. See Civil War, American American Colonization Society, 61, 66, 93–95, 692 Delany’s opposition to, 346 American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, 95–96 American Hunger, 1152, 1153 American Metal Climax (AMAX), 312 American Mineral Fields International, 311, 312 American Missionary Association, 96 American Negro Academy, 973

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1166 INDEX American Revolution American Revolution, 96–98, 133–134, 620 and Bahamas, 142 See also Nova Scotia: African American diaspora in American Trans-Saharan Expedition, 725 Ames, Charles F., 215 Amin, Idi, 513 and Tanzania, 1043, 1088 targeting of Ugandans of other ethnic groups, 348, 1088 See also Uganda Aminata, 600 Amistad case, The, 96, 99–100, 319, 999 memorial, 769 and Sierra Leone, 988–989 Amistad (film), 470 Amsterdam Declaration of 1989, 940 Ananse, 100–102, 965 Ancestor worship, 102–104, 211–212 Ancestral Libation Chamber, 211 Ancient civilizations, 19–20 Anderson, Marian, 169, 170, 1121 Angelou, Maya, 32, 211, 839 Anglo-Boer Wars, 55, 203, 686, 1023, 1040 Anglo-Zulu War, 203 Angola, 104–106 and CIA, 254–255 civil war, 895 and Cuba, 105–106, 248, 255, 283–284, 344–345, 622, 801–802, 1013–1014 funding of revolutionary group by diamond sales, 623 and ironworking, 627 and socialism, 1012 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 and war in Congo, 310 Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela, 63, 106–107, 652 and American influences, 792–793, 890 www.abc-clio.com

Anikulapo-Kuti, Femi, 107 Animal Liberation Front, 1052–1053, 1054, 1058 Animals, and Columbian Exchange, 302 Anita, 32–33, 472 Ann Nancy, 101 Annan, Kofi, 70, 107–108, 1090 Annie John, 670 Anson, Cap, 811 “Ante-bellum Sermon,” 438 Anthony, Earl, 173 Anthony, Michael, 154 Anthropology, 108–111 Denver Africa Expedition, 356–357 and Ethiopia, 428 See also Evolution, human Anthropology and Modern Life, 110 Anti-Slavery Committee, 1128 Anti-Slavery Society (Britain), 45, 65, 904, 1128–1129 Antigua (city), 1102 Antigua and Barbuda, 111–112 Antillanité, 525 Antonin, Arnold, 472 Antony, Mark, 406 Anuak, 366 Apartheid C. West on, 1124 See also Botha, P. W.; De Klerk, F. W.; Mandela, Nelson; Namibia; Ndebele; South Africa; Tutu, Desmond An Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire on Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies, 1128–1129 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 112–113, 917–918 Apprenticeship (British Empire), 113–116 Arab Maghreb Union (UMA), 1065 Arab-American National Museum, 50 ABC-CLIO

La araucana, 678 Araucanians, 902 Arawaks, 900 Antigua and Barbuda, 111–112 Bahamas, 142 Barbados, 149 Jamaica, 638 Arbenz, Jacobo, 253–254 Architecture, 116–118, 1047–1048 plantation, 118–122 sobrado house, 1103 Ardiess, 156, 795 Argentina and IMF, 626, 627 and soccer, 1010, 1011 truth and reconciliation commission, 1073–1074 and U.S. aid, 625 See also MERCOSUR Arion, Frank Martinus, 240 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 122–124, 122, 352, 394, 548, 689, 947 and noirisme, 832 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 101, 697 Armed Islamic Group, 1053, 1054 Armitage, David, 133 Arms trafficking, 124–126 Armstrong, Louis, 648, 652, 792, 888, 978 and Paige, 858 Armstrong, Samuel, 1116 Arns, Paulo Evaristo, 1073 Arnulfo, Óscar, 689 Arrascaeta, Juan Julio, 968 The Arrivants, 1069 Arrowsmith, Edwin Porter, 686 Arroyo, Marina, 171 Art, African, 126–132 ancient, 126–127, 128 contemporary, 132 19th and 20th centuries, 127–130, 129, 130 and royalty, 131–132, 132 and spiritual world, 130–131, 131 Stone Age, 126, 127 Artaud, Antonin, 148 Artigas, José Gervasio, 866, 1098 1-800-368-6868

INDEX Aruanda, 478 Aruba, 388–389 Arusha Declaration, 1042–1043 Asaase Yaa, 100 Asante, 465 and Ghana, 516–517 See also Nanny of the Maroons Asante, Molefi Kete, 71, 367, 507 Asante Empire, 53 resistance to colonialism, 296 Asantewa, Yaa, 517 Asare, Yaw, 101 Ashanti, 131 and kente cloth, 666–667 Ashburton, Lord, 314 Ashe, Arthur, 34 Ashworth, Georgina, 464 Asians, as contract labor in Americas, 361–362 Assata, 983 Asselin, Martial, 216 Assemblies of God, 214 Assemien Dehylé, roi du Sanwi, 332 Assimilação, 433 Assmann, Hugo, 689 Association for the Study of African American Life and History, 108 At the Bottom of the River, 669–670 At What a Price, 735 Atahualpa, 1028 Atilogu dance, 829 Atlantic Charter, 584 Atlantic World, 11, 12, 132–137 Atlas of Endangered Languages, 1094 Atonement and Forgiveness, 938 Attila the Hun, 223, 224 Attucks, Crispus, 97, 137, 137 as sailor, 961 Attwood, William, 668 AU. See African Union Aunty Roachy Say, 157 Australopithecus afarensis, 428, 434–435 An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, 739 www.abc-clio.com

Autobiografía (Manzano), 679, 728 The Autobiography of an ExColored Man, 553, 654, 699 The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 548, 549 inv The Autobiography of My Mother, 670–671 Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de, 137–139, 138 Avengers, 794, 891 As Aventuras Amorosas de Um Padeiro, 478 Aviation, 139–140 Avila, Jac, 472 Aweke, Aster, 794, 892 Awolowo, Obafemi, 824 Awoonor, Kofi, 697, 846 Axé music, 192 Aymara, 182, 183, 184 Azevedo, Arthur, 680 Al-Azhar Mosque/University, 408, 631 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 597 Azores, 140 “The Aztec Suite,” 843 Aztecs, 899–900 Azzam, Abdullah, 1057 Baartman, Saartjie, 669 Babangia, Ibrahim, 934 Babel–17, 72 Bachelet, Michelle, 354 Back-to-Africa movement. See Colonization schemes Bacon, Francis, 748 Bafakoulos, Ted, 471 Bagayogo, Issa, 794, 891–892 Bahamas, 141–144 Bahia, 1101, 1102 Bailey, Amy, 642, 643 Bain, Donald, 356–357 Bajan, 149 Baker, Ella, 1033, 1034 Baker, Herbert, 117–118 Baker, Houston A. Jr., 166 Baker, Josephine, 612, 1120 Baker, Moses, 639 Bakhita, Josephine, Saint, 144–146 ABC-CLIO

1167

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 897 Bakonga, and hair, 545 Bakongo, 212 Bakr, Yasin Abu, 1072 Bal, Suleiman, 52 Balaguer, Joaquín, 374 Balbo, Italo, 140 Balboa, Vasco de, 901 Baldwin, James, 484, 697, 1069 and gay liberation, 507 Balemba, 661 Balewa, Abu Bakar Tafawa, 824 Balfour, Lawrie, 937–938 Balfour Declaration, 204 Ballagas, Emilio, 681 Ballet Africaines de Diebel Guee, 539 Ballet Djoliba, 536–538 Ballet National Djoliba, 539 Les Ballets Africains, 29, 535–536, 537–538, 539 Bamba, Amadou, 926–927 Banana, Canaan, 1160 Bananas, 20, 74, 302 Jamaica, 640 Banda, Hastings, 720–721 Bandung Conference, 832 Bangoura, Karim, 535 Banjo, 30, 788 Banjo, 744 The Banjo Lesson, 33, 1041 Bantu, 1023 and Cuban ritual music, 326–327 and flying Africans, 480 Bantu Women’s Home Improvement Association, 454 Baptist War (Jamaica), 639 Baptists, 263 Baraka, Amiri, 146–149, 146, 166, 176, 379 and pageant style, 857 Barbados, 149–150 Barbara, Saint, 504–505 Barber, Samuel, 170 Barbosa, Milton, 780 Barclay, 1001 Barclay, Thomas, 774 Bargash, Sultan, 54 Barley, 73 Barnes, James, 668 1-800-368-6868

1168 INDEX Barnet, Miguel, 150–151 Barns, Thomas Alexander, 720 Barotseland, 151–152 Barra War, 497 Barreto, Ray, 318 Barrios, Pilar, 195, 1099 Barrios, Ventura, 1098 Barron, Edward, 494 Barrows, Leland Judd, 1061 Barth, Heinrich, 440, 442 Baseball, 34–35. See also Negro leagues Bashir, Omar Hassan al-, 870 Bashir, Umar Hassan Ahmad al-, 349 Basie, Count, 648 Basketball, 34 Bass, George Houston, 379, 857 Bastion, Adolph, 109 Basutoland. See Lesotho Bata dance, 829–830 Bataillon Negre Egyptien, 410 Batista y Zalvidar, Fulgencio, 247, 320, 352 Batouala, 239, 252, 696 Batten, Jean, 140 Battle, Kathleen, 171 The Battle of Algiers, 83 Batuques, 191 Bauxite, 640 Bauzá, Mario, 152–153, 323–324, 842 Bay of Pigs invasion, 248, 254 Bayreuth Festival, 171 BBC Caribbean Service and Caribbean Voices, 153–155 Beans, 302 and Columbian Exchange, 399 Beanes, Scipio, 67 Bearden, Romare, 33, 316 Beat movement, 146 Beat Street, 565 Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands, 389 Beattie, James, 1130 The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, 697 Bebop, 649, 652 Bechet, Sidney, 648, 650 Beckwith, Martha Warren, 101

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Bedout, Jacques, 534 Before the Mayflower, 396 Begin, Menachem, 960 Begone Dull Care, 476 Behn, Aphra, 852, 1038 Beijing Women’s Conference (1995), 450 Bekono, Roger, 227 Belgium and colonial armies, 290 and Congo, 309, 310, 312–313, 441 Belgrano, Manuel, 866 Bell, Cool Papa, 34, 812 Bell, Henry H. J., 1087 Bellan, Esteben, 320 Bellegarde, Windsor, 903 Bello, Muhammad, 335, 1015 Beloved (novel and film), 702, 777, 778, 779, 934, 996–997 Ben Ali, Zine Al-Abidine, 1077 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 83, 344 Ben Solomon, Job, 628 Ben-Jochannan, Yosef, 71–72 A Bend in the River, 798 Benedict, Ruth, 108–109 Benevolent societies, 213–214 Benezet, Anthony, 911 Benguela Current, 800 Benin, Republic of, 127, 155–156 and ironworking, 627 See also Yoruba Benjamin-Constant, Jean Joseph, 1041 Bennett, Hyacinth, 644 Bennett, Lerone Jr., 396 Bennett, Louise (aka Louise Bennett-Coverly, aka Miss Lou), 101, 157, 644 and Morris, 776, 777 Bennett, Rolla, 1108 Bennett, Thomas, 1108 Benson, Bobby, 792, 889 Benzoni, Girolamo, 768 Berbers, 48, 59 Berger, Kathy L., 471 Berlin West Africa Conference, 50, 157–159, 202, 295, 296, 1090

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and French Empire, 487 and shaping of modern African political boundaries, 347 See also Brussels Act Bermuda, 159–160 Bernabé, Jean, 240, 259 Bernal, Martin, 167–169 Bernard, Delvina, 229 Berty, D. W., 725 Bet Giyorgis, 118 Beta Israel. See Falasha Betervide, Salvador, 1098 Béthencourt, Jean de, 1028 Beti, Mongo, 227 Betrayal in the City, 600 Bewardism, 640 Bey, Chief, 538 Beyala, Calixthe, 160–161, 227 Beyond a Boundary, 646 “Beyond Apocalypse Now,” 1069 Bi-Kutsi, 227 Biafra, 161–162 famine of 1960s, and humanitarian assistance, 589–590 Biassou, Georges, 390, 711 Bibb, Henry, 437 Big band music, 648–649 “Big Boy Leaves Home,” 1152 Big Four of Johannesburg, 651, 793, 890 Big Man phenomenon, 347–348 The Big Sea, 554 Biko, Stephen, 280, 1025 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 7 Billet, Jeannot, 390 Bim, 471 Bin Laden, Osama, 668, 1057 Binaisa, Godfrey, 1088 BinNuhu, Alfa Ibrahim, 52 Biography of a Runaway Slave, 150–151 Biotechnology, 162–165, 1142–1143 Birch, Samuel, 98, 165 Birchtown (Birch Town), 165. See also Blucke or Bleucke or Bluck, Stephen

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INDEX Birmingham (Alabama) church bombing, 269–270 Birney, James G., 1138 Birth control. See Reproductive health and family planning in Africa, U.S. influence on Bismarck, Otto von, 158, 347 Bittker, Boris I., 933, 937 Biya, Paul, 226 The Black Aesthetic, 166 Black Aesthetics Movement. See Black Arts Movement Black and White Men Together, 507 Black Arts Movement, 147, 165–167, 176, 701–702 and Harlem Renaissance, 554 influence on Wideman, 1126–1127 and Sanchez, 968 See also Black Power Movement Black Arts Theatre/School (BART/S), 166 Black Athena, 167–169 Black Athena Revisited, 168 The Black Atlantic, 468, 523 Black Bottom, 1119 Black Boy, 31, 697, 1152 The Black Christ, 690 Black classical singers, 169–171 Black colleges, 96 The Black Decameron, 681 Black English. See English, African American vernacular Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, 166 Black Hawk Down, 1017 The Black Jacobins, 238, 645 Black Liberation Army, 1055 Black Literature and Literary Theory, 502 Black Man of the Nile, 71–72 Black Moses, 438

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Black nationalism and Harlem Renaissance, 554 and Walcott, 1113 See also Black Panther Party Black Orpheus, 477–478 Black Panther Party, 83, 171–175, 1055 and L. K. Johnson, 656 programs, 175–176 and Qaddafi, 695 See also Shakur, Assatta Black People, 1119, 1120, 1121 Black Power Movement, 175–177 and C. L. R. James, 646 and Ebony, 395 and Fela, 106, 652 and Islam, 632–633 Trinidad and Tobago, 1072 See also Afrocentrism; Black Arts Movement; Black Panther Party Black pride, 917 Black Religion and Black Radicalism, 690 Black Revolutionary Theatre manifesto, 147–148 Black Star Line, 177, 500 Black Teacher, 523–524 Black Theatre Movement, 147 Black theology, 690 Black Womanist Ethics, 691 Black World, 166 Black-eyed peas, 950, 951 The Blacker the Berry, 553–554 Blackman, 553 Blackwell, Chris, 730 Blair, Montgomery, 91 Blake, or, The Huts of America, 346 Le Blanc de l’Algérie, 368–369 Blancké, Wilton Wendell, 252, 258 Les Blancs, 380, 550, 551 Blaxploitation films, 475–476 Blood, Hilary, 498 Bloodlines, 333–334 Blucke or Bleucke or Bluck, Stephen, 165, 177–179

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1169

Blue Notes and Exiled Voices, 251 Bluegrass music, 30 Blues music, 646–647 and Voodoo, 1111 Blyden, Edmund, 437–438 Blyden, Edward Wilmot, 67, 179–181, 179, 696 Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 629 as Igbo descendant, 598 and Judaism, 663 Blyden, Isa Cleopatra, 180 Blyden, Wilmot III, 180 Boas, Franz, 108–109, 110–111 Boatbuilding, 181–182, 1046. See also Shipbuilding Body and Soul, 475 Boers, 55. See also Anglo-Boer Wars Boesak, Alan, 691 Boff, Clodovis, 689 Boff, Leonardo, 250, 688–689 Bogart, Humphrey, 775 Bogle, Paul, 640, 772 Boigny, Felix Houphouët, 313–314 Boisseau, Tracey Jean, 462–463 Bokassa, Jean-Bédel, 252–253 Bol, Manute, 34 Bolen, David Benjamin, 1040 Bolívar, Simon, 373, 620, 848–849, 879, 1031 and Pétion, 882 Bolivia, 182–185 and Carnival, 241 election of Morales, 354 and globalization, 527 1952 revolution, 352 and socialism, 1014 truth and reconciliation commission, 1073–1074 Bom-Crioulo, 680 Bonachea, Rolando, 918 Bonaparte, Josef, 604 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 406, 713, 1031 Bond, Julian, 1034 The Bondswoman’s Narrative, 503 Bonenfant, Joseph, 215

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1170 INDEX Bono, 342 Boogie Woogie Landscapes, 986 Book of American Negro Poetry, 696 “The Book of Negroes,” 98 Booth, John, 720 Boozer, Mel, 507 Borden, Walter, 229 Borgella, Jérôme-Maximilien, 881 Born Free, 668 ital Borom Sarret, 466, 853 Borrowed Beauty, 230 Bosch, Juan, 374 Bossa nova, 30, 194 Boston Massacre, 137 Botha, P. W., 935, 1025, 1085 Botswana and AIDS, 509 and diamonds, 358 and HIV prevention, 580 Le Bouillon d’Awara, 479 Boukman, Dutty, 547 Boul Ma Mine, 892 Boumedienne, Houari, 83 Bourg, Morillon du, 534 Bourguiba, Habib, 1077 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 872 Bowles, Paul, 49, 775 Boxing, 33–34, 35 Boxtel, Roger van, 937 Boyd, George, 229–230 Boyer, Jean Pierre, 373, 882 encouragement of African Americans to immigrate to Haiti, 1108 and Haitian independence, 547 and Soulouque, 1021 Boyz n the Hood, 476 Bozzi, Maria Raquel, 474 Brackett, Edmond, 687 Bradshaw, Robert, 964 Branch, Thomas H., 720 Branch, William, 379, 380 Brand, Dionne, 185–186 Brand, Dollar, 650 Brand, Quentin, 139 Brasilia, 194 Brasso, Aguebah, 465 Brathwaite, E. R., 523–524 Brathwaite, Edward. See Brathwaite, Kamau

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Brathwaite, Kamau, 32, 102, 154, 186–188, 234, 238, 239, 1069 on language, 882 on M. Smith, 1008 on McKay, 743, 744 Brazil, 188–191 and African ironworkers, 627 and Angola, 104–105 and diamonds, 358 and IMF, 627 quilombos, 913–914 and race, 917 return of slaves to Benin, 155 and slavery, 41–42 and soccer, 1010, 1011 and socialism, 1014–1015 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 and U.S. aid, 625 See also Male Revolt; MERCOSUR Brazilian Carnival, 191–192, 192 Brazilian culture, 193–195 Break dancing, 563, 565, 569–570 Breakin’, 565 Breath, Eyes, Memory, 339 Breeze, Jean Binta, 656 Brer Rabbit and Brer Dog, 228, 484–485 Breton, André, 239, 256 Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, 527, 625, 1139 Brick making, 1046 Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 244, 510, 688 Brierre, Jean, 831 A Brighter Sun, 974–975 Brindis de Salas, Virginia, 195–196, 1099 Britain and Jamaica, 638 See also United Kingdom British and Foreign AntiSlavery Society, 1137 British Caribbean Federation Act of 1956, 1122 British Commonwealth, 203–204

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British East India Company, 200 British Empire, 200–205 early expansion, 200–202 New Imperialism, 202–203 transition to Commonwealth, 203–204 British Guiana, 543–544 British Honduras, 90, 92 British Methodist Episcopal Church, 65 British South African Company, 1157 British West Africa Squadron, 45, 68 British-Asante Wars, 517 Brix, Joseph le, 139 Broadside Press, 968 Brodber, Erna, 239 Broodhagen, Karl, 769 Brooks, Arthur, 1080 Brooks, Berry Boswell, 668 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 31–32, 205–206, 205 Brooks, Roy L., 938 Brouwer, Leo, 206–207 Brown, Arthur, 139 Brown, Elaine, 174 Brown, H. Rap, 632 Brown, Henry B., 382 Brown, James as African cultural hero, 923 and Fela, 106, 652, 792–793, 890 Brown, John, 272 as Moses, 438 Brown, Lloyd, 743 Brown, Ras Sam, 920 Brown, Wendy, 937 Brown, William (sailor), 207–208 Brown, William Wells (author), 1000–1001 Brown Girl in the Ring, 72 Brown Girl, Brownstones, 732–733 Brown v. Board of Education, 267, 269, 271, 286, 672, 933 Browne, Jack, 216 Bruce, John Edward, 973

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INDEX Brukdown music, 92–93 Brundtland Commission, 77 Brussels Act, 208. See also Berlin West Africa Conference Brutus, Dennis, 846 Bryan, Milton, 251 Bryant, Gyude, 694 Bt corn, 163 Bt cotton, 163 Buarque, Chico, 194 Buchanan, Pat, 932 Buena Vista Social Club (group), 320, 324 The Buena Vista Social Club (film), 30, 473 Buenos Aires, 265, 1104 Buffon, Georges, 417 Bulbul, Zózimo, 478 Bullet, Jeannot, 711 Bumbry, Grace, 171 Bunche, Ralph, 209–210, 209 Bunuel, Luis, 474 Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. See Freedmen’s Bureau Burgos, Julia de, 240 Burial ground (New York City), African, 210–211, 211, 1048, 1049 Burial, African practices in the Americas, 211–214 Burke, Inez M., 856–857 Burkina Faso, 214–215 and U.S. aid, 625 See also Fulani Burnham, Forbes, 544 Burning an Illusion, 471 Burns, Alan Cuthbert Maxwell, 92 Burns, John H., 252 Burton, Richard Francis, 440, 441 Burundi, 216–217 and war in Congo, 310 See also Hutu; Tutsi Burundi: The Tragic Years, 216 Busch, Germán, 352 Bush medicine, 141–142 Bush, George H. W., 123

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Bush, George W. Global AIDS Relief package, 869 and Global Gag Rule, 944 on Niger and Iraq, 822 and Senegal, 978 visit to the Gambia, 498 and Yamamoto, 370 Bushmen, 356–357, 432. See also Khoisan Busia, Kofi, 519, 520 Bussa, 769 Bustamante, Alexander, 640 Bustamante, Lady. See Longbridge, Gladys Buthelezi, Manas, 691 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu, 1025 Butler, Octavia, 72 Butler, Pierce, 515 Butler, Tubal Uriah “Buzz,” 1071 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 1138 Bynoe, Yvonne, 571 Caboceer, Cudjoe, 912 Cabot, John and Sebastian, 901–902 Cabral, Amilcar, 219–220, 233–234, 344, 897 and socialism, 1013, 1015 Cabral, Cristina Rodríguez, 220–221 Cabral, Elemo, 220, 1098 Cabral, Luís, 540 Cabral, Sacadura, 139 Cabrera, Lydia, 320 Cacao, 89, 302 and fair trade, 1062, 1064 and plantations, 885 São Tomé, 970–971 and Spanish Empire, 1028 and Yoruba, 1156 Cachaça, Carlos, 191–192 Cadle, C. Ernest, 356–357 Cadmium, 310 Caesar, Imruh Bakari, 251 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 255–256 Caillié, René August, 441 Cairns Group, 1142 Cairo, 408 population figures, 1101, 1102 Cakewalk, 611–612

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1171

Calabar, 221–223, 403, 404 Calabar, 680 Call-and-response format, 647, 789, 1098–1099 Callaghan, Jeremiah, 498 Calle 54, 843 Callender, James T., 495 Calling the West Indies, 153 Calloway, Cab, 153, 1121 Calloway, James Nathan, 1061 Calypso, 30, 223–225, 792 Trinidad and Tobago, 1071 Cam, Diogo, 673 Camara, Papa Ladji, 536, 538 Camara, Sekouba, 536–537 Cambridge, 883–884 Cameron, Edward, 498 Cameron, James, 1060 Cameroon, 225–228 and HIV prevention, 576, 579 and sexual diversity, 508–509 and soccer, 1010–1011 Caminha, Aldolfo, 680 Camp David Treaty of 1979, 407 Camp de Thiaroye, 470, 853 Campanella, Roy, 741, 953 Campbell, Daphne, 643 Campbell, Luther, 566 Campbell, Mary A., 67 Campbell, Ron, 869 Campbell, S. J., 67 Campbell, Tunis G., 515 Campos, Jorge, 1011 Campos, Pedro, 149 Camus, Marcel, 33, 477–478 Canada Africadian culture, 228–230 as Dominion, 203–204 Canals, 22 Canary Islands, 1028 The Cancer Journals, 709 Les Cancrelats, 1045 Candombe dance and music, 1099 Candomblé, 16, 194, 231, 526, 1099 and flying Africans, 480 Cane, 553, 1061, 1062 Cannon, Katie, 691

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1172 INDEX Canossian sisters, 145 Cantos populares de mi tierra, 680 Cão, Diego, 800 Capac, Huayna, 302 Cape Coast Castle, 231–233, 232, 992 museum, 785 as World Heritage site, 994 See also Company of Merchants Trading to Africa Cape Town, 1102 Cape Verde, 233–234 Capitalism and Slavery, 614, 1071 Capoeira, 13, 29, 194, 569 Caporal dance, 184 Carabalí. See Abakuá Caracas, 265, 1104 Cardoso, Hamilton, 780 CARE (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe), 588, 589 Caribbean and Ananse, 101–102, 965 life expectancy and death rates of people of African descent, 364 population of people of black African descent, 6 slavery memorials, 769 See also Code Noir Caribbean Artists Movement, 154, 234–235, 776 The Caribbean Artists Movement, 235 Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM), 235–237, 965, 1123 Caribbean Discourse, 240, 525 Caribbean Free Trade Area (CARIFTA), 1122–1123 Caribbean Free Trade Associaton (CARIFTA), 236 Caribbean League, 246 Caribbean literature, 237–241 Anglophone, 238–239 Dutch, 240

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Francophone, 239–240 Hispanophone, 240 Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), 236 Caribbean Voices, 735, 736 Caribs, 900 Antigua and Barbuda, 111–112 Barbados, 149 and European diseases, 302 Martinique, 486 Saint Kitts and Nevis, 963 Sambola as, 820 Carleton, Guy, 98, 178 Carlisle, Una Mae, 1121 Carlota, 319 Carlyle, Thomas, 772 Carmen Jones, 475 Carmichael, Stokely, 175, 832, 904 and SNCC, 1033, 1034 Carnets d’Amérique, 698 Carnival, 14 Latin American, 241–242 Caroling Dusk, 553 Carpentier, Alejo, 240 La Carreta, 240 Carretta, Vincent, 424 Carrington, Vernon, 921 Cartagena, 287, 288 Carter, Gilbert, 498 Carter, Jimmy, 217, 252, 960, 960 denunciation of Amin, 1088 Carter, Martin, 333 Cartier, Jacques, 486 Cartola, 191–192 Carver, George Washington, 242–243, 242 and Tuskegee Institute, 1080, 1116 Carvings, 130–131, 131 Cary, Joyce, 47 Casablanca, 1102 Casablanca, 49, 775 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 243–244, 303, 375, 510, 902, 1029 and liberation theology, 688 on slavery, 546, 750 “The Case for Black Reparations,” 933

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“Case History, Jamaica,” 776 Cassava, 399 Castas paintings, 244–246, 245 Castellanos, Victoriano, 91 Castillo, Andrés, 1098 Castle, John, 1117–1118 Castlereagh, Lord, 45 Castro, Daisy “Baby Love,” 569 Castro Ruz, Fidel, 246–249, 247, 1031 and CIA, 254 on Congo, 283 and Cruz, 317 and Cuban Revolution, 320 stay in Harlem, 285 and use of rural terrain in revolution, 619 visit to Tanzania, 1042 Castro Ruz, Raul, 247 Catch a Fire, 730 Catching a Wave, 460 Catholic Monarchs. See Fernando, King of Spain; Isabel, Queen of Spain Catholic Relief Services (CRS), 156 Catholic University of Chile, 624 Catholicism, 16, 249–251 and African Americans, 263 decline in Latin America, 17 The Causes of Conflict and the Promotion of Durable Peace and Sustainable Development in Africa, 107 Cecilia, 33, 473 Ceddo, 251 Cédra, Raoul, 123 Celestial Church of Christ, 927–928 Central Africa: Naked Truths of Naked People, 1087 Central African Republic, 251–253 and U.S. aid, 625 Central America. See America, Central

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INDEX Central American Federation, 90 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 253–255 Centro Cultural por La Paz y la Integración, 969 Centros de Belén de Zárraga, 454 Ces voix qui m’assiègent, 368 Césaire, Aimé, 62, 239, 255–257, 259, 696, 701, 744 and anticolonialism, 897 and négritude, 255–256, 809–810, 980 and noirisme, 832 and Price-Mars, 904 on Tchicaya, 1045 Césaire, Suzanne, 239 Cespedes, Carlos Manuel de, 318 C’est le soleil qui m’a brulée, 227 Cetshwayo, King of Zululand, 203 Cha-cha-chá, 30, 321, 323, 324–325 Chad, 257–258 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 and U.S. aid, 625 Chagas disease, 560–561 Chaillé-Long, Charles, 1087 Chain of Being, 418 Chamberlain, Joseph, 662 Chamblain, Louis-Jodel, 123–124 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 240, 258–259 Champlain Samuel de, 486 Chan Chan, 1100 Chanchada, 477 Chaney, James, 270, 271 Change Up, 474 Chantwells, 224 Chapman, Tracy, 340 Charismatic Movement, 17 Charles I, King of England, 746 Charles V, King of Spain, 243, 902, 1028–1029 Charleston (dance), 1119 Charlotte (North Carolina) desegregation, 268

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Charol, Rey, 1099 Charry, Eric, 540 “Charter for Colonial Freedom,” 683 “Charter for Coloured Peoples,” 683 Chase-Riboud, Barbara, 211, 769 Chatelain, Héli, 105 Chauvet, Marie, 239 Chávez, Hugo, 353, 1012 Cheek, Landon N., 720 Cheney-Coker, Syl, 677 Cherokee, and Trail of Tears, 511 Cherry, Don, 649 Chesimard, JoAnne. See Shakur, Assatta Chicago, University of, 624 Chicago Historical Society, 784 Chico Rei, 478 Chikaba (Venerable Therese Juliana of Saint Dominic), 259–261 Chikane, Frank, 691 Chikly, Chemama, 466 Child, Lydia, 637 Children of Babylon, 471 Chile, 261–262 and CIA, 254 first woman president, 354 and IMF, 626, 627 and suppression of rebels, 619 truth and reconciliation commission, 1073 Chilembwe, John, 720 Chili peppers, 302 Chiluba, Frederick, 666 Chimurenga of 1896–1897, 1159–1160 China, and Black Panther Party, 174 Chock Full o’ Nuts, 953–954 Chocolate Kiddies, 1119, 1120 Cholera, 398–399, 557, 1141 The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, 733–734 Choteau, Alphonse Paul Albert, 739 Christian and Missionary Alliance, 214

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1173

Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, 301. See also Colored Methodist Episcopal Church Christianity and Africa, 16–17, 249–250, 925–926, 927–928, 929, 931 African American, 262–263 Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 629 Christmas Kindness, 7 Christmas Rebellion (Jamaica), 639 Christophe, Henri Christophe, Henri, 64, 263–264, 548 and fermage, 946 and Haitian independence, 547 and Pétion, 263–264, 881–882 Chronicles of a Hostile Sun, 186 Church: Charisma and Power, 688 A Church for the Next Millenium, 689 Church Missionary Society, 1128 Churchill, Winston, 498, 743 and Atlantic Charter, 584 Chy Lung v. Freeman, 605 CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) and Africa, 254 and Angola, 254–255 and Castro, 254 and Chile, 254 and Congo, 254, 285, 311 and Guatemala, 253–254 and Lumumba, 285, 311, 312, 313 and Zaire, 254, 255 Ciboney tribe, 318 Cidade de Deus, 33, 478 Cien cárceles de amor, 195, 196 CIMMYT. See International Center for Wheat and Maize Improvement Cinque, Joseph, 99, 318, 999 Cities, 264–267

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1174 INDEX Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 932 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 165–166 Civil Rights Movement, 267–272, 268 and Black Panther Party, 171 and Black Power Movement, 175 Colombia, 288–289 and Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 301 and Jackie Robinson, 952, 954 and M. Anderson, 170 and Robeson, 170 See also King, Martin Luther Jr.; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Niagara movement; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Civil War, American, 272–274, 273 and Bahamas, 142–143 and Delany, 346 reasons for, 1003, 1006 Claire solange, 239 Clapham Sect, 45, 1128 Clark, J. P., 827, 846 Clark, John, 1133 Clark, Mark, 174 Clark, Reed Paige, 105 Clarke, George Elliott, 228, 229, 230 Clarke, Reuban, and Clarke Memorandum, 528 Clarkson, John, 836 Clarkson, Thomas, 64, 68, 1128, 1138 Cleaver, Eldridge, 173–174, 173, 175 Cleaver, Kathleen, 173, 174 Clemente Walker, Roberto, 274–276 Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, 406

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Cliff, Jimmy, 729, 923 Cliff, Michelle, 239, 276–277 Climbié, 332–333 Clinton, Bill, 32 on Burundi, 216–217 and Haiti, 123 speech on slave trade at Gorée Island, 932 visit to Senegal, 978 Clinton Doctrine, 870 Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, 1000–1001 Cobalt, 310 Cobbett, William, 1129 Coca-Cola, 836 Cocaine, 183–184 Cochrane, Alexander, 837 Cochrane, Kelso, 657 Cockerill, Walter B., 720 Cocoa. See Cacao Code Noir, 277–279, 547 Coelancanth, 305 Coetzee, John Maxwell, 47, 279–282, 279 Coffee, 76, 282, 302, 976 and Columbian Exchange, 399 and demand for slaves, 1005 and fair trade, 1062, 1063, 1064, 1065 Jamaica, 638 origin in Africa, 951 and plantations, 885 São Tomé, 970–971 Uganda, 1087 and USAID, 1106 COFO. See Council of Federated Organizations COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), 174 Coker, Daniel, 66, 67 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 277 Cold War, 282–286 and Africa, 761–762 and Comoros, 304 and human rights, 586 and insurgencies, 621–622 and Latin America, 761 and Mozambique, 781 and U.S. interventions in Africa and Latin America, 871–872

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See also Non-Aligned Movement The Coldest Winter Ever, 571 Cole, Vinson, 171 Coleman, Ornette, 649 Coles, Louis “Kid,” 612 Collins, Iris Rhudella, 643 Colombia, 286–289 and Carnival, 241 insurgencies, 621–622 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 Colón, Willie, 318 Colonial armies in Africa, 290–293 Colonialism, 293–300 and reparations, 932–938 “Colonization in Reverse,” 157 Colonization schemes and Barbados, 150 Birchtown (Birch Town), Nova Scotia, 165 Central America, 91 See also American Colonization Society; Black Star Line; Cuffe, Captain Paul; Garvey, Marcus; Liberia The Color Purple, 702, 1114 Colored Farmers National Alliance, 300 A Colored Man Round the World, 1068 Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 300–301. See also African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church; Christian Methodist Episcopal Church The Colored Museum, 32 Coltan, 310 Coltrane, John, 649 Columbia music, 321, 323 Columbian Exchange, 20–22, 74, 301–303, 526, 902, 951 Columbus, Christopher, 303–304, 1027 and Bahamas, 142 and black sailors, 601 and Cuba, 318 and Hispaniola, 372

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INDEX and Niño, 678 and Trinidad and Tobago, 1070 See also Columbian Exchange; PreColumbian America Comes the Voyager at Last, 697 Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), 1065, 1066 Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, 199 Communaute Financiere Africaine (CFA) Franc Zone, 1065, 1066 Communism and C. Jones, 657 and Du Bois, 384 Community Mosque of Atlanta, 632 Comoros, 304–305 Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique, 486 Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, 305–306. See also Cape Coast Castle; Royal African Company Compendia de la vida ejemplar de la Venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo, 260–261 Compromise of 1850, 272, 491 Conakry, 266 Conde, Mamoudou, 539 Condé, Maryse, 240, 306–308, 696 Cone, James, 689, 690 Confédération Africaine de Football (CAF), 1010 Confederation of North and Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF), 1010 Conference of Negro Writers and Artists (1956), 367 The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1135 Confiant, Raphael, 240, 259

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Congo and Black Panther Party, 174 and Bunche, 209 and CIA, 254, 285 and Cold War, 283, 284–285 crisis of 1960, 313 and Cuba, 283, 285 and diamonds, 358 War (1998–present), 309–310 and western powers, 157–158 and Zimbabwe, 1161 Congo (Brazzaville), 308–309 Congo (Kinshasa), Democratic Republic of, 309–312 Congo jazz, 890 Congo music, 93 Congo River, 158, 202, 295, 442 Congo Square (New Orleans), 378, 648, 1110 Congolese independence, 312–313 Congregational Church, 96 Congress of Black Writers and Artists (1956), 977–978 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 270–271 Conrad, Joseph, 47, 440 Constab Ballads, 743 Consultive Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), 1140 Conte, Lansana, 539 Contras, 819–820 Conventillo, 1099 Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 940 Convention on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism, 1054–1055 Convention Peoples’ Party (CPP), 516, 519, 797 Conyers, John, 934, 937

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1175

Conze, Jean-Baptiste, 878 Cook, Samuel, 725 Cook, Will Marion, 610, 650 Cooper, Carolyn, 1008 Cooper, Patrick Ashley, 720, 1157 Copper, 19, 23 and Congo, 310 and Zambia, 1157 and Zimbabwe, 1159 Le Corbusier, 117 Cordeaux, E. S., 1087 CORE. See Congress of Racial Equality Corfield, Richard, 1016 Corn, 19, 73, 74, 302 Bt corn, 163, 164 and Columbian Exchange, 399 hybrid, 76 and leaf blight, 24, 76 and Yoruba, 1156 See also Green Revolution Cornut-Gentille, Bernard, 534 Coronado, Francisco de, 901 Cortázar, Octavio, 473 Cortés, Hernán, 302, 750, 899, 901, 1028 Cortes, Hernando, 601–602, 678 Cosas que pasan en el Piru, año de 1598, 954–955 Cosell, Howard, 85 The Cosmopolitan, 643 Cost of Living Movement, 456 Costa, Haroldo, 478 Costa, Lucio, 117 Costes, Dieudonne, 139 Côte d’Ivoire, 313–314 and HIV prevention, 575 and U.S. aid, 625 Cotheal, Alexander I., 1016 Cotton, 75, 614, 976, 1001 and African cultivation experience, 1047 Bt cotton, 163, 164 and Columbian Exchange, 398, 399 and demand for slaves, 1005 and fair trade, 1063–1064 and plantations, 886 Uganda, 1087

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1176 INDEX Cotton Club, 1121 Cotton Comes to Harlem, 475–476 Cotton gin, 1001 Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), 271 Count Basie Band, 153 Country music, 30 Countryman, 471 Counts, Dorothy Geraldine, 268 Courbon, Charles de, 277 Coutinho, Gago, 139 Coutts, Walter Fleming, 1087 Couvade, 102 Covey, James, 99 Cox, Harvey, 877 Coyotes, defined, 88 Craft, William and Ellen, 198 Craft networks, 1046 Crafts, Hannah, 503 La Creation du monde, 650 Creole Revolt, 314–315 Creole/criollo, 315–316, 917 and Netherlands Antilles, 817 and Nicaragua, 820–821 Price-Mars on, 904 Senegal, 988, 989 See also Castas paintings; Mixed-race persons; Transculturation Creolistes, 240 Créolité, 257, 258–259, 525. See also Transculturation Crile, George, 668 The Crisis, 316–317, 383, 553, 818, 1069 and ads for African American Pageants, 856 and Fauset, 447–448 Crisis Corps, 869 Crispe, Thomas, 465 Crispi, Francesco, 425 Crops, and Columbian Exchange, 302 Crosby, Elisha O., 91 Crossing the River, 884 Crowder, Baba Robert, 538 Cruz, Celia, 317–318, 317 Crying in the Wilderness, 691 Cuba, 318–321 and Africa, 283, 284

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and African independence movements, 344 aid to revolutionary movements, 1055 and Algeria, 283, 286 and Angola, 105–106, 248, 255, 283–284, 344–345, 622, 801–802, 1013–1014 and Black Panther Party, 173 and Carnival, 241, 242 and Congo, 283, 285 and Ethiopia, 248, 1012 and Haiti, 392 and immigration to U.S., 606, 609 and Non-Aligned Movement, 833 sponsorship of terrorist organizations, 1056 support of other revolutionaries, 622 See also Castro Ruz, Fidel; Martí, José Cuban Academy of Sciences, 150 Cuban Communist Party, 319–320 Cuban Missile Crisis, 248 Cuban music, 13, 30 influence on African pop music, 794 See also Brouwer, Leo Cuban music, African influence in, 321–325 cha-cha-chá, 324–325 columbia, 323 Latin jazz, 323–324 mambo, 324 Rumba, 322–323 son, 322 yambú, 323 Cuban Revolution, 352, 1012 and Guillén, 532, 533 and rumba, 323 See also Castro Ruz, Fidel Cuban ritual music, African influence in, 325–328 and Abakuá music, 327–328 and Bantu-Congo music, 326–327 and Yoruba, 325–326

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“Cubop City,” 153 Cudjoe, 328–329 Cuffay, William, 197 Cuffe, Captain Paul, 61, 64, 329–330, 329, 961, 1048 Cugoano, Ottobah, 532, 1068 Cullen, Countee, 316, 506, 553 Cultural pluralism, 108 Culture constant mutability, 12–13 framing principles, 11 immanent transcendence, 14 inevitable determination, 13–14 mutual influence of African and Western, 29–35 See also Black Athena Cumbia, 29 Curaçao, 386, 387, 388–389, 816 Kura Hulanda Museum, 785 Curatteau, Jean-Baptiste, 534 Cush Kingdom, 330 Cuttington University, 694–695 Cuzco, 1100, 1101, 1102 Cyclops, 794, 891 Cyril Blake’s Band, 153 Da Gama, Vasco, 948 Daaga, Makandal, 1072 Daar, Aden Abdullah Osman, 1016 Dabydeen, David, 331–332 Dacko, David, 252, 253 Daddy Says, 986 Dadié, Bernard Binlin, 332–333 D’Aguiar, Fred, 235, 333–334 Dahomey, 155, 489 Dakar, 265 Dalby, Thomas, 465 Damaras, 800 Damas, Léon. See Gontran-Damas, Léon Dan Fodio, Uthman, 52, 61, 334–335, 554–555, 1015 Dance, 29

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INDEX influence of African forms in Americas, 537 Dance Africa, 538 A Dance of the Forests, 1027 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 335–336 Daniel and the Lion’s Den, 1041 Danish Empire, 336–338 Danquah, Joseph, 518 Danticat, Edwidge, 239, 338–340 Danzón, 30, 320, 322 Dar es Salaam, 266 Dar ul-Islam Movement, 631, 632 Darfur genocide, 50, 434, 510, 512, 870, 873, 874 and humanitarian assistance, 589 Powell on, 514 See also Sudan: Darfur region Dark Town Strutters, 651, 793, 890 Darro, Iko, 63 Darwin, Charles, 434, 772, 916 Darwish, Sayed, 408 Dash, Julie, 340, 469, 476 Daughters, 734 Daughters of the Dust, 340, 469, 476 Davis, Angela, 176, 461 Davis, Chuck, 538 Davis, Dixy and Richard, 612 Davis, Miles, 649 Davis, Ossie, 32, 475–476 Dawes Act of 1871, 433 Dawud, Talib A., 632 Day, Leon, 813 “The Day My Father Died,” 776 De cierta manera, 473 De Gaulle, Charles, 534 De Graft, Joe, 101 De Klerk, F. W., 727, 935, 1025–1026, 1085 De La Soul, 571 De Soto, Hernando, 901 Deal, Melvin, 538 Dean, Dizzy, 858 Dean, Dora, 612

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Death, 103 Death of Cleopatra, 686, 687 Debrot, Cola, 240 Debt cancellation, 340–343 The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, 936 Deby, Idriss, 349 December 20 Movement, 1056 La decisión, 473 Declaration of Sentiments, 458 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 711 Decline of the West, 681 Decolonization, African, 343–345 DeJarnette, Edmund T., 106 Delaney, Emma B., 720 Delany, Martin Robinson, 274, 345–346, 346, 822, 1048 Delany, Samuel R., 72 DeLay, Tom, 932 Delgado, Eric, 474 Deming, Olcott Hawthorne, 1088 Democracy African, 347–351 Latin American, 351–356 Denham, Edward, 498 Denis, Lorimer, 831 Dennis Bovell Dub Band, 656 Denver Africa Expedition, 356–357 The Department of State, 215 Depestre, René, 239 Le dernier survivant de la caravane, 529 Derrick, Henry, 409 “Des Cannibales,” 768 El desalojo de la calle de los negros, 969 Desertification, 62 Dessalines, Jean Jacques, 357–358, 357, 487, 711, 881 and Christophe, 263, 264 execution of whites, 830–831 and fermage, 946 and Haitian independence, 547

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1177

and influence of Bahia slave uprisings, 628 Desvarieux, Jacob, 794, 891 Detroit Institute of Arts, 215 The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, 187 Devil on the Cross, 1059 Le devoir de violence, 697 Devore, Irven, 668 Dew, Thomas Roderick, 1003 Dewey, John, 108 Diabate, Toumani, 794, 891 Diallo, Boubacar Telli, 535 Diallo, Yaya, 540 Diamonds, 358–360 Botswana, 358 Brazil, 358 conflict diamonds, 358, 359–360 Congo, 310, 312 and funding of revolutionary groups, 623 Namibia, 358 panning for, 359 Sierra Leone, 358, 359 South Africa, 21, 358 Diarrhea, 561 Diaspora, 360–362 demography of, 362–365 Díaz, Junot, 240 Díaz, Luis “Terror,” 375 Dibango, Manu, 63, 227, 652, 792, 793, 890, 924 Dickens, Charles, 772 Dicker, Rory, 460, 461 Diego Garcia, 717, 718, 740–741 Diego Maradona, Armando, 1010 Diegues, Carlos, 469–470, 478 The Dilemma of a Ghost, 80 DiMaggio, Joe, 858 Dinar, Ali, 1035 Dingiswayo, 54–55 Dinka, 366 Dinkins, David, 210 Diop, Alioune, 697, 977–978 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 366–368 Diori, Hamani, 822 Diouf, Abdou, 978

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1178 INDEX A Diplomacy of the Oppressed, 464 Dirty Pretty Things, 469 “Discours sur le colonialisme,” 256 Diseases, 302. See also Cholera; HIV/AIDS; Malaria Disgrace, 279, 281 A Distant Shore, 884 Ditcher, Jack, 496 Dixieland jazz, 648, 651 in Africa, 793, 890 DJ Kool Herc, 564 Djebar, Assia, 368–369 Djembe drum, 535, 536, 538–539 Djibouti, 370–371 DJs, 565 Do You See What I See?, 471 Doby, Larry, 813, 858 Doctors Without Borders. See Médecins Sans Frontières Dodd, Clement “Sir Coxone,” 730 Dodge, Ralph Edward, 105 Doe, Samuel K., 371–372, 371, 693, 1044 Dogo, Henri, 400 Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation, 689 Dolphyne, Florence Abena, 451 Dominican order, 243 Dominican Republic, 372–375 and Douglass, 377 and Haiti, 374, 1022 U.S. Marine presence in, 766 Dominican sisters, 260 Dongala, Emmanual Boundzeki, 375–376 Dorr, David, 1068 Dorsey, Jimmy, 648 Dorsey, Tommy, 648 Doudouisme, 238 Douglas, Aaron, 316 Douglas, B. V., 216 Douglas, Louis, 1121 Douglass, Frederick, 31, 40, 198, 272, 376–377

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and evasion of capture, 484 house as location of Museum of African Art, 1009 The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 1068 My Bondage and My Freedom, 437t The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 996 and women’s suffrage, 459 Douglass, Kelly Brown, 690, 691 Dowie, John Alexander, 876 Down These Mean Streets, 474, 907 Drake, Bernard, 534 Drake, Edwin, 844 Drake, Francis, 200, 534 Drama African American, 378–381 See also Hansberry, Lorraine; Hughes, Langston; Nigeria: drama in; Pageant, The African American Drayton, Thaddeus, 612 Dred Scott v. Sanford, 272, 381–382, 381 The Drinking Gourd, 379, 380, 550, 551–552 Drug trafficking, 124–125 Du Bois, W. E. B., 31, 108, 382–385, 382 on African American Pageant, 855 and Africana, 113 and B. T. Washington, 383, 818, 1116–1117 on color line, 583 compared with Fanon, 445 and concept of “Africanisms,” 445 and The Crisis, 316, 383, 553, 818, 1069 and “double consciousness,” 133, 917 and drama, 378, 379 and Garvey, 501

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and Harlem Renaissance, 553 influence on African liberationists, 344 and Judaism, 663 and literature, 696, 700 and Marxism, 701 on McKay, 744 and Moody, 771 as Moses, 438 and Pan-Africanism, 62, 69, 382, 862, 1131, 1132 The Souls of Black Folk, 382–383, 553, 818, 1116–1117, 1131 Du Chaillu, Paul Belloni, 493 Duarte, Juan Pablo, 373 Dub poetry, 655–656, 777 Dube, Ermelo “Lucky,” 923 Dugdale, William, 1118 Dumont, Donald Albert, 216 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 438 Dunbar, Sly, 793, 890, 924 Duncan, Sara J., 67 Dundas, Charles C. F., 1087 Dunham, Katherine, 29, 537, 538, 978, 1069 Dunmore, John Murray, Earl of, 96–97 proclamation, 96, 97 Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, 97, 98 Duquesne, Fritz, 356 Durban, 1102 Dusklands, 280 Dust Tracks on a Road, 594, 595 Dutch East India Company, 385 Dutch Empire, 385–390 Dutch West India Company, 385, 386 and Elmina castle, 992 and Pernambuco, 388 and slave trade, 815–816 Dutty, Boukman, 390–391, 711 Duvalier, François “Papa Doc,” 352, 391–393, 391 allowance for workers sent to Dominican Republic, 946

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INDEX and noirisme, 391, 831, 832 and Price-Mars, 904 and Voodoo, 1111 Duvalier, Jean-Claude (Baby Doc), 122, 352, 393–394 and Voodoo, 1111 Duvalier, Marie-Denise, 393 Dye, William, 409 Eakins, Thomas, 1041 Earth Liberation Front, 1052–1053, 1054, 1058 Earth Summit (1992), 421 East African Expeditionary Force, 216 East St. Louis (Illinois) race riot, 501 Eastman, Max, 743 Ebonics, 415, 416 Ebony, 395–397, 395 Eboué, Adolphe Félix Sylvestre, 258 Ecology, 397–400 ECOMOG, 63 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), 400–401, 871, 1065, 1066 Economic Community of West African States Cease-fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), 401, 989 Economic Organization of West African States, 63 Ecuador, 401–403 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 Edwards, Al, 663 Edwards, Charles, 921 Efik, 221–222, 403–404. See also Abakuá Efuru, 838–839 Efut. See Abakuá Egypt, 404–409 and agriculture, 73–74 American mercenaries in, 409–410 ancient, and hair, 545 British control and influence, 202, 204

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culture, 407–408 and Diop, 366–367 Douglass on, 376–377 ethnic and religious groups, 407 geography, 404–405 history, 405–406 independence, 204 and Israel, 960 modern politics, 406–407 and Non-Aligned Movement, 833 Revolution of 1952, 406–407 and soccer, 1010 and Somalia, 1016 war with Ethiopia (1875–1884), 409–410 See also ‘Ali Pasha, Muhammad; Black Athena; Cush Kingdom; Mamluk Beys Egypt 80 (band), 107 Egyptian soldiers in Mexico, 410–411 Ehui, Frederic Desire, 794, 891 The Einstein Intersection, 72 Eisenhower, Dwight, 267–268, 269 and assassination of Lumumba, 311 and international international aid, 624 and Refugee Relief Act of 1953, 607 and UN human rights policy, 586 Ekpo, Margaret, 404 Ekuikui, King of Agnola region, 763–764 Ekwensi, Cyprian Odiatu Duaka, 411–412 El Salvador, truth and reconciliation commission, 1072, 1074 Elaw, Zilpha, 198 Elephantiasis, 561 “The Eleventh Hour of Nordicism,” 110–111 Eliot, T. S., 154 Elizondo, Virgilio, 689

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1179

Ellington, Duke, 648–649, 978, 1119 Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 31, 412–413, 412 Elmina slave castle, 232, 385, 386, 785, 992 and Dutch, 815–816 as World Heritage site, 994 Emancipation Act of 1833 (Britain), 40 Emancipation Proclamation, 41, 95, 273, 413–414, 413 and black soldiers, 1095 and Juneteenth, 663 Emancipation Statue (Barbados), 769 Emecheta, Buchi, 63, 414–415, 451, 839 Emedy, Joseph, 196–197 Emergency Relief Desk, 590 The Emigrants, 1069 Los empeños de una casa, 659 The Emperor Jones, 380, 475 Empire and Commonwealth Museum (Bristol), 784, 785 Empire Windrush, 199 Empson, William, 154 En la Lucha, 690 Encomienda, 1028 Engerman, Stanley, 1001–1002 English, African American vernacular, 166, 415–416 Enlightenment philosophy, 416–419 Ennis, Merlin W., 105 Enriquillo, 375 Ensor, Robert, 314 Environmentalism, 419–421 Epitomé, 1045–1046 Equatorial Guinea, 421–423 Equiano, Olaudah, 196–197, 331–332, 423–424, 423, 532, 696, 697 description of his capture, 759 as Igbo descendant, 598 The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, 423–424, 423, 697, 996, 1068

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1180 INDEX Equiano (continued) as sailor, 961 view on race, 916 Ercilla y Zúniga, Alonso de, 678 Ericsson, Leif, 901 Eritrea, 424–427 and Cold War, 284 war of independence, 621 L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse, 259 Esparragoza, María Eugenia, 474–475 Essais, 767–768 Essou, Jean Serge, 793 Estenoz, Evaristo, 319 Estes, Simon, 171 Estes, Thomas Stuart, 215 Estevanico, 750 Estimé, Dumarsais, 391, 904 Ethiopia, 427–430 and Cold War, 284 and Cuba, 248, 1012 ethnic and religious groups, 427 Falasha (Beta Israel), 443–444 famines and humanitarian assistance, 589, 590 and HIV prevention, 579 invasion by Italy, 682, 685 and socialism, 1012 as uncolonized country, 692, 1102 and U.S. aid, 625 war with Egypt (1875–1884), 409–410 See also Eritrea Ethiopia at the Bar of Justice, 857 Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 428 Ethiopianism, 640 and Rastafari movement, 919 Ethnicity, 430–434 Ethnocentrism, 433 L’Étudiant noir, 239, 256, 697 Evans, Sara, 462 Evans, Thomas, 1117 Evers, Medgar, 270 Every Child is Born a Poet, 474 Evolution, human, 434–436 The Exile, 475 Exodus, 436–439 www.abc-clio.com

Exploration and explorers, Africa, 56, 439–442 and Gabon, 493 and Sahara Desert, 442 Exxon Oil, 389 Eyadéma, Gnassingé (Étienne), 1061 Eyamba V, King of Duke Town, 222 Eyes of the Rainbow, 983 Eyo Honesty II, King of Creek Town, 222 Eyre, Banning, 726 Eyre, Edward John, 772 Faasege, Bala, 482–483 Faat Kine, 853 Fabara, Sandra “Lady Pink,” 570 Facely, Kante, 536 Faidherbe, Louis, 291 Faílde, Miguel, 322 Fair trade. See Trade, fair Fair Trade Certified, 1064 Fair Trade Federation, 1064 Faisal, Daoud, 631–632 Fakoly, Tiken Jah, 794, 891, 923 Falasha (Beta Israel), 443–444, 661 Family planning. See Reproductive health and family planning in Africa, U.S. influence on The Famished Road, 847 Fania All Stars, 317–318 Fanon, Frantz, 83, 444–445, 444, 978 and anticolonialism, 897 and Césaire, 255 and “combat breath,” 985 as Igbo descendant, 598 influence on Black Panther Party, 171–172 Fante, 465 Farafina, 215, 539 Fard, Wallace, 803–805 Farewell to Innocence, 691 Faris, Ellsworth, 1087 Farmer-Paellmann, Deadria, 936 The Farming of Bones, 339 Farouk I, King of Egypt, 959 ABC-CLIO

Farrakhan, Louis, 446–447, 446, 806–807 and W. D. Mohammad, 765, 806–807 Faruq, King of Egypt, 406 Fatala, 539 Fatiman, Cécile, 390 Fatta, Maghan Kon, 482 Faubus, Orval, 269 Fauset, Arthur Huff, 110, 228 Fauset, Jessie, 110, 316, 447–448 Favaneva, 1061 Favelas, 189, 194 Fazenda, 119 FBI African offices, 978 and Chaney-GoodmanSchwerner murders, 271 Febre, Mayra Santos, 240 Fédon, Julien, 448–449 Fédeon Rebellion, 448–449 Feeding the Ghosts, 334 Feijoada, 194 Fela. See Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela Feller, Bob, 858 Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail, 207 Feminine Amnesty Movement, 456 The Feminine Mystique, 459, 460 Feminism and women’s equality movements African, 449–453 transatlantic, 453–457 U.S., 457–465 Femmes échouées, 1115 Fences, 32 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 90 Fernández, Leonel, 374 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 752 Fernando, King of Spain, 303 Fernando Ortiz Foundation, 150 Fernando Póo, 421, 494 Ferré, Rosario, 240 Ferrer, Fran, 474 Ferreyra, José Agustín, 33, 474 Fetishism, 925 1-800-368-6868

INDEX Fetu of Cape Coast, 232, 465–466 Fez (city), 1101 Fields, Arabella, 612 Figari, Pedro, 1099 Figueroa, John, 154 Film, 32–33 Africa, 466–468 Atlantic, 468–470 Brazil, 477–478 Canada, 476 Caribbean, 470–472 Central America, 474 Cuba, 473 Dominican Republic, 474 French Guiana, 478–479 Guyana, 478–479 Latin America, 472–475 Mexico, 474 North America, 475–477 Puerto Rico, 474 South America, 474–475, 477–479 Surinam, 478–479 United States, 475–476 The Final Passage, 883 Finlayson, James, 1133 Finley, Robert, 66 Fire from Heaven, 877 The Fire Next Time, 697 Fire on the Water, 228, 229 First Cleveland Mosque, 630–631 First Pan-African Cultural Festival, 173 First Paulista Women’s Congress, 456 Fischer, Eugen, 110 The Fisher King, 734–735 Fisheries, 22, 26 Fishing, 1046 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 198 Fitzgerald, Ella, 153 Five Percent Nation, 479 The Flame of the Soul, 251 The Flame Trees of Thika, 668 Flegler, Samuel, 67 Flemming, Herb, 1121 Flowers and Shadows, 847 Flying Africans, 479–482 Fodeba, Keita, 535–536, 539 Foerster, Werner, 983 Fogel, Robert, 1001–1002 Folk-Tales of Angola, 105 Folklore, African, 482–485 www.abc-clio.com

Foote, William, 611 For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf, 984–985, 986 “For the Brothers That Ain’t Here,” 571 Ford, Henry, and Ford Motor Company, 24 Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (U.S.), 1105 Foreman, George, 86, 318 A Forest of Flowers, 971 Forestry, 420 Forever Free, 686, 687 Forman, James, 932–933 Forster, Claude Henry, 216 Fortuna, Xiomara, 375 Fossey, Dian, 956 Foster, Rube, 812 Foster, W. F., 1080 Foster Parents Plan International, 215 Foucault, Michel, 897 Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA), 756 Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 148 Four the Moment, 229 The Fourth Century, 525 Fousset, Louis Jacques, 725 Fowler, Bud, 811 Fox, George, 911 Foxtrot, 1119 Fragments, 101 France African colonial policy, 297 and colonial armies, 290, 291 and Comoros, 304 and Congo, 308, 311 and Côte d’Ivoire, 313 and Mozambique, 781 and postwar retention of colonies, 343 Franco, Francisco, 139, 1032 Franco, Ramón, 139 François, Jean, 711 Frears, Stephen, 469 Frederick, J. R., 67 Free blacks and Colombia, 287 in English colonies and early U.S., 603–604 ABC-CLIO

1181

Free Enterprise, 276, 277 Free jazz, 649–650 Free Methodist Church of North America, 216 Freedmen’s Bureau, 95 and Gullahs, 542 Freedom, 550 Freedom from Hunger, 756 Freedom National Bank, 954 Freedom Rides and Riders, 270–271, 1033 Freedom Summer, 1033 Freeman, Thomas Birch, 197 French Empire, 485–490 French Foreign Legion, 370 French Somaliland. See Djibouti French-Sheldon, May, 462 Frere, Henry Bartle, 203 Friedan, Betty, 459, 460 Friedman, Herbert, 668 Frobenius, Leo, 681 Frobisher, Martin, 534 From Mento to Lovers Rock, 656 Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), 781 Fuad, King of Egypt, 406 Fuentes, Carlos, 897 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 272, 490–491, 491, 637 Fujimori, Alberto, 1056 Fulani, 492, 665 Empire, 61, 335 Fulbe, 52 Full Disclosure, 571 Full Moon of Sonia, 968 Fuller, Gil, 842 Fuller, Hoyt, 166 Fulton, Robert, 22 Funk music, 652 Fur (people of Sudan), 431, 1034 Fur trade, 22 Furia, 456 Futa Jalon, 52 Futa Toro, 52, 60 Ga, 212 Gabon, Republic of, 493–495 Gabriel, 495–496 Gadio, Cheik Tidiane, 978 Gage, Matilda Goslyn, 458 1-800-368-6868

1182 INDEX Galeano, Eduardo, 897 Gallwey, Henry, 498 Gambia, The, 497–498. See also Senegal Gambia Adventurers, 497 Gandhi, Mahatma, 268 Ganga Zumba, 478 Gangbé Brass Band, 156, 652, 794–795, 892 Gangsta rap, 566 Gant, Harry A., 475 Garang, John, 366 García, Romeo Lucas, 511 García Caturla, Alejandro, 324 Garifuna, 820 –821 defined, 89 Garifuna Journey, 471 Garifuna music, 93 Garment trade, 1062 Garner, Robert L., 1139 Garnet, Henry Highland, 437 Garrick, David, 196–197 Garrido, Juan, 601–602, 750 Garrison, William Lloyd, 40, 700, 994, 1137 on American Colonization Society, 95 Garvey, Amy Ashwood, 499–500, 642 Garvey, Amy Jacques, 499–500, 642–643 Garvey, Marcus, 62, 86, 150, 500–502, 501 and Amy Ashwood, 642 and Amy Jacques, 642–643 and Harlem Renaissance, 553 influence of Blyden on, 181 influence of H. S. Williams on, 1132 influence on African liberationists, 344 and Islam, 629 and Jamaican decolonization movement, 454, 640 and Judaism, 663 and literature, 696 and Malcolm X, 722 as Moses, 439 and Pan-Africanism, 862–863

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and Rastafari movement, 919, 921, 973 and Universal Negro Improvement Association, 1095, 1096 See also Black Star Line; Rastafari movement; Universal Negro Improvement Association Garvey and Garveyism, 499 Garveyism, 640 Gas War (Bolivia), 184–185 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 113, 502–503, 506, 782 Gaviria, Cesar, 848 Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender movements, Africa and African diasporic, 503–509 Gayle, Addison Jr., 166 Gearan, Mark, 869 Gedney, Thomas R., 99 Gee, Vanyoska, 472 Geffrard, Fabre Nicolas, 1022 Geisel, Ernesto, 252 Gelede dance, 828–829 Gell, Monday, 1108 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 1142 The General History of Africa, 1094 Genetic engineering, 162–163 Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 162–164 Genocide, 434, 510–515 South-West Africa, 800 Geographic Society of France, 56 A Geographical Historie of Africa, 440 Georgia’s Sea Islands, 515–516 Gerima, Haile, 469 Germany black entertainers in imperial era, 610–613 black entertainers in Weimar Republic, 1118–1121

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and South-West Africa, 800 See also Berlin West Africa Conference Germs, 301–302 Gershwin, George, 170, 650–651 Ghana, 62, 516–522 and Cold War, 283 and HIV prevention, 579 railroads, 341 slave trade–oriented historical museums, 785 and soccer, 1010 song for hanging, 787 status as republic, 204 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 See also Akan; Ananse; N’krumah, Kwame Ghana Empire, 522–523 Ghania, Maleem Mahmoud, 652, 794, 892 Ghost Dance, 433 Gibbs, Josiah W., 99–100 Gibson, Althea, 34 Gibson, Josh, 34, 812, 858 Gibson, Kean, 478–479 Gide, André, 252 Gilbert, Humphrey, 200–201 Giles, Alexander Falconer, 686 Gilkes, Michael, 102 Gillespie, Dizzy, 153, 323–324, 649, 842 Gilroy, Beryl Agatha, 102, 523–525 Gilroy, Paul, 468, 523, 702, 917–918 Ginés de Sepúlveda, Juan, 1029 Giovanni, Nikki, 176, 968 Giral, Sergio, 469, 473 A Glance Away, 1126 GLBT movements. See Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender movements, Africa and African diasporic Gleason, Judith, 469 Glissant, Edouard, 240, 259, 525–526 Globalization, 526–528 Globo Network, 189 Glover, Savion, 29

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INDEX Gluckman, Max, 151 “Go Down Moses,” 438 Go Tell It on the Mountain, 484 Gobineau, Arthur de, 916 God Moves on the Water, 1059 A God of Incredible Surprises, 689 God’s Trombones, 553, 653 Golar, William H., 837 Gold, 19–20, 23, 613–614, 1047 Congo, 312 Ghana, 131–132 Mozambique, 781 and pre-colonial Sudan, 1101 and trans-Saharan trade, 1100 West Africa, 58 See also Cape Coast Castle Gold Coast, 59, 60 economy, 517–518 and Fetu, 465 Gold Coast colony. See Ghana Golden Gloves, 476 Goldenweiser, Alexander, 108 Gomez, Miguel Mariano, 320 Gomez, Sara, 473 Gontran-Damas, Léon, 239, 701, 809, 980 Gonzalez, Don Ruben, 320 González, Jose Luis, 906 Good Neighbor Policy, 528–529 Gooden, Lolita Shante, 570 Goodman, Andrew, 270, 271 Goodman, Benny, 648, 649, 842 Goodwin, A. J., 356 Goombay music, 142 Gordon, Charles George, 719, 1087 Gordon, George William, 640, 772 Gorée Island, 932 Gorgendière, Joseph de Fleury de la, 534 Gorham, Sarah, 67 Gorillas, 956 Gorillas in the Mist, 956 Goulart, João, 190 Gouldsbury, Valesius, 498

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Gouverneurs de la rosée, 831 Gowon, Yakubu, 161, 1027 Goyemide, Etienne, 529 Gradual Manumission Act, 705 Graf Zeppelin, 140 Graffiti, 563, 564–565, 570 Grajales, Mariana, 453 Grameen Bank (Bangladesh), 756 Gramsci, Antonio, 896 Gran Colombia, 373 Grandmaster Flash, 564 Granger, Geddes. See Daaga, Makandal Granger, Gordon, 663 Grant, A. G., 518 Grant, Jacquelyn, 691 Grant, James Augustus, 440 Grant, Ulysses S., 376 Graves, Denyce, 171 Great Depression, 24, 25, 26, 27 and African nationalism, 61–62 Great Societies (Brazil), 191 Great Trek, 54, 55 Greek culture. See Black Athena Green, Claude, 87 Green, Ernest, 269 Green, Paul, 1152 The Green Book, 695 Green Hills of Africa, 668 Green Revolution, 77, 163, 530–532, 531, 1140 Greenlee, Gus, 812 Greenlee, Rufus, 612 Greensboro Four, 270 Greensboro Massacre, 1074–1075 Grenada, Fédeon Rebellion, 448–449 Grenville, Lord, 68 Griffiths, Marcia, 644 Grillo, Francisco (Frank). See Machito Grimké, Angelina Weld, 506–507 Grimke, Archibald, 1108 Grimké, Sarah, 458 Griots, 30, 537 Griots, 482–483 Les griots, 831

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1183

Grist, Reri, 171 Griswold, Benjamin, 493–494 Grodet, Louis Albert, 725 Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw, 196–197, 532, 1068 Groulx, Gilles, 476 Grunitzky, Nicolas, 1061 Guadeloupe, 486 Guanches, 134 Guano, 800 Guaraní, 182 Guatemala and CIA, 253–254 left-wing insurgency, 621 mass killings in, 511 and possible U.S. complicity in genocide, 514 and slavery, 90 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 Guerrero, Félix, 842 Guerrero, Vicente, 752 Guerrilla warfare, 618–619 Guevara, Che, 83 and anticolonialism, 897 and Bolivia, 182–183 and Castro, 247 and Congo, 283, 285, 1015 on guerrilla warfare, 619–620 influence on Black Panther Party, 171–172 Guiana, French, 486 Guiana, 479 Guillén, Nicolás, 240, 320, 324, 532–533, 696, 1069 and Hughes, 573 and Negrismo, 681 Guinea, 533–535 and ironworking, 627 Guinea Company, 497. See also Royal African Company Guinea dance, 535–540 Guinea-Bissau, 540–542 Guinn, Dorothy C., 857 Guise, Robert Paul Marie de, 534 Guiseppe, Neville, 154 Gullah, 416, 542–543 Pritchard as, 1108

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1184 INDEX Gullah (continued) See also Georgia’s Sea Islands Gunner, Frances, 857 Gunther, Hans, 110 Gurdjieff, Georges, 1062 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, 33, 469, 473 Gutiérrez Merino, Gustavo, 250, 688 Gutman, Herbert, 1001–1002 Guttiérez, Pedro Juan, 240 Guy, Buddy, 647 Guy, Camille Lucien Xavier, 534 Guyana, 543–544 Guzman, Abimael, 1054, 1056 Haas, Elsie, 472 Habré, Hissène, 258 Hagar’s Daughters, 691 Hair, 545–546 Haiti, 546–548 and Dominican Republic, 374, 1022 and Douglass, 377 establishment of, 39–40, 136, 487 and immigration to U.S., 607 and J. W. Johnson, 654, 655 as oldest independent largely black nation, 692 popular music of, 489 and South Africa, 6–7 and sustainable agriculture, 78–79 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 U.S. Marines in, 878, 903 and Voodoo, 1109–1111 War of Independence, 390 See also Aristide, JeanBertrand; Christophe, Henri; Dessalines, Jean Jacques; Duvalier, JeanClaude (Baby Doc); Duvalier, François “Papa Doc”; Louverture, Toussaint; Noirisme; Péralte, Charlemagne Masséna; Pétion, Alexandre Sabés www.abc-clio.com

Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act of 1998 (U.S.), 607 Hakmoun, Hassan, 652, 794, 892 Haley, Alex, 32, 497, 548–549, 702 Hall, Adelaide, 1121 Hall, Arthur, 538 Hall, Edith, 168 Hall, Edmund, 792, 888 Hall, Price, 97 Hall, Stuart, 234, 897 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 1034 Hamid, Yusuf M., 632 Hamilton, Ed, 769 Hamilton, James, 1108 Hamilton, Sylvia, 229, 230 Hammadi, Rodolphe, 259 Hammon, Jupiter, 699, 1125 Hammond, John, 612 Hammond, Peter B., 215 Hampton, Fred, 174 Hampton, Pete, 612 Hamuda Bey, 1077 Hancock, Herbie, 652, 793, 890 Handley, William Jules, 725 Handy, W. C., 647 Hani, Chris, 1025 Hanneken, Herman “Hard Head,” 878 Hansberry, Lorraine, 32, 379, 380, 549–552, 549, 697 and African dramatic modes in African American theater, 827 The Harder They Come, 471, 729 Harlan, John Marshall, 933 Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 554 Harlem Renaissance, 31, 33, 109, 552–554 compared with Black Arts Movement, 166 and Fauset, 447 and homosexuality, 506–507 influence on Caribbean Artists Movement, 234 influence on négritude movement, 255 and Marson, 735 and McKay, 743 ABC-CLIO

and Schomburg, 972, 973 and Toomer, 1061 Harlem Shadows, 553, 744 Harley, Robert W., 92 Harper, Frances E. W., 438 Harper, James L., 720 Harris, Frank, 743 Harris, Hilda, 171 Harris, Joel Chandler, 228 Harris, Leslie, 476 Harris, Maggie, 102 Harris, Wilson, 102, 238, 333 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1865, 63 Hartford Courant, 936 Harvey, Thomas, 1133 Hassan II, King of Morocco, 48 Hassan, Mohammed bin Abdullah. See Mad Mullah Haughton, Antoinette, 644 Hausa (people), 554–555. See also Nigeria Hausa federation, 335 Hausa-Fulani, 161 Hausaland, 554 Haussmann, Baron, 1104 Haussmann, GeorgesEugéne, 265 Havana, 265, 318 Hawkesworth, John, 92 Hawkins, Coleman, 152 Hay, James Shaw, 498 Hayes, Diana L., 691 Hayes, Isaac, 438 Hayes, Roland, 169–170 Hayford, Casely, 181 The Head Money Cases (U.S.), 605 Head, Bessie, 555–556 Health, public, 556–563 Heard, William H., 67 Heart and Head, 690 Heart of Darkness, 47, 440 Heartbeats, 794, 891 Heath, Roy, 102 Hegel, G. W. F., 440, 916 Heiss, John P., 91 Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, 800 Hemingway, Ernest, 668 Henderson, Russell, 835 Henderson v. Mayor of New York, 605 1-800-368-6868

INDEX Hendricks, Barbara, 171 Henri I, King of the North (Haiti). See Christophe, Henri Henry, Claudius, 920 Henry the Navigator, Prince of Portugal, 59 Henshaw, James Ene, 404 Henzell, Perry, 471 Héouville, Gabriel d’, 712 Herbert, Frederick “Toots,” 921 Herero, 512 Hernández, René, 153 Hernandez, Rita Indiana, 240 Hernandez, Roger, 320 Herodotus, 439, 440, 441 Hertzog, J. B., 1024 Herzl, Theodore, 662 Heyerdahl, Thor, 774 Hezbollah, 1056, 1058 Hidalgo, Miguel, 752 Higgs, Joe, 730 Higher Ground, 883 Highlife music, 106, 652, 791, 792, 888, 889, 924 Hijos de Baraguá, 469 Hill, Lauryn, 571 Hill, Renee, 691 Hilliard, Asa, 367 Hindemith, Paul, 1119 Hines, Gregory, 29 Hip-hop, 30, 563–567 as African cultural retention, 568–569 and Côte d’Ivoire, 314 Cuban, 567–568 influence on African pop music, 795, 892–893 Pan African Hip-Hop Festival, 156, 795, 893 women in, 568–572 Hip-Hop Speaks, 571 Hip-Hop Women’s Progressive Movement, 571 Hispaniola, 372. See also Dominican Republic; Haiti Historia de vida: Negros en el Uruguay, 969 Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia, 215 History of Jamaica, 1130 www.abc-clio.com

The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, 160, 904, 905, 1133 History of the Indies, 688 Hitchcock, Alfred, 475 HIV/AIDS, 399, 940, 941, 944 ABC approach, 577 and African death rates, 365 and GLBT movements, 509, 577 Haiti, 394 Mandela’s work against, 727 and Médecins Sans Frontières, 745 and Namibia, 799 number of people infected, 945 as obstacle to economic development and social stability, 350 and Peace Corps, 868, 869 prevention, 573–582 socioeconomic impact, 581–582 and sub-Saharan life expectancy, 556 and U.S. Global Gag Rule, 578, 579, 580, 944 and Uganda, 1088 and United Nations, 1092 and World Health Organization, 1141 Ho Chi Minh, 897 Hodge, Merle, 239 Hodges, Gil, 953 Hoefler, Paul, 356–357 Holiness-Pentecostal-Apostolic denominations, 263 Holland, Peggie, 612 Hollar, Constance, 154 Hollywood Shuffle, 476 The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America, 86 Home, Ninian, 449 Home to Harlem, 744 Homer, 545 The Homesteader, 475 Homeward Bound Foundation, 769 Homewood Trilogy, 702 ABC-CLIO

1185

L’Homme sur les quais, 33, 472 Homo erectus, 435 Homo sapiens, 435–436 hooks, bell, 461 Hoover, J. Edgar, 501 Hope, John, 818 Hopkins, Claude, 1120 Hopkins, Dwight, 690 Hopkinson, Nalo, 72 “Horatio,” 1125 Horner, Ruth, 154 Hornsby, Rogers, 858 Horowitz, David, 937 The Horrors of Slavery, 1118 Horses, and Columbian Exchange, 399 Horton, James, 598 Hot, Cool, and Vicious, 570 Hotchkiss, Willis, 667 Hotel Rwanda, 957 Hottentot. See Khoikhoi How the West Under-Developed Africa, 1015 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 95 Howell, Leonard, 919 Howlin’ Wolf, 647 H2O Assouka, 156, 795, 893 Huddleston, Trevor, 1082–1083 Hudson, Henry, 385–386 Hughes, Langston, 32, 316, 506, 553, 554, 572–573, 572 and African dramatic modes in African American theater, 827 and Congress of Black Writers and Artists, 977–978 and Marson, 735 Hugues, Victor, 449 Hull, Agrippa, 97 Human immunodeficiency virus. See HIV/AIDS Human rights, 582–588 civil and political, 586–587 defined, 582 development of, 582–584 and development of United Nations, 584–585 economic and social, 586, 587 in second half of 20th century, 585–586 1-800-368-6868

1186 INDEX Humanitarian assistance, 588–593 critiques of, 591–592 defined, 588 history of, in Africa, 589–590 and NGOs, 590 recent changes in, 590–591 Humbolt, Wilhelm von, 417 Hume, David, 109, 417, 418–419, 1130 Humphrey, R. M., 300 Hunter, David, 272–273 Huntington, Samuel P., 351 Huntley, Henry Vere, 497 Hurston, Zora Neale, 109, 110, 316, 438–439, 593–595, 593, 1069 and African American folklore, 483–484 feminist tones of, 506 and Harlem Renaissance, 554, 593–594 Their Eyes Were Watching God, 109, 554, 594, 595 and Voodoo, 1111 Hurt, Mississippi John, 647 Hutu, 216–217, 595–596 conflicts with Tutsis, 513–514, 595–596, 956–957 Huxley, Elspeth, 668 Huxley, T. H., 772 “I Have a Dream,” 268–269 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 32 I Speak of Freedom, 863–864 Ibadan, 265, 1102 University of, 599 Ibn ‘Abdallah, ‘Ahmad, 51–52 Ibn Battuta, 440 Ibn Nafi, Uqbah, 48 Ibn Umar, Jibril, 334 Ibn Ziyad, Tariq, 48 Ibo. See Igbo Ice Cube, 571 Idi Amin: Hitler in Africa, 216, 1088 Idris I, King of Libya, 695, 909 Iere, Lady, 224 “If I Ruled the World,” 571 www.abc-clio.com

“If We Must Die,” 743 Ife, 126–127 Igbo, 161–162, 597–598 and hair, 545 massacre of in Nigeria, 512–513 as naturally entrepreneurial people 824 See also Nigeria Ike, Vincent Chukwuemeka, 598–599, 698 Illusions, 340 “An Image of Africa,” 47 Imbuga, Francis D., 599–600 IMF. See International Monetary Fund Immigration, United States, 601–610 colonial era, 601–603 1776–1870, 603–604 1870–1921, 604–606 1921–present, 606–609 and refugees, 603–604, 607 quotas, 606–608 Immigration Act of 1924 (U.S.), 606–607 Immigration Act of 1990 (U.S.), 608 Imole Olaba ritual dance, 830 Imperial British East Africa Company, 667 Imperial Germany, black entertainers in, 610–613. See also Weimar Republic, black entertainers in the In a Free State, 798 In a Green Night, 1113 In Dahomey, 378 In Griot Time, 726 In Montgomery, 205 In My Father’s House, 113 In Praise of Love and Children, 524 In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 1114 In the Heart of the Country, 279, 280 In the Heat of the Night, 476 Incas, 302, 901 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 637 ABC-CLIO

Indentured servitude, 21, 337 Independence movements, Ebony’s coverage of, 396 Independientaes de Color, 319 Indian Army, 290 Indian Rebellion, 198 Indigenous peoples decimation of population in Americas, 510–511 of Haiti, 546 Latin American movements, 354 See also Native Americans; Pre-Columbian America; names of African peoples Indigo, 88, 89 and demand for slaves, 1005 and plantations, 884 Industrial Revolution, 23–24 and profits from slavery system, 1000 and slavery, 613–616, 1046–1047 Industrial Workers of the World, 23 Industrialization, 613–618 “Inglan Is a Bitch,” 656 Iniciativa Feminista, 456 Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, 207 Insurgency and counterinsurgency, 618–624 Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, 1142 Intelligent Black Women’s Coalition, 571 Inter-American Development Bank, 624 The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, 423–424, 423, 697, 996, 1068 International African American Ballet, 538 International Bill of Rights, 586 International Center for Wheat and Maize Improvement (CIMMYT), 530 1-800-368-6868

INDEX International Conference on Population, 940 International Conferences on Population and Development, 940–941 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 586–587 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), 586, 587 International development, 624–625 International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, 530 International Labor Organization, 685 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 184, 625–627, 814 and Cameroon, 226–227 and Congo, 311–312 distinguished from World Bank, 1139 loans to African countries, 340, 342 International Rice Research Institute, 530 International Textile and Clothing Bureau, 1142 International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 583 International Women’s Year Conference (1975), 455 Invermectin, 561, 562 Invisible Man, 31, 412 Irish Republican Army, 1058 Iron ore, Brazil, 1047 Irons, Clement, 67 Ironworking, 19, 627–628, 1046, 1047. See also Ogun Is English We Speaking, 777 Is God a White Racist?, 690 Isaac, Jorge, 680 Isaacs, Gregory, 1008 Isabel, Queen of Spain, 303 Isasi-Díaz, Ada María, 690 Ishangi Family African Dancers, 538 Islamic Mission to America, 631–632 www.abc-clio.com

Islamic Party, 632 Islamic terrorist groups, 1053 Islam in Africa, 16, 17, 925–927, 929–930, 931 African American, 628–635. See also Malcolm X; Nation of Islam African reform movements, 52–53, 61 and African religious conflicts, 350 in Americas, 16, 17 and Blyden, 180 and North Africa, 48, 50 and Sierra Leone, 988 Trinidad and Tobago, 1072 and West Africa, 52–53, 59 An Island Is a World, 975 Ismael, Toure, 536 Ismail, Khedive of Egypt, 409, 719 Israel, and Falasha, 443–444 It a Come, 1008 Italy and Eritrea, 425 and Ethiopia, 429 “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” 269 Ivory, 1101 Ja Ja of Opobo, 598 Jackson, Jesse, 447, 634 Jackson, Michael, 923 Jackson-Opoku, Sandra, 1069 Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 637–638 Jagessar, Rohit, 479 Jagua Nana, 411 Jamaica, 638–641 independence, 204, 640, 643 labor rebellion (1938), 204 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 women’s role in, 641–645 See also Cudjoe; Morant Bay Rebellion; Rastafarians Jamaica Labrish, 157 Jamaican Folktales and Oral Histories, 101 James, Cyril Lionel Robert, 238, 645–646, 657, 682, 1069, 1153 ABC-CLIO

1187

and Louverture, 713 and Nyerere, 1013 and Trotsky, 780 Jamestown settlement, 201 Janjaweed, 512, 1035 Jasanoff, Jay, 168 Jazz, 30, 646, 648–651 African, 651–652 Congo style, 890 U.S. State Department promotion of, 286 and Voodoo, 1111 in Weimar Germany, 1119–1121 Jazz Age, 648 Jazz dance, 537 Jazz Kings of Accra, 651, 793 Jea, John, 532 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 647 Jefferson, Thomas on human rights, 583 plow design, 75 See also Monticello Jeffries, Leonard, 367 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 263 Jekyll, Walter, 101, 743 Jenkins, Philip, 249 Jesuits, 865 as slave owners, 261, 1096 Jet magazine, 396 Jewison, Norman, 476 Jews diaspora, 360, 361 and Farrakhan’s antiSemitism, 447 See also Falasha (Beta Israel); Judaism Jiménez, Blas, 375 Joachim, Joseph, 610 João II, King of Portugal, 303 Jocelyn, Simeon, 96 Johannesburg, 1102 “Johannesburg Mines,” 572 John, Dr. See Rebennack, Mac John, Grant, 356 John Paul II, Pope, 394 Johnson, Andrew, 411 Johnson, Charles (dancer), 612 Johnson, Charles R. (writer), 652–653 Johnson, Dickie, 471 Johnson, Frank, 610 Johnson, George and Noble, 32, 475 1-800-368-6868

1188 INDEX Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 506–507 Johnson, Jack, 1059 Johnson, James Weldon, 438, 653–655, 654, 696, 700 on baseball and African Americans, 812 and Harlem Renaissance, 553 and Marson, 735 and Schomburg, 973 Johnson, John H., 395 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 235, 238, 655–657 and M. Smith, 1008, 1009 Johnson, Lyndon, 271 Johnson, Philip, 117 Johnson, Prince Y., 372, 693, 1044 Johnson, Sarah, 642 Johnson, Walter, 34 Johnson, Wesley, 694 Johnson-Sirleaf, Ellen, 694 Johnston, Arthur James, 1119 Johnstone, Blind Willie, 1059 Jola people, 431–432 Joliot-Curie, Frederic, 366 Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 594 Jones, Absalom, 66 Jones, Charles C., 121 Jones, Claudia, 657–658, 834 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Jones, Sarah, 571 Jones, Sissieretta, 169 Jones, William R., 690 Jonny spiel auf, 650–651 Jordan, Barbara, 507 Jordan, June, 1069 Jordan, Roxanne, 691 Jordon, W. L., 216 Jorrín, Enrique, 324 A Journal, 732 Journal of Negro History, 658–659 Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, 441 Journey to the Congo, 252 The Joys of Motherhood, 414 Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sor, 659–660, 659 Juarez, Benito, 410 Judaism, 660–663. See also Jews www.abc-clio.com

Judson, Andrew T., 99–100 Juju music, 63, 792, 889 Juletane, 1115 Julien, Isaac, 471 Julien, Pauline, 214 Julius Caesar, 406 Junconoo, 641 Juneteenth, 663–664 Juneteenth, 412 Jungle Brothers, 571 Junkanoo, 141–142, 965 Just Another Girl on the IRT, 476 Kabasselleh, Joseph “Grand Kalle,” 793 Kabbah, Ahmad Tejan, 989, 990 Kabila, Joseph, 312 Kabila, Laurent, 309, 311, 344 Kagame, Paul, 513–514, 957 Kaguvi, Sekuru, 1159–1160 The Kahina, 662 Kaid, Taher, 83 Kalakuta Republic, 107 Kalinda, 224 Kanem-Bornu Empire, 665. See also Nigeria Kanemi, Muhamad al-Amin al-, 665 Kano, 265 Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (U.S.), 41 Kant, Immanuel, 109, 417, 418, 419, 916 Kante, Mory, 892 Kante, Sumanguru, King of Sosso, 482–483, 1036, 1037–1038 Kanute, Demba, 483 Kapepwe, Simon, 666 Karanga kingdom, 1159 Karenga, Jaulana, 176, 701–702 Karim, Yahya Abdul, 631–632 Kasavuba, Joseph, 714, 715 Kasrils, Ronnie, 662 Kassav, 891 Kaunda, Kenneth, 665–666, 1157 Keane, Shake, 656 Kebe, Lamen, 628 Keita, Mamady, 539 ABC-CLIO

Keïta, Salif, 794, 892 Kelly, John, 494 Kennedy, Arthur Edward, 498 Kennedy, Edward, 216 Kennedy, John F. Latin American policy, 352–353 Malcolm X on, 722, 806 and Peace Corps, 868–869 and USAID, 624, 1105 Kente cloth, 666–667 Kenton, Stan, 842–843 Kenya, 667–668 agriculture, 76 and Al Qaeda attacks, 1057 and HIV prevention, 579 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 Kenyatta, Jomo, 69, 344, 668 The Keys, 682 Khartoum. See Madhi Khoikhoi, 398, 669, 1023 Khoisan, 668–669, 1023 Kidjo, Angélique, 156, 794, 892 Kieh, G. K., Jr., 1051 Kilimanjaro Action Program, 939 Kimberly Process, 359–360 Kincaid, Jamaica, 669–671, 1069 King, Boston, 97 King, James F., 110 King, Martin Luther Jr., 175, 268–269, 396, 658, 671–673, 672 compared with Malcolm X, 445 reference to Exodus, 438 King, Martin Luther III, 765 King, Rodney, 634 The King Does Not Lie, 469 Kingsley, Mary, 441 “Kinky Hair Blues,” 735 Kinshasa, 265 Kinshasa–Washington DC–Paris, 794, 891, 924 Kinte, Kunta, 497 Kipling, Rudyard, 897 Kissinger, Henry, 254, 960 Kiswahili, 1042 Kittermaster, Harold Baxter, 92 1-800-368-6868

INDEX Klaatsch, Hermann, 109 Knibb, Mary Morris, 643 Knight, Etheridge, 968 Knight, Marion “Suge,” 984 Knight, Pedro, 317 Knights of Labor, 23 Kokolaea, François, 539 Kola nut, 951, 1156 Konate, Famadou, 539 Kongo, 673–674, 1109–1110 Koola Lobitos, 106 Kora, 788 Kortwright, Cornelius, 498 Kouchner, Bernard, 589 Kouyate, Balla Fasseke, 482 Kouyate, Djeli Mamadou, 482 Kpognon, Mensah, 1061 Krenek, Ernst, 650–651, 1119 Kriger, Sally, 775 Krik? Krak!, 472 Kroeber, Alfred L., 108 Kroes, Rob, 1050 KRS One, 565–566, 571 Kru sailors, 674–676 Krushchev, Nikita, 248 Ku Klux Klan, 270, 271 Kufour, John, 521–522 Kulthum, Umm, 408 Kumar, Harbance, 471 Kuomboka, 151 Kush, 923 Kwaito music, 795, 892 Kwaku, 102 Kwando River, 799 Kwanza, 176 Kwela music, 791 La Rose, John, 234 La Salle, Cavelier de, 486 Labor unions, 23, 24 Labuchin, Rassoul, 32–33, 472 Lacascade, Suzanne, 239 Ladd, Florence, 853 “Ladies First,” 571 Lady B, 570 Lagos, 265 Laing, Kojo, 102, 677–678 Lake Kariba, 1158 Lakota, 511 Lalibela (city), 117 Lalibela, King of Ethiopia, 428 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 713 Lamban dance, 537 www.abc-clio.com

Lambert, Evelyn, 476 Lamizana, Sangoulé, 215 Lamming, George, 154, 238, 1069 Landeta, Matilde, 474 Landlocked countries, 185 The Landscape Within, 847 Laou, Julius Amede, 472 Lara, Christian, 33, 472 Laraki, Ahmed, 775 Larouche, Joseph, 1060 LaShane, Joanna, 395 Laswell, Bill, 652, 793, 890 Latif, Al-Amin Abdul, 633 Latifah, Queen, 565–566, 571 Latin America economic development (19th century), 23, 25 economic development and decline (20th century), 25–26 and globalization, 527 and IMF, 626–627 independence movements, 1031 life expectancy and death rates of people of African descent, 364 mass killings in, 511 population of people of black African descent, 5 and Western powers’ domination of agriculture and mining, 617 and World War I, 1143–1144 and World War II, 1146–1147 See also Pre-Columbian America Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter, 456 Latin American literature, 678–682 Latin Jazz, 321, 323–324. See also O’Farrill, Arturo “Chico” Latinos, and ethnicity, 432 Latortue, Gérard, 124 Lauren, Jean Paul, 1041 Laveau, Marie, 546, 1110, 1111 Laveaux, Etienne, 712 ABC-CLIO

1189

Lawlin, Richard, 493–494 Lawrence, Jacob, 33 Laws of the Evolution of Peoples, 903 Le Bon, Gustave, 903 Le Jeune, Olivier, 534 Leadbelly (Huddie William Ledbetter), 647, 1059–1060 League of Coloured Peoples, 682–683, 735. See also Moody, Harold Colonial Charter for Coloured People, 770 League of Nations, 683–685 The Learning Tree, 32, 475 Leaves in the Wind, 523 Leavitt, Joshua, 1137 Leclerc, Victor, 713 Lecuona, Ernesto, 206, 324 Lee, Canada, 475 Lee, Don L. (Haki Madhubuti), 968 Lee, Richard Borshay, 668 Lee, Spike, 476, 1060 Lefkowitz, Mary, 168 Légitime défense, 696, 697 Leibniz, Gottfried, 417 Leland, Andrea E., 471 Lema, Ray, 794, 891, 924 Lemba, Sebastián, 375 Lemkin, Raphael, 510 Léon, Nicholas, 245 Leon, Rodney, 211 Leonard, Buck, 812 Leonidow, Ivan, 1119 Leopold II, King of Belgium, 441 Leprosy, 1141 Léry, Jean de, 768 Lesotho, 625, 685–686 Let My People Go (book), 437 “Let My People Go” (poem), 438 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 268 Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul von, 1144–1145 Leuk, 484–485 Lewanika, King of Barotseland, 151–152 Lewis, John, 1034 Lewis, Mary Edmonia, 686–687 1-800-368-6868

1190 INDEX Liberation and Reconciliation, 690 The Liberation of Theology, 689 Liberation theology, 16, 250–251, 687–692 The Liberator, 40 Liberia, 61, 63, 692–695 and AME missions, 67 and American Colonization Society, 94–95 and Blyden, 179, 180–181 civil war, 6 culture, 694–695 Delany on, 346 first woman president, 354 history, 692 and Kru, 675 politics, 692–694 and Slave Trade Act of 1819 (U.S.), 68 as uncolonized country, 692, 1102 village scene, 94 and Yoruba, 1156 See also Black Star Line; Taylor, Charles Libertat, Baillon de, 710, 711 Liborio, 373–374 Libya, 695 and terrorism, 1056 Liebenfels, Jörg Lanz von, 109 Lien de Parenté, 472 The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 1068 Life and Times of Michael K, 279, 280–281 Lifeboat, 475 “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” 653 The Light of the Women, 857 Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, 583 Like Water for Chocolate, 207 Lilís (Ulises Heureaux), 373 Lima, 1101 Lima, Walter Jr., 478 Limann, Hilla, 520 Lincoln, Abraham, 272 and Emancipation Proclamation, 41, 95, 273, 413–414, 413 as Moses, 438

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and proposed black colonies in Central America, 91 and reasons for Civil War, 1003, 1006 on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1033 Lincoln Production Company, 475 Lind, Jenny, 169 Lindbergh, Charles, 139 Lindsay, John, 479 Linneaus, Carolus, 417, 916 The Lion and the Jewel, 825 Lisbey, Debbie, 471 Lisette, Gabriel, 258 Lisle, George, 639 Liston, Sonny, 84 Literature, 31–32 African, 695–698 African American, 698–703 Caribbean, 237–241 Latin American, 678–682 Little Black War of 1912, 319 Little Rock desegregation, 267–268, 269 Little Rock Nine, 269 Little-White, Lennie, 471 Littlefield, Daniel, 947–948 “Living dead,” 211–212 Livingston, Bunny. See Wailer, Bunny Livingstone, David, 105, 151, 440–441 Livingstone fruit bats, 305 Llewellyn, Robert Baxter, 498 Loans. See International Monetary Fund (IMF); Microfinance; World Bank Loas, 16 Lobbo, Ahmadu, 52 Lobengula, 1159 Locke, Alain LeRoy, 31, 110, 506, 696, 703–704, 703 and Harlem Renaissance, 553 and Hurston, 593 Locke, John, 746 Lockett, Samuel, 409 Lodagaa, 212 Lomé Peace Accord, 990

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London Committee to Abolish Slavery, 40 The Lonely Londoners, 975 Long Black Song, 166 Long Island: African Americans and native peoples, 704–706 Long, Edward, 1130 Longbridge, Gladys, 642 The Longest Memory, 334 Lopes, Henri, 706–708 López, Antonio Carlos, 867 López, José Hilario, 288 Lopez, Odilon, 478 López, Orestes and Cachao, 324 Lopez, Rigoberto, 473 Lopez de Gómara, Francisco, 768 López de Legazapi, Miguel, 1029, 1030 Lorde, Audre, 507, 708–709 Lost Boys of Sudan, 608–609, 709–710 Lost Footsteps, 240 Lou, Miss. See Bennett, Louise Louis XIV, King of France, 277, 547 Louis, Joe, 438 Lourenço, Nilton, 779 Louverture, Toussaint Bréda, 39–40, 256, 373, 390, 487, 710–713, 710 capture, exile, and death, 713 and Christophe, 263, 264 and Dessalines, 357 and fermage, 946 as general and governor of Saint Domingue, 712 and Haitian independence, 547 as Igbo descendant, 598 and influence of Bahia slave uprisings, 628 and Pétion, 881 and revolt against France, 711, 998 upbringing, 710–711 Love, Monie, 571 Lowie, Robert, 108 Luanda, 265

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INDEX Lubosi Imwiko II, King of Barotseland, 152 Lucca, Papo, 318 Lucy, 670, 1069 Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), 428, 434–435 Lufthansa, 140 Lugard, F. J. D., 296 Luggard, Lord (wife of ), 822 Lukacs, Georg, 896 Lule, Yusuf, 1088 Lumumba, Patrice, 254, 256, 284–285, 311, 713–715, 714 and CIA, 285, 311, 312, 313 and Cuba, 283 and socialism, 1015 See also Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University Lund, Kátia, 33, 478 Luperón, Gregorio, 373 Luque, Adolfo, 320 Luschan, Felix von, 108, 109–110 Luthuli, Albert, 437 Lymphatic filariasis, 561 Ma grand-mère bantoue et mes ancêtres les Gaulois, 707 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 380 Macaulay, Zachary, 45 Macedo, Joaquim Manuel de, 680 Machado y Morales, Gerardo, 319–320 Machel, Samora, 1013 Machín, Antonio, 152 Machito, 320, 323, 842–843 Machito’s Afro-Cubans, 153 Mackandal, 547 Maclure, Richard, 215 Macoutes, 123 Mad Mullah, 717, 1016 Madagascar, 625, 717–718 Madhi, 719 Madison, Ambrose, 598 The Madman and the Medusa, 1045 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, 455

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Mãe, 680 Magellan, Ferdinand, 900, 901, 1028–1029 Maghreb (Maghrib). See Africa, North Magi Magi, 296 Magloire, Paul, 391 Mahdi, Sadeq al-, 349 Mahfouz, Naguib, 408 Mahlangu, David, 809 Mai Chaza Church, 455 Maitland, Thomas, 712 Major Gentl and The Achimota Wars, 678 Major League Soccer (MLS, U.S.), 1011 Makeba, Miriam, 650, 651, 793, 891 Makiadi, François Luambo “Franco,” 793, 1020 Making a Difference, 726 Makoni, Chief, 1159–1160 Makonnen, T. Ras, 501 Makossa, 63, 227 Malan, D. F., 1024 Malaria, 365, 398, 556, 557–558, 559–560, 1141 and Médecins Sans Frontières, 745 Malawi, 719–721 Malcolm X, 17, 70, 83, 270, 721–723, 721 compared with King, 445 influence on Baraka, 146, 166 influence on Black Arts Movement, 166 influence on Black Panther Party, 171–172 influence on Black Power Movement, 175 influence on Fela, 106 and Nation of Islam, 631, 721–722, 723, 806 split with E. Muhammad, 446 See also Shabazz, Betty Malcolm X (film), 476t Malcolm X as Cultural Hero and Other Afrocentric Essays, 71 Male Revolt, 723–724 Malekebu, Daniel Sharpe, 720

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1191

Malemort, 525 Mali, 724–726, 1100. See also Fulani; Sundiata Malloum, Félix, 258 Malone, Annie, 546 Mambo, 29, 30, 321, 323, 324 “Mambo Inn,” 153 Mambo Kings, 318 Mamluk Beys, 51, 84 Mamout, Yarrow, 628 The Man Died, 1027 The Man Furthest Down, 1069 The Man Who Cried I Am, 1135 Mandabi, 853 Mandela, Nelson, 237, 726–727, 726, 1024, 1025 elected president, 1025–1026 on reparations, 935 See also Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund Mandela, Winnie, 727 Mandinga, 1099 Mané, Ansumane, 540 Mangin, Charles, 291 Manhattan Research, 888 Manhattan School of Music, 791, 888 Manifest Destiny, 766–767 Manioc, 302 Manley, Abe and Effa, 812–813 Manley, Norman, 640, 658 Mannas, James, 478 Manuel, King of Portugal, 662 Manzano, Juan Francisco, 679, 727–728 Mao Zedong, 619–620 influence on Black Panther Party, 171–172 Marabi music and dance, 651, 793, 890–891 Maran, René, 239, 252 March on Washington, 268–269 and Ebony, 396 Marcha-rancho music, 191 Margai, Albert, 989 Margai, Milton, 989 Margaret, Princess of Great Britain, 640

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1192 INDEX Maria, 680 Mariam, Mengistu Haile, 429–430 Mariel boat lift, 320 Maringa music, 793 Maritime and Industrial Museum (Bristol), 784, 785 Maritz, Manie, 1145 Mark, Saint, 406 Marker-assisted selection, 162 Markus, 964 Marley, Rita, 644, 730 Marley, Robert Nesta, 641, 644, 729–731, 729 and African reggae, 922–923 Exodus, 439 and Rastafari movement, 920 on reggae, 921 See also Rastafari movement; Reggae Marley, Ziggy, and the Melodymakers, 644 Mármol, José, 680 Maronnage. See Maroons Maroon Wars (Jamaica), 328, 638–639, 803, 997 Maroons, 39, 61, 1000 Colombia, 286, 288 derivation of term, 802 in French colonies, 488 Guyana, 543 Haiti, 547 Jamaica, 638, 802–803 memorials, 769 Mexico, 1000 and rice, 950 Saint Kitts, 964 Santo Domingo, 372 Suriname, 1038–1039 transported from Jamaica to Sierra Leone, 991 U.S., 1000 See also Cudjoe; Nanny of the Maroons; Quilombo Marqués, René, 240 Marrakech, 1101 Marrant, John, 532, 731–732 Mars, Jean-Baptiste, 903 Marshall, Paule, 239, 702, 732–735 www.abc-clio.com

Marshall, Thurgood, 267, 271 Marshall Plan, 1139 Marson, Una, 153, 643, 735–736 Martí, José, 240, 246–247, 319, 320, 736–737, 879 Martin, Mavis, 171 Martinez, Angie, 570 Martínez, Ernesto Cardenal, 689 Martinique, 486 Martins, Adebayo, 404 Marx, Roberto Burle, 119 Mas Canosa, José, 918 Masai, 545, 737–739 Masekela, Hugh, 650, 651, 793, 891 Masjid Sankore, 632 Masks, 127–130, 129, 130 Masokoane, Glenn Ujebe, 251 Mason, Alexander, 409–410 Mason, Charlotte Osgood, 594 Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 376 Massachusetts Bay Company, 200 Massaquoi, Hans J., 396 Massina Empire, 61 Massip, José, 473 Masters of the Dew, 239 Matamoros, Miguel, 322 Mathurin-Mair, Lucille, 644 Matos, Luis Palés, 681 Mau-Mau Uprising, 668, 703, 1055, 1058 Maud Martha, 206 Mauritania, 739–740 and North America, 49–50 and U.S. aid, 625 Mauritius, 740–741 Maurits, John, 386 Le Mauvais Sang, 1045 Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 91, 257 Maxixe, 191 May, Butler “String Beans,” 1059 Mayans, 511, 900 Maybank, Sandy, 121 Maybin, John, 1157 Mays, Willie Howard, 741–742, 741 ABC-CLIO

Mbalax music, 63, 794, 892 Mbasogo, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, 349 Mbeki, Thabo, 237, 508, 935, 1025–1026, 1090 Mbira (hand piano), 788 Mbiti, John S., 924 Mboo, 151 Mbuyu (Mwambwa, Mbuywamwambwa), 151 MC Lyte, 570 MC Nas, 571 MC Yo-Yo, 571 McAdoo, Orpheus Myron, 651 McCarran-Walter Act (U.S.), 607 McCoo, Edward J., 857 McDonnell, Richard Graves, 497 McIntosh, Roderick and Susan, 948 McKay, Claude, 506, 553, 554, 735, 743–745 and Schomburg, 973 McKaye, James, 95 McLaren, Norman, 476 McShann, Jay, 648–649 McVeigh, Timothy, 1056 Mead, Margaret, 108 Mead, Richard W., 99 Measles, 397, 557, 1141 Médecins Sans Frontières, 589, 745–746 Mediterranean Development Forum, 1140 Mediterranean world, 20 Mehegan, John, 652 Meirelles, Fernando, 33, 478 Melady, Thomas P., 216, 1088 Mella, Julio Antonio, 320 Melodie, Miss, 571 Memoria y Resistencia, 220 Memory of African Culture Inc., 539 Mendel, Loren, 474 Mendoza, Pedro de, 1096 Menelik (of Solomonic dynasty), 660–661 Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia, 425, 429 Menes, Pharaoh, 405 Meneses, Agrario de, 680 1-800-368-6868

INDEX Mengitsu, Colonel, 1012 Ménil, René, 239 Mensah, King, 1061 Mercantilism, 201, 202, 746–748 Merck, Sharpe and Dohme, 562 MERCOSUR, 748–750 Meredith, James, 271 Mereghetti, Elisa, 469 Meringue music, 793 Merlin, Martial-Henri, 258 Mermoz, Jean, 139–140 Merriam, Alan P., 216 Merritt, William, 314 Merseyside Maritime Museum (Liverpool), 784 Les Merveilles de Guinee, 539 Merwart, Émile, 252, 257 Mestizos defined, 88 and Mexico, 753–754 See also Castas paintings; Mixed-race persons Métayer, Amiot, 123 Métayer, Butter, 123–124 Methodist Episcopal Church and Angola, 105 See also African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church; Christian Methodist Episcopal Church; Colored Methodist Episcopal Church Methodists, 263 Mexica Indians, 302 Mexican Revolution, 1012 Mexico, 750–753 and African iron miners, 627 Afro-Mexican identity, 753–755 Egyptian soldiers in, 410–411 and IMF, 626–627 Ministry of Agriculture and Green Revolution, 530 recognition of U.S.-based Mexicans, 361 and smallpox, 302 and soccer, 1010 www.abc-clio.com

truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 Mexico City, 265, 1102, 1103–1104. See also Tenochtitlán Mfecane, 54–55 “Mi Cyaan Believe It,” 1008 Mi Puerto Rico, 474 Micheaux, Omar, 32 Micheaux, Oscar, 475 Michigan State University, African Studies Center, 739 Micombero, Michel, 1013 Microfinance, 755–758 Middle passage, 758–760, 1005 as literary theme, 702–703 proposed memorial, 769 Middle Passage (Johnson), 652, 653t The Middle Passage (Naipaul), 798t Middleton, Charles, 1128 Middleton, John, 498 Midnight Robber, 72 Mies Van der Rohe, Ludwig, 117 Mighty Sparrow, 658, 1071 Miguez Bonino, José, 689 Mikell, Gwendolyn, 451–452 Miles, William H., 301 Milhaud, Darius, 650 Military forces, 760–763 Milk and Honey, 476 Mill, John Stuart, 772 Miller, Loret, 869 Miller, Samuel T., 763–764 Millet, 20, 74, 948–949 Millet, Charles, 667 Millett, Kate, 459–460 Million Man March, 807 Mills, John Atta, 521 Milonga dance and music, 1099 Minas Gerais, 1102 The Mind of Primitive Man, 110 Mingus, Charles, 649 The Ministry of Hope, 102 Minty Alley, 645 Miranda, Carmen, 477 The Mis-Education of Lauryn Hill, 571 Missionaries, 60–61 ABC-CLIO

1193

and Africa, 249–250 in Angola, 104, 763 in Cape Coast, 912–913 in Chad, 258 in Côte d’Ivoire, 313 in Gabon, 493–494 in Jamaica, 639 in Lesotho, 686 in Malawi, 719–720, 725 in Namibia (South-West Africa), 800 in Rwanda, 956 in Swaziland, 1040 in Uganda, 1087 United Secession Church in Calabar, 222 in Yorubaland, 1156 See also American Missionary Association Mississippi Jazzers, 1121 Missouri Compromise of 1820 (U.S.), 41 Mister Johnson, 47 Mitochondrial Eve, 669 Mittelholzer, Edgar, 154 Mixed-race persons, 902 Chile, 261–262 Colombia, 286, 287 and Columbian Exchange, 302 Haiti, 831, 881 Peru, 880 Puerto Rico, 906 Spanish soldiers and settlers in Americas, 602 See also Creole/criollo; Mestizos; Transculturation Mobil Oil, 312 Mobutu, Joseph. See Seko, Mobutu Sese Moe, Petra Mallena, 1040 Moffat, Robert, 441–442 Mohammad, Warith Deen, 446, 634, 764–765, 805–806 Mohammed V, Sultan of Morocco, 49, 1032 Moi, Tituba, Sorciere Noire de Salem, 307 Mollison, Jim, 140 Moloney, Cornelius, 92, 498 Mombasa, 265 Momoh, Joseph Saidu, 989 Monk, Thelonius, 649 1-800-368-6868

1194 INDEX Monroe, James, 68, 765, 766 and Gabriel’s slave rebellion, 496 and Office of Indian Affairs, 510 Monroe Doctrine, 765–767, 1031, 1090, 1143 Monsieur Toussaint, 525–526 Montaigne, Michel de, 767–768 Monte, Domingo del, 680, 728 Montealegre, José María, 91 Monteath, Archibald “Aneaso,” 598 Montejo, Esteban, 150–151, 506 Montejo, Francisco de, 678 Montes, Pedro, 99 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 268 A Month for the Entertainment of Spirits, 478–479 Monticello, 119–121 Montigny, Grandjean de, 119 Monuments and memorials, slavery, 769–770 Moodie, Susanna Strickland, 905 Moody, Harold, 682, 770–771 and Marson, 735 Moolaade, 852 Moore, Brigette, 571 Moore, Charles, 538 Moore, Jessica Care, 571 Moorhead, Scipio, 1125 Moorish Science Temple, 86–87, 629, 630 Moorland, Jessey E., 108 Morales Aima, Evo, 183, 184, 354, 1012 Morales, Noro, 842 Morant Bay Rebellion, 198, 639–640, 642, 771–772 Morejón, Nancy, 240, 773–774 Morelos, José María, 752 Morenada dance, 184 Morgan Guaranty, 312

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Moroccan American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange, 49 Morocco, 48, 774–776 and Congo, 311 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 and U.S., 49 Morris, Mervyn, 776–777 Morrison, Toni, 697, 777–779, 778, 933–934 Beloved (novel and film), 702, 777, 778, 779, 934, 996–997 influence of Hurston on, 595 Moses, 436, 438–439 Moses, a Story of the Nile, 438 Moses, Man of the Mountain, 438, 594, 595 Moses, Robert, 1034 Moshoeshoe, 1023 Moskowitz, Henry, 108 Moslem Ten-Year Plan, 82 Mosque Cares, 764 Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood (Harlem), 631 Mosquito Coast, 820–821 The Mossi of Upper Volta, 215 Moten, Bennie, 648–649 The Moth and the Star, 153 Motherhood, and feminism, 450, 454–455 Motivos de son, 533, 573 Mott, James, 1138 Mott, Lucretia, 1138 Mount Kilimanjaro, 1043 Mount Vernon, 119–120 Moura, Clovis, 780 Mouride brotherhood, 926–927, 976, 978 The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, 550 Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), 971, 972 Movement of April 19 (Colombia), 1055 Movement of Priests for the Third World, 689

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Movement of the People Party, 107 Movimento Negro Unificado, 779–780 Movimiento, 567 Mowatt, Judy, 644 Mozambican National Resistance (RENAM0), 781 Mozambique, 780–782 civil war, 895 and socialism, 1012 Mpongwe, 493 Mr. Potter, 671 Mubarak, Hosny, 407, 1057 Mudimbe, Valentin, 698 Mugabe, Robert, 349, 350, 1026, 1090, 1160 and GLBT movements, 503 Muhammad, Askia, 1018–1019 tomb of, 1017 Muhammad, Ava, 807 Muhammad, Bilali, 628 Muhammad, Elijah, 84, 446, 631, 722, 804–805, 804. See also Mohammad, Warith Deen Muhammad, Fard, 631 Muharram Massacre, 1071 “Mujer Negra,” 773 Mujerista theology, 689–690 Mukasa, Ham, 1069 Mukuri, Melchior, 216 Mulattos. See Mixed-race persons Mules and Men, 594, 483–484 Mulheres Negras, 478 Mullen, Harryette, 782–783 Muluzi, Bakili, 721 Mun, Thomas, 746–747 Muntu Dance Theater, 538 Muritala, Muhammad, 824 Murphy, Dudley, 475 Murray, Judith Sargent, 458 Murray, Maggie, 451 Museum of AfricanAmerican History (Detroit), 785 Museum of the Confederacy (Richmond), 784

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INDEX Museums and transatlantic slavery, 783–786 Museveni, Yoweri, 1088 Music, 30 African, 786–790 African popular, 790–796 American influences on African popular music, 792, 794, 795, 887–894 call-and-response format, 647, 789, 1098–1099 dominance of rhythm in African, 788–789 mixing of pan-American and African forms, 528 moving to, 787–788 timbre, 789 time lines, 789 See also Blues music; Cuban music, African influence in; Hip-hop; Jazz; Reggae; and names of various styles Muslim Brotherhood of America, 632 Muslim Mosque, 722 Muslim Political Action Committee, 634 Muslim World League, 633 Musokotwane, Kebby, 1157 Mutabaruka, 776, 796 Mutesa, Edward, 1088 Muthariki, Bingu wa, 721 Mutismos, 773 Mutombo, Dikembe, 34 Muwanga, Paulo, 1088 Muzorewa, Abel, 1160 Mwanawina, Sir, King of Barotseland, 152 Mwene Mutapa, 1159 My Black Sister, 240 My Bondage and My Freedom, 437 My Brother, 671 My Life and the Beautiful Game, 1068 Mzilikazi, 1023, 1159 Na Boca do Mundo, 478 NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

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Naficy, Hamid, 468 Naimbanna, John, 196–197 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad, 154, 238, 798–799 Nairobi, 266 Nakasa, Nat, 1069 Nama, 800 Namibia, 799–802 and diamonds, 358 and HIV prevention, 575, 576–578 independence, 1013–1014 and sexual diversity, 508 war with South Africa, 621 See also South West Africa Nanny of the Maroons (aka Granny or Grandy Nanny), 453, 642, 769, 802–803, 997 Napolean I. See Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoleon III, Emperor, 410, 411 Narco-terrorism, 1056 A Narrative, 731, 732 Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, 1039 A Narrative of Events, Since the First of August 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, 1132–1133 The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 376, 996 A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, 532, 1068 Nascimento, Abdias do, 780 Nash, Diane, 1034 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 85, 407, 832 influence on Qaddafi, 909

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and Sadat, 959 Nathaniels, Roland, 1121 The Nation of Gods and Earths, 479 Nation of Islam, 16, 84, 629, 631, 803–807 and Farrakhan, 446–447 and homosexuality, 507 and Malcolm X, 631, 721–722, 723, 806 and Qaddafi, 695 See also Malcolm X; Muhammad, Elijah National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 108, 271, 700 and Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 301 and Du Bois, 383, 384 and J. W. Johnson, 653–655 See also Civil Rights Movement; The Crisis National Ballet of Senegal, 539 National Black Justice Coalition, 507 National Black Theatre, 379 National Coalition of Black Gays and Lesbians, 507 National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), 934 National Coalition of Women (Nicaragua), 456–457 National Council on Women and Development (Ghana), 451 National Emigration Convention (1854), 346 National Liberation Army (Bolivia), 1055 National Liberation Army (ELN, Colombia), 1053, 1056, 1058 National Liberation Front (FLN, Algeria), 1053, 1055 National Maritime Museum (UK), 784

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1196 INDEX Nations, nègres, et cultures, 367 Native Americans architecture, 116 and European diseases, 302 geographic groupings, 899 pre-Columbian, 19–20 removal process, 510–511 and spiritual androgyny, 505 and U.S. genocide, 514 See also Indigenous peoples; PreColumbian America Native Son, 31, 697, 1150, 1152 Native Tongues, 571 The Nature of Blood, 884 ital, inv Ndebele, 807–809, 1023 N’Dour, Youssou, 63, 794, 892 Neal, Larry, 166 Neco, King of Egypt, 439 Neger-Jazz-Orchester, 1119 La Negra Angustias, 474 Negrismo, 240, 681. See also Négritude; Noirisme; Pan-Africanism Négritude, 179, 180, 239, 701, 809–811 and Césaire, 255–256, 809–810, 980 and Gontran-Damas, 809, 980 and Guillén, 532, 533 and McKay, 744 and Price-Mars, 904 and Senghor, 344, 809, 810, 979, 980 See also Negrismo; Noirisme; Pan-Africanism The Negro, 179 “Negro,” replacement of term by “black,” 175 Negro Digest, 166 Negro leagues, 34–35, 811–813 “The Negro Question,” 772 Negro Seaman Acts, 962 Negro Society for Historical Research, 973 Negro World, 500, 553

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Nehanda, Mbuya, 1159–1160 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 832 Nelson, Charles Joseph, 1040 Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, 7 Neocolonialism, 813–815 Neolithic Revolution, 77 Neria, 335 Neruda, Pablo, 533 Nervous Conditions, 335, 336 Netherlands Antilles, 385, 386–387, 388, 815–818 Neto, Agostinho, 105 New Day, 101 New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), 1065–1066 New Lafayette Theatre, 379 New Masses, 1152 “New Negro,” 31 The New Negro: An Interpretation, 553, 696, 703, 704 New Negro Renaissance, 701, 973. See also McKay, Claude New Orleans Congo Square, 378, 648, 1110 and jazz, 648 and Voodoo, 1110 New York City African burial ground, 210–211, 211, 1048, 1049 key sites and African labor, 1048 slave revolt (1712), 39 Newcombe, Don, 953 Newton, Huey, 83, 171–172, 174, 175 Newton, John, 1128 The Next Christendom, 249 Nguema Biyoga, Macías, 422 Nguema Mbasongo, Teodoro Obian, 422 Nguni, 807 Ngwane, King of Swaziland, 1039–1040 Niagara movement, 383, 818 Niane, Djibril Tamsir, 482 Nicaragua, 818–822

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1979 revolution, 352 U.S. Marines in, 819 and Walker, 90–91 Nicholas, Fayard and Harold, 29 Nichols, Grace, 1069 Nicola, Isaac, 206 Niemeyer, Oscar, 117, 194 Niger, 625, 822. See also Fulani Niger River, 158, 295, 441, 822 Nigeria, 822–825 agricultural reform, 76 and Blyden, 179 culture, 825 drama in, 826–827 economy, 824 education, 825 ethnic groups, 432 government, 823 and hair, 545 and IMF, 626, 627 and ironworking, 627 massacre of Ibo, 512–513 politics, 823–824 religion, 823 and sexual diversity, 508 traditional dances, 828–830 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 See also Abakuá; Biafra; Calabar; Hausa people; Hausa-Fulani; Hausaland; Igbo; Kanem-Bornu Empire; Oyo Empire; Palm oil; Yoruba Nigeria 70 (band), 106 Nigerian-Biafran War, 161–162, 621 Nigger Heaven, 553 Night Son, 1135 Nile River, source of, 440, 441, 442 Ninety-Nine, 571 Niño, Pedro Alonso, 678 Nipson, Herbert, 396 Nixon, Richard, 254, 954 Nkomo, Joshua, 1160 Nkosi, Lewis, 1069 N’Krumah, Kwame, 62, 69, 85, 209, 519, 797–798

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INDEX and African liberation movements, 344 and Cold War, 283 and Convention Peoples’ Party (CPP), 516, 519, 797 influence of Blyden, 181 and kente cloth, 667 and King, 672 and Non-Aligned Movement, 832 overthrow of, 519 and Pan-Africanism, 519, 862, 863–864, 1132, 1153 as president of Ghana, 519 and self-government, 519 and term neocolonialsm, 813 No Language Is Neutral, 186 No Sweetness Here, 80 No Telephone to Heaven, 276, 277 Noé, Comte de, 710 La Noire de . . . , 853 Noirisme, 548, 830–832. See also Negrismo; Négritude Nok, 825 Nolan, Faith, 230 Non-Aligned Movement, 248, 283, 832–834, 981, 1042 Norland, Donald Richard, 1040 Norman, Jessye, 171 Noronha, Linduarte, 478 North America and Black Panther Party, 173 and Industrial Revolution, 23–24 economic development (18th–19th centuries), 22, 23 economic turbulence of late 20th century, 24–25, 26 population of people of black African descent, 4, 6 See also Canada; PreColumbian America; United States

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North Star, 345, 376, 637 Northup, Solomon, 484 Notebook of a Return to the Native Country, 239 Notes on American Civilization, 645 Notorious B. I. G., 984 Notting Hill Carnival in London, 834–836 Nova Scotia African American diaspora in, 836–837 black refugees in, 837–838 See also Birchtown (Birch Town) “The Novelist as Teacher,” 47 Ntare V, King of Burundi, 216 Ntikuma, 100 Nuba Arabic peoples, 366 Nuer, 366, 545 Nuestra Raza, 196, 220, 1098 Nueva Trova, 207, 324 Nugent, Richard Bruce, 506 “Nursery Rhyme Lament,” 796 Nussbaum, Alan, 168 Nuyorican Poet’s Café, 240, 907 Nwana, Pita, 697 Nwapa, Flora, 838–840 Nyame, 100 Nyasaland. See Malawi Nyerere, Julius, 283, 1013, 1042–1043 and African Unity, 344 and Non-Aligned Movement, 1042 O Cigano, 679–680 O Escravocrata, 680 O Liberato, 680 O.K. Jazz, 1020 Oakes, James, 1002 OAU. See Organization of African Unity Obama, Barack, 271 Obando, José Maria, 288 Obasanjo, Olusegun, 508, 824 Obeah, 16, 141, 453, 841–842 and flying Africans, 480

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1197

See also Cudjoe; Nanny of the Maroons Obeso, Candelario, 680 Obey, Ebenezer, 792 Obock. See Djibouti Obote, Milton, 513, 1088 “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” 772 Occom, Samson, 705 O’Connell, Daniel, 1138 Odingar, Noël, 258 Oduduwa, 1155 O’Farrill, Arturo “Chico,” 324, 842–843 Ofeu Negro, 33, 477–478 Ogé, Vincent, 547 Ogletree, Charles, 936 Ogun, 843–844 Ogunde, Hurbert, 826–827 Ogunyemi, Wole, 827 Ohio River, 995 Ohio State University Rural Finance Program, 756 Oil, 24, 25, 844–845 Aruba and Curaçao, 388–389 Congo, 309 Ecuador, 401 Mexico, 845 Nigeria, 626, 824, 845, 971, 972 Sahara, 845 Venezuela, 845 Oil palms, 20 dates, 74 See also Palm oil Ojukwu, Chukwuemeka, 161 Okara, Gabriel, 411 Okavango River, 799 Okigbo, Christopher, 845–846 Okra, 950, 951 Okri, Ben, 677, 847 Olaiya, Victor, 889 Olaujuwon, Hakeem, 34 Olivella, Manuel Zapata, 220 Oliver, Joe “King,” 648 Oliver, Pearleen, 229 Olmecs, 900 Olowokandi, Michael, 34 Olutunji, Babatunde, 538 Olympics, 33, 35 Olympio, Sylvanus, 1061

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1198 INDEX Oman, 54 Omdurman, 265 Omenuko, 697 Omeros, 1113 “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously,” 776 Onchocerciasis, 561–562 Ondimba, El Hadj Omar Bongo, 494 O’Neill, Eugene, 380 Onofre, Waldyr, 478 Operation Clean-up, 456 Operation Torch, 775 Ophir, 134 Oppression-Liberation, 689 Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, 7 Oral rehydration therapy (ORT), 561 Orchestra Baobab, 794, 795, 892 Orfeu, 478 Organization of African Unity, 69–70, 626, 666, 832 and Malcolm X, 722 and Nyerere, 344 and reparations, 934–935 and Senghor, 980 See also African Union Organization of American States, 832, 848–850, 870 Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, 965 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, 24 Original Kings of Comedy, 1060 Orisha (Orixá), 16, 231, 569, 850–852, 926, 1071 Orishas (musical group), 567 Oroonoko, 852, 1038 “Orphée Noir,” 810 Orpheu Negro, 30 Orquesta Bellmar, 842 Orquesta de Córdoba, 207 Ortiz, Fernando, 469, 1066 Orwell, George, 153–154 Ory, Edward “Kid,” 648 Oshoffa, Emmanuel, 928 Oshoffa, S. B. J., 927, 928 Osibisa, 792

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Osman, Ahmed, 775 Osumare, Halifu, 986 Othello (character), 380 Othello (film), 49 Othello (play), 916 Ottoman Empire and Algeria, 83 and colonial armies, 290 and Egypt, 51, 83–84 and North Africa, 51 Oueddei, Goukouni, 258 Ouologuem, Yambo, 697 Our Nig, 502–503 Our Own Freedom, 451 Our Sister Killjoy, 80 Ousmane, Sembene, 852–853, 1052 Out of the Dark, 857 Ovaherero, 800 Ovando, Nicolás de, 243, 372 Ové, Horace, 471 Overton, Anthony, 546 “An Overview of Women and Power in Africa,” 463 Ovington, Mary White, 108, 818 Owambo, 800 Owen, Robert Dale, 95 Owen, William Fitz William, 497 Owens-Ibie, Nosa, 1051 Owusu, Martin, 101 Oxfam, 588, 589 Oyewùmí, Oyèrónké, 452 Oyo Empire, 53. See also Nigeria Pacheco, Johnny, 318 Padmore, George, 181, 344, 682 and Pan-Africanism, 862, 864, 1132, 1153 Paes, César, 479 Page, Walter, 973 Page Act of 1875 (U.S.), 605 Pageant, The African American, 855–858 Paige, Leroy Robert “Satchel,” 34, 812, 858–859 Palacio, Andy, 93 Palcy, Euzhan, 33, 469, 471–472

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Palenque: Un Canto, 474 Palenques. See Maroons Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 909 Palm oil, 221, 859–861. See also Oil palms Palm Wine music, 63 Palmer, Archibald Leighton, 1133 Palmerston, Lord, 46 Pan African Hip-Hop Festival, 156, 795, 893 Pan Africanist Congress, 727, 987, 1024, 1084 Pan y Agua, P. Juan Carlos, 260–261 Pan-African Association, 1131–1132 Pan-African Conference (1900), 198–199, 861–862, 1131 and Du Bois, 382, 861–862 Pan-African Conference (1945), 344 Pan-African Conference on Reparations, 934 Pan-African Congresses, 69, 198, 383, 771, 862 and Du Bois on color line, 583 and Fauset, 448 Pan-African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa (PAFMESCA), 666 Pan-African Games, 34 Pan-Africanism, 862–865 and A. J. Garvey, 500 and arts, 538 and Black Panther Party, 173, 176 and Du Bois, 62, 69, 382, 862, 1131, 1132 and Fanon, 444–445 and H. S. Williams, 1131 and Harlem Renaissance, 553 and Igbo, 597 and Nyerere, 1043 and Wright, 1153

1-800-368-6868

INDEX See also African Diaspora; African Union; Afrocentrism; Afrofuturism; Blyden, Edward Wilmot; Negrismo; Négritude; N’Krumah, Kwame; Organization of African Unity Pan-Africanism and Communism, 864 Pan-Americanism, 848–849 Pan-Arabism, 909 Panama, 1074 Panama Canal, 92 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 743 “Paper Thin,” 570 Papillon, Jean-François, 390 Papyrus, 405 Paraguay, 865–868, 1072. See also MERCOSUR Paraiba, 1101 Paranda music, 93 Parham, Charles, 875 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 584, 684 Park, Mungo, 441, 1049 Park, Robert E., 108 Parker, Charlie, 649 Parker, Raymond L., 229 Parks, Gordon, 32, 33, 475, 476 Parks, Gordon Jr., 476 Parks, Rosa, 268, 672, 765 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 827 Parr, John, 165, 178 Parra, Pim de la, 479 Parsons, George, 516 Partido Africano de Indepencia de Guine e Capo Verde (PAIGC), 219, 233–234 Partido Autóctono Negro (Uruguay), 1098 Partido Revolucionario Cubano, 319 Pascal-Trouillot, Ertha, 123 The Passenger Cases (U.S.), 603, 605 Paterson, Albion, 624 Patois, Bahamas, 141–142 Patoulet, Jean-Baptiste, 277 Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, 286 www.abc-clio.com

Patronato system, 115 Patternists series, 72 Patti, Adelina, 169–170 Paul, John Warburton, 92, 498 Payne, Amaniyea, 538 Payne, Tom, 478 Payton, Carolyn R., 869 Paz, Octavio, 897 Pazzanita, Anthony G., 739 p’Bitek, Okot, 846 Peace Corps, 868–869 in Benin, 156 in Burkina Faso, 215 in Chad, 258 in Lesotho, 686 in Malawi, 720–721 in Mauritania, 739 in Namibia, 802 in Somalia, 1016 in Togo, 1061 in Uganda, 1088 Peacekeeping and military interventions, 870–875 Peanuts, 242, 302, 1048 and Columbian Exchange, 399 and Yoruba, 1156 Peck, Raoul, 33, 472 Pedro I, Dom, 190 Pelé, 35, 1010, 1068 Pena, Martins, 679–680 Peña Batlle, Manuel Arturo, 374 Peña Gomez, Francisco, 374 Penn, William, 911, 911 Penn Center, 543 Pentecostalism, 16, 17, 875–877 The People’s Case, 1131 Péralte, Charlemagne Masséna, 831, 877–878 Les Percussion de Guinee, 539 Perdicaris, Ion, 775 Pereira dos Santos, Nelson, 33, 477, 478 The Pérez Family, 318 Pérez Jímenez, Marcos, 352 Pérez Prado, Dámaso, 324 El Periquillo sarniento, 752 Permanent Court of International Justice, 685 ABC-CLIO

1199

Perón, Juan, 352 Perrier, Jean-Baptiste, 881 Perry, Lee “Scratch,” 730 Perse, Saint-John, 239, 259 Personal Politics, 462 Peru, 879–880 and IMF, 626 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 and Tupac Amaru, 621, 622, 1055, 1056 Pessoa Câmara, Hélder, 688 Petals of Blood, 1059 Peters, Lenrie, 846 Peterson, Oscar, 476 Pétion, Alexandre Sabés, 881–882, 881, 1021 and Christophe, 263–264, 881–882 and Haitian independence, 547, 881 and Soulouque, 1021 Petit Pays, 227 Pettiaguers, 181 Pharmaceutical companies, 1142 Philip, Marlene Nourbese, 882–883 Philip II, King of Spain, 1029 Philippe, Guy, 124 Phillips, Caryl, 239, 883–884 Phillips, Wendell, 1138 Phoenician culture. See also Black Athena Phosphate, 1061 A Photograph, 986 The Piano Lesson, 32 Piel morena, 1099 Piepmeier, Alison, 460, 461 Pierre-Alype, Marie François Julien, 370 Pietri, Pedro, 907 Pinder, Frank, 624 Pineapples, 302 Piñero, Ignacio, 322 Pinero, Miguel, 907 Pinochet, Augusto, 254, 619, 1056 Pirates, and Bahamas, 142–143 Pirate’s Choice, 892 Pirogues, 181 Pitanga, Antonio, 478 Pitt, William, the Younger, 1127–1128 1-800-368-6868

1200 INDEX Pizarro, Francisco, 302, 879, 901, 1028, 1101 Plácido (Gabirel de la Concepción Valdés), 679 Plague, 397–398, 557 The Plains of Caroni, 975 Planeta Femea, 456 Plantations and plantation systems, 884–886 Planter, 1007–1008 The Pleasures of Exile, 238 Plessy v. Ferguson, 267, 933 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 1125 Poesía negra, 680 Poesías líricas, 679 The Poetry of MCs, 571 The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949, 573, 735 Point du Sable, JeanBaptiste, 602 Polio, 561, 1141 Polk, James, 766–767 Pollard, Velma, 102 Pompa, Ahen, King of Fetu, 465 Ponce de León, Juan, 601, 901, 1028 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 83 Pontiac’s conspiracy, 201 Popular music, American influences on African, 792, 794, 795, 887–894 Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR, Mexico), 1056 Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (Brazil), 1055 The Popular Theatre, 826 Population growth in Africa, 938–940 of people of black African descent in Latin America, 5–6 of people of black African descent in North America, 6 of people of black African descent in the Americas, 4

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of people of black African descent in the Caribbean, 6 Porgy and Bess, 170, 650–651 Portugal and Angola, 104–105 and Guinea-Bissau, 540 and Mozambique, 780–781 and Namibia, 800 and postwar retention of colonies, 343 and São Tomé e Príncipe, 970–971 Portuguese Empire, 894–895 Posey, Cum, 812 Positive Black Soul, 795, 892 Post, Amy, 637 Postcolonial studies, 895–898 Potatoes, 19, 73, 74, 302 and Columbian Exchange, 399 high-yield, 76 Late Blight, 76 The Potter’s Wheel, 599 Powell, Adam Clayton, 175, 507 Powell, Colin, 514, 1036 Powell, Henry, 149 Powell, Kevin, 571 Poyas, Peter, 1108 Pozo, Luciano “Chano, 153, 323–324 Praise Song for the Widow, 702, 734 Prats, Carlos, 254 Pre-Columbian America, 898–902 Caribbean, 900 Central America, 900 contacts with outside world, 901–902 human settlement, 898–899 Mexico, 899–900 North America, 899 South America, 900–901 Pregón de Marimorena, 195, 1099 Preminger, Otto, 475 Présence Africaine, 255, 697 Pressure, 471 Prester John, 134, 428

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Price, Hannibal, 903 Price, Leontyne, 169, 170, 170 Price, Thomas, 1133 Price-Mars, Jean, 831, 902–904, 903 and Voodoo, 1111 Prince, Mary, 160, 904–905 Principles of Sociology, 102 Pringle, Thomas, 905 Prins, Gwyn, 151 Pritchard, Jack, 1108 Promotion of Rural Initiatives and Development Enterprises (PRIDE), 756–757 Prosser, Gabriel, 437, 998 Prosser, Thomas Henry, 495–496 Proust, Marcel, 259 Ptolemy, 439–440 Public Enemy, 565–566 Puente, Tito, 317, 320 Puerto Rico, 906–908 Pure Emotion, 843 Puritans, and Bahamas, 142 Pyramids, 408 Qaddafi, Muammar al-, 258, 695, 909–910, 910 Qadiriyya brotherhood, 52 Al Qaeda, 1053–1054, 1057–1058 and diamonds, 359 Qilombo, 478 Quainton, Anthony Cecil Eden, 253 Quakers, 39, 40, 910–912 Quaque, Philip, 912–913 Quebec City, 486 Quechua, 182, 183, 302 Quesnay, Francois, 746 A Question of Power, 555 Quevedo, Francisco, 954 Quilombo, 913–914. See also Maroons Quilombo, 469–470 Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit, 1115 Quinine, 557 Quinn, William Paul, 65 Quivar, Florence, 171 Quota Act of 1921 (U.S.), 606

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INDEX Ra expeditions, 774 Race Enlightenment views of, 417–418 history of, 915–918 Race, Language, and Culture, 110 Race Matters, 1123 Rada, 1109–1110 Rada, Rubén, 1099 Radio Martí, 918 Radiocarbon testing, 367 Ragtime music, 651 in Africa, 793, 890 Ragtime Sextette, 612 Rahahman, Abdul, 628 Raices de mi Corazon, 473 Railroads, 22 Rainey, Paul, 667 Rainforest Alliance, 1064 A Raisin in the Sun, 32, 549, 550–551, 697 Raising Victor Vargas, 474 Rake-and-scrap, 142 Raleigh, Walter, 200–201 Rameau, Willie, 472 Ramondetti, Miguel, 689 Randall, Dudley, 968 Randolph, A. Philip, 501 Rap music, 30, 479. See also Hip-hop Rape Crisis, 456 “Rapper’s Delight,” 565 Rasha, 794, 892, 924 Rashidi, Runoko, 367 Rassemblement Democratique Africain, 333, 367 Rastafari movement, 640, 918–921 and Selassie, 429, 919, 921, 973 See also Marley, Robert Nesta Rawlings, Jerry John, 520–521 Raynal, Abbé, 711 Read and Company, 312 Reagan, Caroline Dudley, 1120 Reagan, Ronald, 869, 944 and insurgencies, 622 and Tutu, 1085 Reams, Ralph Borden, 215, 822

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Rebennack, Mac, 1111 Reconciliation Sculpture (Benin), 770 Red Cross, 685 The Reds and the Blacks, 668 Reed, Ishmael, 1111 Reena and Other Stories, 734 Reese, Pee Wee, 953 Refugee Relief Act of 1953 (U.S.), 607 Reggae, 30, 641, 921–922 African, 922–924 and African artists, 794 and Alpha Blondy, 314, 794, 891, 923 influence on African pop music, 792 and L. K. Johnson, 655–656 and Notting Hill Carnival in London, 835 in Senegal, 979 women in, 644 See also Marley, Robert Nesta Regla de Ocha. See Santeria Regla de Palo Briyumba, 326 Regla de Palo Mayombe, 326 Regla Kimbisa, 326 Reid, Vernon, 892 Reid, Victor Stafford, 101, 703 Relationality, 525 Religion Africa, 924–929 attack on pre-Columbian Native American beliefs, 17 Caribbean, 930 Central Africa, 930 conflicts in Africa, 350 demography of, in Africa and the Americas, 929–931 diversity of, 15 East Africa, 930 intolerance, 17 Latin America, 930 and mobilization of collective energies, 17–18 mutability of, 1 North Africa, 929–930 North America, 931

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social comprehensiveness of, 15 Southern Africa, 930 syncretism as result of Columbian Exchange, 16, 302 West Africa, 930 See also Christianity; Islam; Obeah Remond, Cornelius Lenox, 97 Renaissance in Haiti, 831 Renchard, George W., 216 Renison, Patrick M., 92 Reparations (slavery and colonialism), 932–938 Reparations Coordinating Committee, 936 Report from Part One, 205 Reproductive health and family planning in Africa, U.S. influence on, 938–946 Restavek, 946–947 The Resurrection of Lazarus, 1041 Retamar, Roberto Fernandez, 240 Retiro, 119 Return to Africa, 166 Return to My Native Land, 809 “The Revolution,” 571 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 1053, 1056, 1058 Revue indigène, 831 Revue Nègre, 1119, 1120 Revue tropique, 239 Rhodes, Cecil, 55, 1159 Rhodesia, 285 and Mozambique, 781 and Nyasaland, 720 See also Zambia; Zimbabwe Rhone, Trevor, 101–102 Rhys, Jean, 238 Ribeiro, Júlio, 680 Rice, 20–21, 74–75 and African cultivation experience, 1048 in the African diaspora, 947–952 Brazil, 949–950 and Columbian Exchange, 398, 399

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1202 INDEX Rice (continued) and demand for slaves, 1005 and plantations, 884 Portugal, 949 See also Green Revolution Rice, Condoleezza, 1036 Rich, Matty, 476 “Richard trajo su flauta,” 773 Richards, Arthur, 498 Riché, Jean-Baptiste, 1021 Rickey, Branch, 952 Rigaud, André, 357, 831, 881 and Haitian independence, 547 and Soulouque, 1021 Rihlah, 440 Riley, James, 739 Rio, 40 Graus, 478 Rio de Janeiro, 1101, 1102, 1104 Rio Zona Norte, 33, 477 Rites and Reason, 379 Rivarola, Pantaleón, 679 The River Where Blood Is Born, 1069 Rivera, Diego, 533 Rivera, Ismael, 474 Rivera, Pedro, 474 Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots, 186 Roach, Max, 649 The Roaring Lion, 223, 224 Robbins, Warren M., 1009 Roberts, J. Deotis, 690 Roberts, Joseph Jenkins, 693 Robeson, Paul, 170, 475, 657 and Freedom, 550 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” 29 Robinson, Jack Roosevelt, 34–35, 742, 811–812, 813, 952–954, 952 Robinson, Jonathan, 474 Robinson, Randall, 936, 1124 Robinson, Richard, 67 Rochereau, Tabu Ley, 793 Rock and roll, 793–794 Rock Steady Crew, 569 Rock’a Mambo, 1020 Rockefeller Foundation, 530 Rockers, 471 Rodgers, John, 1077 Rodman, Selden, 831 Rodney, Walter, 1015

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Rodrigues, Jan, 704 Rodríguez, Arsenio, 322 Rodríguez de Francia, José Gaspar, 866 Rogers, Guy, 168 Rogers, Joel C., 720, 1040 Rogers, Woodes, 142–143 Rohlehr, Frederick Gordon, 223 Rolando, Gloria, 469, 473, 983 Roldán, Amadeo, 324 Romeu, Antonio María, 152 Rommel, Erwin, 1147–1148, 1148 Ronaldo, 35 La Rondes Vodu, 472 Roopnaraine, Rupert, 478 Roosevelt, Franklin D. and Atlantic Charter, 584 and Casablanca Conference, 49 and Good Neighbor Policy, 528–529 visit to the Gambia, 498 Roosevelt, Theodore and B. T. Washington, 1117 Big Stick policy, 528 and Duquesne, 356 and J. W. Johnson, 654 and Monroe Doctrine, 767 visit to Kenya, 668 Roots: Essays in Caribbean Literature, 187 Roots: Saga of an American Family, 32, 497, 548–549, 548, 702 Rosas de Oquendo, Mateo, 954–955 Rose, Benjamin, 725, 774 Rosewood, Florida, race riot, 935 Rossen, Robert, 475 Rotimi, Ola, 827 Roumain, Jacques, 239, 831 and Guillén, 533 and Hughes, 573 and Price-Mars, 904 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 417 “Roxanne’s Revenge,” 570 Roy, Chunilal, 215 Royal Adventurers Company, 497, 746

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Royal African Company, 232, 305–306, 465, 725, 746, 955–956 and Cape Coast Castle, 992 and the Gambia, 497 See also Company of Merchants Trading to Africa Royal Navy, 961 and abolition, 45–46, 54 and impressment, 68 and opening of Africa, 46 See also African Squadrons Ruanda-Urundi, 216 Rubber, 21, 886 Rude, 476 Rue Cases Nègres, 33, 471–472 Ruiz, Jose, 99 Rumba, 29, 30, 321, 322–323 in Africa, 793, 890 See also Soukous music and dance Running, 34 Ruoff, E. G. “Jay,” 725–726 Russell, Tiller, 474 Rustin, Bayard, 507 Ruth, Babe, 742 Rwanda, 216–217, 956–957 genocide and religious conflict, 17, 510, 870, 873 and humanitarian assistance, 589, 591 Hutu-Tutsi conflicts, 513–514 truth and reconciliation commission, 1072 and U.S./UN reluctance to intervene, 514 and war with Congo, 309–310 See also Hutu; Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front, 619, 623 Ryneveld, Pierre van, 139 Rysanek, Leonie, 169 Sab, 137, 138 Sabasaba music, 791 Sacks, Karen, 463 Sadat, Muhammad Anwar el-, 407, 959–961, 960, 1055

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INDEX Sadik, Nafis, 945 Sadler, James Hayes, 1087 Sahara Desert, 442 Said, Edward, 897 Said Pasha, 410 Sailors, 961–963 black, under Columbus, 601 See also Kru sailors Saint. See also entries beginning with St. Saint Croix, and Danish, 337–338 Saint Domingue, 373, 486–487 refugees migrating to U.S., 603–604 See also Haiti Saint Kitts and Nevis, 963–966 Revolt of 1639, 966–967 Saint-Exúpery, Antoine de, 140 Saint-Laurent, Philippe Roume de, 712 Une saison au Congo, 256 Sakpata Boys, 156, 795, 893 Salafia Jihadia, 775–776 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 219 Salkey, Andrew, 102, 234, 736 Salsa, 320. See also Cruz, Celia Salt, 481, 1100 Salt-N-Pepa, 570, 571 Salto al Atlantico, 474–475 Salvador, 1103–1104 Salzman, Glen, 476 Sam, Tirésias Simon, 903 Sam, Vilbrun Gauillaume, 903 Sam Sharpe’s Rebellion, 639 Samara, Noah, 7 Samba, 14, 29, 30 and Brazil, 191–192, 192, 193 Sambo’s grave, 967–968 Sambola, Joseph, 820 Sampaio, Oswaldo, 478 San Basilio, 287 San Martín, José de, 774 San Martin, Ramon Grau, 320 San, 669, 800, 1023, 1159 Sánchez, Francisco, 373

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Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 240 Sanchez, Sonia, 176, 968 Sancho, Ignatius, 196–197, 1125, 1130 Sancious, David, 892 Sanders, Pharoah, 649, 794, 892 Sandinistas, 819–820, 1012 Sankara, Thomas, 215, 1013 Sankofa (film), 469 Sankofa (film and video collective), 471 Sankoh, Foday, 989, 990 Sano, Mohammed Kemoko, 539 Sansaricq, Bernard, 393 Santana, Carlos, 892 Santana, Pedro, 373 Santeria, 16, 325, 526, 569, 1066 and flying Africans, 480 Santiago de Chile, 265 Santo Domingo, 372. See also Dominican Republic Santos Arrascaeta, Beatriz, 968–970 Santos Zelaya, José, 820 Sao Paolo, 265 São Tomé e Príncipe, 970–971 Sapir, Edward, 108–109 Sarah’s Psalm, 853 Sarduy, Severo, 240 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 971–972 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 444, 810 Sasakawa, Ryoichi, 531 Savacou, 234 Savage, Augustus, 210 Savimbi, Jonas, 105–106 Sawyer, Amos C., 693 Sawyer, Raymond, 985 Saya music, 184 Schaller, George B., 956 Schmelzenbach, Harmon F., 1040 Schoelcher, Victor, 713 Schomburg, Arthur Alfonso, 972–973 Schuyler, Philippa Duke, 1068 Schwartz-Bart, Simone, 240 Schweinfurth, Georg, 440 Schwerner, Michael, 270, 271

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1203

SCLC. See Southern Christian Leadership Conference Scottsboro Boys, 682 Seabrook, Jeremy, 1051–1052 Seacole, Mary, 642, 1069 Seaga, Edward, 640–641 Seale, Bobby, 83, 171–172, 175 Search Sweet Country, 677 Second-Class Citizen, 414 Segalen, Victor, 259 Segou: Les Murailles de terre, 307 Segundo, Juan Luis, 250, 689 Seko, Mobutu Sese, 86, 254, 256, 311–312, 715 favoring of own ethnic group, 347–348 Selassie I, Haile, 284, 429, 973–974, 978 and Marson, 735 and Rastafari movement, 429, 919, 921, 973 speaking to League of Nations, 684 visit to Jamaica, 920 See also Rastafari movement Selig, Bud, 954 Selika, Marie, 169 Selim the Sot, Sultan, 1029 Selma, Alabama, 271 Selvon, Samuel Dickson, 154, 974–975 Sembene, Ousmane, 466, 470 Sendero Luminoso, 1053–1054, 1055, 1056, 1058 Senegal, 975–979 agriculture, 76 ethnic groups, 433 slave trade–oriented historical museums, 785 and soccer, 1010–1011 Senghor, Leopold, 239, 696, 701, 744, 977–978, 979–980, 979 and négritude, 344, 809, 810, 979, 980 and noirisme, 832 and Price-Mars, 904 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 303

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1204 INDEX Seraph on the Suwanee, 594 Serengeti Natonal Park, 1043 Seven Years’ War, 88–89, 201 Sewall, William G. “Billy,” 370 Seward, William Henry, 91, 411 Sexual Politics, 459–460 Sexuality and the Black Church, 691 Seychelles, 980–981 Seydou, Conte, 536 Seymour, William Joseph, 16, 875, 876 Shabazz, Betty, 981–982, 982. See also Malcolm X Shabazz, Menelik, 251, 471 Shaft, 476 Shaka, 54–55, 1023 Shakespeare, Robbie, 793, 890, 924 Shakur, Assatta, 983 Shakur, Tupac Amaru, 983–984, 984 Shakur, Zayd, 983 Shange, Ntozake, 857, 984–987 Shango, 504–505 Sharpe, Granville, 45, 61, 64, 989, 990 and Somerset, 197 Sharpe, Sam, 639 Sharpeville Massacre, 987–988, 1024 Shaw, Artie, 648 Shaw, George Bernard, 743–744 She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, 882 Shell Oil, 389 Shelton, Millicent, 571 Sherbrooke, John, 837–838 Sherlock, Philip, 101 Shimmy, 1119 Shinn, David H., 215 Shipbuilding Bermuda, 159 See also Boatbuilding Shirley, George, 171 Shriver, Robert Sargent Jr., 868–869 Shufeldt, Robert W., 109 Shuffer, J. J., 300 Shuffle Along, 1120

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Shultz, George, 394 Shuttlesworth, Fred, 268 Siad Barre, Mohammed, 872, 1016–1017 Sickle cell disorder, 557 Sierra Leone, 60–61, 63, 988–990 and the African Institution, 64 and AME Church, 67 and Blucke, 178 and Blyden, 179, 180 and diamonds, 358, 359 funding of revolutionary group by diamond sales, 623 guerrilla violence against population, 619 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 and World War I, 1144 See also Cuffe, Captain Paul Sierra Leone Company, 990–991 Sierra Leone Independence Movement, 180 Le silence de la forêt, 529 Silva e Heitor, Ismael, 191–192 Silveira da Luz, Robson, 779 Silver, 23, 613–614 and Spanish Empire, 1028 Silver, April, 571 “Simmer Down,” 730 Simon, Nel, 769 Simon, Sharon, 474 Simon-Baptiste, Suzanne, 710 Simpson, Charles William, 774 Singh, Hari Prasad, 1072 Singleton, John, 476 Sinhá Moça, 478 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 354 Sissie, 1135 Sister Souljah, 571 Sisters in the Wilderness, 691 Sistren Theater Collective, 239 Sisulu, Walter, 991–992, 1024 Sit-ins, 270 Sitting in Limbo, 476 Ska music, 730 Sketches of My Culture, 1124

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Skinner, Elliott, 215 Slave Coast, 59, 60, 233, 480, 517 and French Empire, 487–488 memorials, 769–770 Slave forts, 992–994 Slave Importation Act of 1807 (U.S.), 68 Slave narratives, 696, 994–997 See also Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw; Travel writing Slave revolts, 997–1000 Bahia, 628 Brazil, 997 Creole Revolt, 314–315 Cuba, 318 Haiti (1791), 39–40, 547–548, 997–998 Jamaica, 638, 639, 997 Louisiana, 998 memorials, 769 Mexico, 997 and Muslim slaves, 628–629 Netherlands Antilles, 817 New York City (1712), 39 Saint Domingue, 487 Saint Kitts and Nevis, 964, 966–967 San Miguel de Gualdape, 997 Santo Domingo, 372 South Carolina, 1107, 1108 Virginia, 998–999 See also Amistad case, The; Gabriel; Turner, Nat; Vesey, Denmark Slave Ship, 148 Slave Song, 331 Slave trade, 3–4, 7, 21 Slave trade Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 (Britain), 40, 68, 202 and African diaspora, 361 and Angola, 894, 1004 and Bantu, 674 and Côte d’Ivoire, 313, 488 and Dahomey, 155

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INDEX and Danish Empire, 336 and Dutch, 385, 386–387, 389 and Dutch West India Company, 815–816 effect on Africa, 12, 21 effect on African coastal kingdoms, 1101 English participation in, 746 and French Empire, 487–488 and Gabon, 493, 494 and the Gambia, 497, 976 and gender and sexual diversity, 504–505 and Ghana, 516–517 and Guinea, 534 historical roots, 1004–1005 and Igbo, 597–598 and Kongo, 308, 488 and Kru sailors, 674 and Madagascar, 718 and Mozambique, 781 and Muslims, 1004 numbers of Africans enslaved, 1005, 1101 and Peru, 879 and Portugal, 894, 992, 1101 and pre-colonial Sudan, 1101 and rice, 949 and Senegal, 976–977, 1004 and Sierra Leone, 988–989 and Sudan, 144–145, 1004 trans-Saharan, 1100 Uruguay, 1096–1098 and West Africa, 57, 58–60 and Yoruba, 1155 See also Abolitionism; Amistad case, The; Brussels Act; Calabar; Cape Coast Castle; Cape Verde; Company of Merchants Trading to Africa; Elmina slave castle; Middle passage; Royal African Company; Slave forts; Slavery

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Slave Trade Act of 1819 (U.S.), 68 Slavery, 21 in Africa, 42–43, 51, 53, 54, 58–59 and African burial customs, 212–213 Antigua and Barbuda, 112, 115 and Atlantic World, 135 Bahamas, 143 Barbados, 149–150 Bermuda, 115, 159 Brazil, 119, 189–190 and British Empire, 201 Caribbean, 115 Central America, 87–91 Chile, 261–262 Colombia, 286, 287–288 and Columbian Exchange, 302 and Columbus, 303 Cuba, 138–139, 318–319, 321, 325 and cultural mutability, 12 Curaçao, 816 Danish Caribbean islands, 337–338 and De las Casas, 243–244, 546 economics, 1000–1004 escaping from, 999 and exodus concept, 437–438 Ethiopia, 974 Guyana, 543 Haiti, 373, 546–547 and hiring out, 1001 history, 1004–1007 and Industrial Revolution, 613–616, 1046–1047 Jamaica, 638 Latin America, 41–42 Mexico, 750–751 monuments and memorials, 769–770 museums, 783–786 Netherlands Antilles, 816–817 Nevis, 963–964 Nicaragua, 820 Paraguay, 865 Peru, 879–880

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1205

and Portuguese Empire, 894–895 and provision grounds, 1001 reparations, 932–938 Saint Kitts, 963–964 Santo Domingo, 372 São Tomé e Príncipe, 970–971 Suriname, 1038 and triangular trade, 614–615 Trinidad and Tobago, 1070–1071 Turks Islands, 160 undermining, 999 Uruguay, 1096–1098 Virgin Islands, 115 and Yoruba, 1155–1156 See also Abolitionism; Architecture: plantation; Code Noir; Restavek; Slave trade Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 (Britain), 45 Slavery and Freedom, 1002 Slavery and the Numbers Game, 1001–1002 Sleeping sickness. See Trypanosomiasis Sleeping with the Dictionary, 782 Sleet, Moneta Jr., 397 Slovo, Joe, 662 A Small Place, 670 Smallpox, 302, 397–398, 556, 1141 Smalls, Robert, 961, 1007–1008, 1007 Smile Orange, 101–102 Smith, A. Donaldson, 1016 Smith, Adam, 616, 746, 747 Smith, Amanda, 67 Smith, Bessie, 506–507 Smith, David, 65 Smith, Ian, 781, 1160 Smith, John N., 476 Smith, Mikey, 656, 776, 1008–1009 Smith, William Benjamin, 109 Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 (U.S.), 1109 Smitherman, Geneva, 484

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1206 INDEX Smithsonian African Art Museum, 1009–1010 Smooth, Joe, 438 Smuts, Jan, 1145 SNCC. See Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Snider, Duke, 953 The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 668 Sobhuza I, King of Swaziland, 54–55, 1039–1040 Sobhuza II, King of Swaziland, 1040 Sobrado house, 1103 Sobukwe, Robert, 987 Soccer, 33, 35, 1010–1011 Brazil, 193 World Cup, 34 Socialism, 1011–1015 ujamaa (Tanzania), 1042–1043 Society for Gradual Abolition of Slavery, 639 Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 583 Society for the Suppression of Vice, 1128 Sofola, Zulu, 827 Sokoto Caliphate, 52, 1015–1016 Solano López, Francisco, 867 Solás, Humberto, 33, 473 Sollett, Peter, 474 Solomon, King, 660–661 Solomonic dynasty, 428 Somalia, 248, 1016–1017 and Cold War, 284 and Egypt, 1016 and humanitarian assistance, 591 relations with U.S., 1016 U.S. intervention in, 514, 872–873, 1017 Somers, George, 159 Somerset, James, 197 Somerset case (Britain), 45 Somoza Debayle, Anastasio, 352 Son music, 30, 320, 321, 322, 324. See also Soukous music and dance and Guillén, 533

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Song of Solomon, 702, 777, 778, 779 Songhay (medieval empire), 1017–1020, 1100 Songs of Jamaica, 743 Soninke, 522 Sonthonax, Félicité-Léger, 711 Sorghum, 20, 74, 948–949, 951 Sotho, 807, 1023 Soukous music and dance, 489, 1020–1021 Soul Clap Hands and Sing, 733 Soul Makossa, 652, 793, 890 Soul music, 30 influence on African pop music, 792, 890 Soul Survivor, 476 Soulouque, Faustin, 548, 832, 1021–1022, 1110 The Souls of Black Folk, 382–383, 553, 818, 1116–1117, 1131 Sousa, John Philip, 611 South Africa and AME Church, 67 and anticommunism, 285 and diamonds, 21, 358 and exodus concept, 437 and Haiti, 6–7 history and politics, 1023–1026 and HIV prevention, 575, 576 independence movement, 1024–1025 and jazz, 651–652 Land Act of 1913, 21 pre-colonial, 55–56 and socialism, 1012 and state terrorism, 1056 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 935, 1026, 1072, 1073, 1074 and war in Congo, 310 See also Mandela, Nelson; Ndebele; Sharpeville Massacre South American Soccer Federation (CONMEBOL), 1010

ABC-CLIO

South Carolina, and African rice cultivation, 947–948 South West Africa German genocide of Herero, 512 See also Namibia South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), 799, 801, 802, 1053, 1055 Southern Africa Customs Union, 749–750 Southern African Development Community (SADC), 1065, 1066 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 268, 270, 271, 1033 and Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, 301 Soviet Union and Angola, 255 and Cuba, 248 See also Cold War Soybeans, 74 Soyinka, Wole, 31, 63, 825, 827, 846, 972, 1026–1027, 1026 and Okigbo, 846 Spain and Equatorial Guinea, 421–422 and Jamaica, 638 and Puerto Rico, 906, 908 Spalding, Thomas, 119–120, 121 Spanish Black Legend, 244 Spanish Empire, 1027–1032 Spanish-American War, 1090 “Special English,” 1109 Speke, John Hanning, 440 Spell #7, 986 Spence, Thomas, 1117 Spencer, Herbert, 102, 772 Spengler, Oswald, 681 Spielberg, Steven, 470 Spinderella, 570 Spirit of Dance, 986 Spiritual androgyny, 505–506 Spirituals, 888–889

1-800-368-6868

INDEX Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 897–898 Sports, 33–35 and segregation, 34 Spring in New Hampshire, 744 Squash, 302 St. See also entries beginning with Saint St. Eustatius, 386, 388 “St. Louis Blues,” 647 Standard Oil, 312 Stanley, Henry Morton, 105, 440, 441 Stanton, Edwin M., 95 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 458, 1138 Stanton, Henry B., 1138 A State of Independence, 883 Statute of Westminster of 1931, 204 Stauffacher, John, 667 Steamboats, 22 Stedman, John, 1039 Steel pan music, 30, 223. See also Calypso Steele, Charles, 268 Steinberg, Donald K., 106 Sterne, Lawrence, 196–197 Stewart, Margaret M., 721 Stimson, Henry, 528 Stone, Charles, 409 Stools, 132 Storia Meravigliosa, 145 Story, Joseph, 100 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 40–41, 346, 700, 1032–1033, 1033 Straight Out of Brooklyn, 476 “A Stranger in the Village,” 1069 A Street in Bronzeville, 205 Stride Towards Freedom, 672 Stuart-Young, Brian, 478 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 175, 270, 271, 1033–1034 Sturge, Joseph, 1133, 1138 Styron, William, 1135 Suárez y Romero, Alselmo, 680 Sucre Amer, 33, 472 Sudan, 50, 203

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civil wars, 512, 621 Darfur region, 1034–1036 genocide and religious conflict, 17 and humanitarian assistanc, 591 and IMF, 626, 627 as part of Egyptian Empire, 410 pre-colonial trade, 1101 Sudanese troops constituting Bataillon Negre Egyptien, 410–411 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 See also Darfur genocide; Dinka Sudan Interior Mission, 214 Suez Canal, 202, 425 Sufism, 926 Sugar, 21, 25, 74, 302, 976 Antigua and Barbuda, 112 Barbados, 149–150 Brazil, 894 Central America, 88 and Columbian Exchange, 398 Cuba, 616 and demand for slaves, 1005 and French Empire, 487 Guyana, 543 Jamaica, 638, 639, 640, 641 Mauritius, 740 and plantations, 884, 885, 886, 894 Saint Croix, 337–338 Saint Domingue, 486 Saint John, 337 Saint Kitts and Nevis, 964 Saint Thomas, 337 São Tomé e Príncipe, 970 and slavery, 44, 45–46 and Spanish Empire, 1028 Suriname, 1038, 1039 and transculturation, 1066 Trinidad and Tobago, 1070–1071 Sugar Cane Alley, 469 Sugar Hill Gang, 564, 565 Suicide, 480 Sukarno, 832

ABC-CLIO

1207

Sula, 777, 779 Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan, 1029 Sullivan, Joseph Gerard, 106 Summers, Lawrence, 1123 Sumner, Charles, 604–605 The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me, 160–161 Sundiata, 1036 Sundiata Keita and Sundiata Epic, 1037–1038 Sunlight on Sweet Water, 524 Sunnis, 48 Superfly, 476 Sur l’Autre Rive, 707 Suriname, 385, 386–387, 1038–1039 Survival, 731 Suso, Foday Musa, 498 Sutherland, Efua, 101 Swange dance, 829 Swanzy, Henry, 154 Swayne, Eric John Eagles, 92 Swaziland, 1039–1040 Sweet potatoes, 242, 302 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, 475 Sweet-Escott, Ernest, 92 Swing music, 648–649 Syphilis, 302 and Columbian Exchange, 398 See also Tuskegee syphilis experiment Tacky, 638, 842 Tacon, Miguel de, 318 Taft, William Howard, 767 Tainos, 142, 302, 900, 902 and Santo Domingo, 372, 375 Tal, Umar, 52–53 Talbot, Richard Hewitt, 216 Tales from the Heart, 308 Talking and Testifying, 484 Tallet, Ramón Guirao y Zacarías, 681 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 604 Tam Tam Mandingue, 539 Tambimutto, M. J., 154 Tambo, Oliver, 1024 Tamex, Elsa, 689 Taney, Roger, 381, 603

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1208 INDEX “Tanga,” 153 Tangier, 774, 775 Tango, 1099 Tanna, Laura, 101 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 33, 1041–1042 Tanzania, 1042–1043 and Cold War, 283 and Hutu, 596 and killing of Arabs, 512 and U.S. aid, 625 See also Nyerere, Julius Tap dancing, 29 Tappan, Lewis, 96 Tarte, Yvon C., 215 Tawfiq, K. Ahmad, 631 Taylor, Cecil, 649 Taylor, Charles, 63, 372, 693–694, 1043–1044, 1044 Taylor, Elizabeth (of Jamaica), 642 Taylor, William, 105 Taylor-Greenfield, Elizabeth, 169 Tchicaya U Tam’si, 1044–1046 Tchrkin, 545 Teatro Negro Independiente (Uruguay), 1098 Tea, and fair trade, 1062, 1063, 1064 Technology transfers, 1046–1049 Tecora, 99 Teer, Barbara Ann, 379, 857 Teheran Conference on Human Rights , 940 Tehuelches, 900 Television in Africa, American influence on, 1049–1052 Tell My Horse, 594, 595 Tellier, Théophile Antoine Pascal, 822 Tennis, 34 Tennyson, Alfred, 772 Tenochtitlán, 302, 899–900, 1028, 1100, 1101 Teotihuacán, 899 The Terror and the Time, 478 Terrorism, 1052–1058 Les Têtes Brulées, 227 Tewodros II, Emperor of Ethiopia, 429 www.abc-clio.com

Texaco, 258, 259 The Thankful Poor, 1041 Théatre de l’éclair, 375 Theatre of Cruelty, 148 Their Eyes Were Watching God, 109, 554, 594 Thelma, Lady, 224 A Theology of Hope, 689 Theology of Liberation, 688 Thevet, André, 768 Things Fall Apart, 46–47, 335, 597, 825 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 703, 1058–1059 Third African Population Conference, 940 Third World Collective, 985 13X, Clarence, 479 Thirteenth Amendment (U.S. Constitution), 41, 274 Thomas, Piri, 474, 907 Thomas, Valerie, 251 Thompson, Ann, 642 Thompson, Era Bell, 396 Thompson, Smith, 99 Thompson, Thomas, 912 Through Her Eyes, 689 Through the Dark Continent, 441 Through Unknown African Countries, 1016 Thurman, Wallace, 553 Tierou, Alphonse, 540 Tijanyya brotherhood, 52–53 Till, Emmett, 270 Timbuktu, 724, 725, 774, 1018, 1100 Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 1001–1002 Tissue culture, 162 Titanic (film), 1060 Titanic (ship), 1059–1060 Titanic (song), 1059–1060 Titanic Blues, 1059 Tito, Josip Broz, 832, 833 Tiv people, 480, 829 To My Husband from Iowa, 599, 698 To Sir With Love, 523–524 “To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals,” 206 ABC-CLIO

Tobacco, 19, 21, 74, 75, 302, 1048 and Columbian Exchange, 399 and Cuba, 318 and demand for slaves, 1005 and plantations, 884, 885 and Spanish Empire, 1028 and transculturation, 1066 Togo, 1060–1061 and HIV prevention, 575 and U.S. aid, 625 Tolbert, William R. Jr., 371, 693 Tolson, Melvin B., 438 Toltecs, 899 Tolton, Augustus, 250 Tomatoes, 302 and Columbian Exchange, 399 Tombalbaye, N’Garta, 258 Tontons Macoutes, 392, 393 Toomer, Jean, 109, 553, 1061–1062 Topeka Revival, 875 Toro, David, 352 Torre, Haya de la, 848–849 Torres, Edwin, 240 Tosh, Peter, 730, 921, 923 Toure, Ali Farka, 794, 891 Touré, Sadan Moussa, 535 Touré, Sékou, 534–535, 536, 539 Tovalou-Houenou, Kojo, 862, 863 Townsend, Robert, 476 Trachoma, 1141 Trade, fair, 1062–1065 Trade networks, 1046 Trade zones, African, 1065–1066 Trail of Tears, 511 TransAfrica, 936 Transculturation, 1066–1068 TransFair, 1064–1065 Travel writing, 1068–1070. See also Slave narratives Treaty of Asunción, 749 Treaty of Lagos, 62 Treaty of Paris (1763), 486 Treaty of Paris (1898), 319 Treaty of Ryswick (1697), 546 Tree Tall Woman, 782 Trent, Joe, 1119 1-800-368-6868

INDEX The Trial, 446 Triangular trade, 614–615 described, 758–759 and Kru sailors, 675 See also Middle passage A Tribe Called Quest, 571 Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra, 834 Trinidad and Tobago, 204, 1070–1072 and C. L. R. James, 646 and Carnival, 241–242 See also Notting Hill Carnival in London Tristão, Nuño, 541 Tropicália movement, 194 Tropiques, 696 Trotha, Lothar von, 512, 800 Trotter, Monroe, 818 Il Trovatore, 170 Trueba, Fernando, 843 Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leónidas, 246 , 339, 352, 374 Truman, Harry S., 253, 624 Truth, Sojourner, 40, 461, 1075–1076, 1075 “Ain’t I a Woman?,” 458–459, 1076 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, 935, 1026, 1072–1075 Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), 560 and Médecins Sans Frontières, 745 Tshombe, Moise, 714, 715 Tsvangirai, Morgan, 1160–1161 Tuberculosis, 557, 1141 and Médecins Sans Frontières, 745 Tubman, Harriet, 438, 999, 1076, 1076 Tuff Gong studios, 794, 923 Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riot, 935–936, 1074 Tuman, Dankara, 1036, 1037 Tunis, 1102 Tunisia, 1077–1078 and Cold War, 49 and U.S. aid, 625 Tunisian Combatant Group, 1058 Tunney, John, 216 www.abc-clio.com

Tupac Amaru (Peru), 621, 622, 1055, 1056 Tupinamba Indians, 768 Ture, Samori, 53 A Turn in the South, 798 Turner, Henry McNeal, 67 Turner, Nat, 380, 994, 998–999, 1078–1079 illustration of rebellion, 1078 Turner: New and Selected Poems, 331 Tuskegee Airmen, 1079–1080, 1079 Tuskegee Institute, 242, 1080 Tuskegee syphilis experiment, 1080–1081 Tutsi, 216–217, 1081–1082 conflicts with Hutu, 513–514, 596, 956–957 and Hutu, 595–596 Tutu, Desmond, 690–691, 1082–1086, 1083 and homosexual rights, 508 and Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1073, 1074, 1082, 1085 Twa, 595 The Twist, 891 2 Live Crew, 566 Two Races, 856–857 Tye, Colonel, 97–98 Tynes, Maxine, 230 Ubangi-Shari, 252, 257. See also Central African Republic Uganda, 1087–1089 and HIV prevention, 580 and Lord’s Resistance Army, 623 mass killings in, 513 and Rwandan Patriotic Front, 619 and sexual diversity, 508 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 and U.S. aid, 625 and war with Congo, 309–310 See also Amin, Idi ABC-CLIO

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Uganda’s Katakiro in England, 1069 Ugho dance, 829 Ujamaa socialism, 1042–1043 La Última Cena, 33, 207, 469, 473 Um é Pouço, Dois é Bom, 478 Umar, Al-Hajj, 52–53, 61 Umbanda, 16, 194 Umbundu: Folk Tales from Angola, 105 Uncivil Wars, 937 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (novel), 40–41, 138, 346, 1032, 1033 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (play), 380 Underground Railroad, 999–1000, 1076 UNESCO. See United Nations: Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Union of South Africa, 203 Unitarian Church, 1117–1118 United Africa Company, 860 United Black Movement, 455–456 United Fruit Company, 640 United Gold Coast Convention, 518–519 United Islamic Society of America, 82 United Kingdom and abolitionism, 40, 43–46, 44 and Jamaican immigrants, 157, 199 people of African origin and descent, 196–200 and postwar retention of colonies, 343 and West Indian immigrants, 234 See also Britain; British Commonwealth; British Empire; Notting Hill Carnival in London United Nations, 1089–1093 and Bunche, 209 Commission on Human Rights, 585–586 1-800-368-6868

1210 INDEX United Nations (continued) Conference on the Environment (1992), 456 Convention on the Rights of the Child, 946 and definitions of terrorism, 1054 development of, 584–585 Disaster Relief Office (UNDRO), 590 Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), 1091–1092 Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 1093–1094 Food and Agriculture Organization, 590 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 1142 General Assembly, 1091 High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 589 International Court of Justice (World Court), 1092 and Namibia, 801–802 Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 588 peacekeeping and interventions, 872–874 Population Fund, 941, 942, 944, 945 Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 589 Secretariat, 1092 Security Council, 1091 and Somali intervention, 872–873 Trusteeship Council, 1092 UNICEF, 947 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 586, 940, 1092 World Food Programme (WFP), 588, 590 World Health Organization, 590, 1141–1142

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See also Peacekeeping and military interventions United Self-Defense Forces/ Groups of Colombia (AUC), 1056, 1058 United States and African environmentalism, 420 and African immigrants, 63 and African ironworkers, 627 anticommunist policies in Africa, 348–349 anticommunist policies in Latin America, 348–349, 352–353 and Congo, 308–309, 311–313 and Cuba, 319 and Cuban immigrants, 606, 609 Development Loan Fund, 624–625 and Dominican Republic, 373–374 and Gabon, 494 and Haiti, 392, 393, 394 and HIV prevention, 578–580, 581 and immigrants from Saint Domingue, 603–604 immigration, 601–610 law against importation of slaves, 603 and Liberia, 371–372 and Morocco, 774, 775–776 and Puerto Rico, 906–908 and reparations, 1074 and Somalia, 1016–1017 See also Cold War; Peace Corps; entries beginning with U.S. United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 155–156, 283, 588, 1105–1106 and family planning, 941–943 and Gabon, 494 and Kennedy, 624

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and Latin America, 624 on microfinance, 756 and Nigeria, 624–625 and Uganda, 625 United States Colored Troops, 1094–1095 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 177, 500, 501, 553, 973, 1095–1096 Up from Slavery, 697, 1116 “Upon Westminster Bridge,” 1008 Upper Volta, 214 Uprising, 731 Urban League, 271 Urban Think Tank Industry, 571 Urbanization, 1100–1105 Urdaneta, Andres de, 1029 Uribe, Alvaro, 353 Uruguay, 1096–1100. See also MERCOSUR U.S. See also United States U.S. Department of Agriculture, 75 U.S. Marines in Dominican Republic, 766 in Haiti, 878, 903 in Nicaragua, 819 U.S. Slave Trade Act (1808), 1005 U.S. Steel, 23 Valderrama, Carlos, 1011 Valdivia, Pedro de, 902 Valéry, Paul, 259 Van Buren, Martin, 100 Van Der Zee, James, 33 Van Peebles, Melvin, 32, 475 Van Sertima, Ivan, 367 Van Vechten, Carl, 553 Vanderhorst, Richard H., 301 Vanilla, 302 Vargas, Getúlio, 190, 352 Varley, Cromwell, 775 Vasquez, Gaddi H., 869 Vassas, Gustavas. See Equiano, Olaudah Vaudoux. See Voodoo Veeck, Bill, 858

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INDEX Velázquez, Diego, 243, 318, 1028 Veloso, Caetano, 194 Velvetbean, 79 Venereal disease, 1141 Venezuela and democracy, 353 and globalization, 527 and IMF, 627 and socialism, 1014 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 Verrett, Shirley, 171 Versos Sencillos, 737 Vesey, Denmark, 437, 961, 962, 998, 1107–1109 Vesey, Robert, 1107, 1108 Vespucci, Amerigo, 901 Victoria Falls, 1158 Videla, Jorge Rafael, 252 La vie Scelerate, 307 Vieira, João Bernardo “Nino,” 540 La Vielle Quimboiseuse et le Majordome, 472 Vietnam, and Black Panther Party, 173 Villa, Alfredo de, 474 Villard, Henry Serrano, 739 Villarroel, Gualberto, 352 Villaverde, Cecilia, 680 Ville Cruelle, 227 Virchow, Rudolph, 109 Virginia Company, 201 Virginia Jubilee Singers, 651 Virgo, Clement, 476 Visual arts, 33 As Vítimas Algozes, 680 Vodun. See Voodoo A Voice from Bleeding Africa, 180 Voice of America, 286, 918, 1109 Voodoo, 16, 489, 569, 1109–1111 and Benin, 155, 156 and F. Duvalier, 391, 392 and flying Africans, 480 Price-Mars on, 904 Vorster, B. J., 1084 Voting Rights Act of 1965 (U.S.), 166, 271 A Voz do Carnaval, 477

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Waddell, Rube, 812 Waddington, Eubule John, 1157 Wade, Abdoulaye, 978 Wahab, Mohammad Abd el-, 408 Wahaj, Siraj, 633 Wailer, Bunny, 730, 921 The Wailers, 730, 794, 921 Waiting for the Barbarians, 280 Walcott, Derek, 32, 238–239, 702, 703, 827, 1113 Walker, Alice, 691, 702, 839, 1114 influence of Hurston on, 595 Walker, C. J., 546 Walker, David, 998–999 Walker, George, 378 Walker, Moses Fleetwood, 811 Walker, William, 90–91 Walling, William E., 108 Walmsley, Anne, 235 Walters, Alexander, 382 Wan Pipel, 479 War of 1812. See Nova Scotia: black refugees in War of the Pacific, 185 War of the Triple Alliance, 866–867 War on Terror, 1057 Ward, Frederick, 229 Warfield, William, 170 Warner, Willard, 605 Warner-Vieyra, Myriam, 1114–1115 Washington, Booker T., 31, 109, 1069, 1115–1117, 1116 and Du Bois, 383, 818, 1116–1117 as Igbo descendant, 598 influence on Garvey, 501 and literature, 696, 697 as Moses, 438 and Tuskegee Institute, 1080, 1116 Up from Slavery, 697, 1116 Washington, Denzel and Pauletta, 7 Washington, George, 75

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and African American soldiers, 97 and Wheatley, 1125 See also Mount Vernon Washington, Madison, 314 Washington Heights, 474 Water War (Bolivia), 184 Waters, Muddy, 647, 648 Watson, James, 967 Wave theory of democracy, 351 Way of a New World, 166 We a BaddDDD People, 968 We Are One Voice, 691 We Are the Elephant, 251 The Wealth of Nations, 746 The Weary Blues, 553 Weathermen, 1055 Webb, Chick, 152–153 Webb, James L. A., 739 Webster, Daniel, 314 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 314 Wedderburn, Robert, 1117–1118 Wedlock of the Gods, 827 Weill, Kurt, 1119 Weimar Republic, black entertainers in the, 1118–1121. See also Imperial Germany, black entertainers in Welles, Orson, 49 Wells, Ida B., 198 Wemba, Papa, 793 West, Cornel, 917–918, 1123–1124 West African Frontier Force, 290 West African Students’ Union, 682 West Coast Dance Works, 985 West India Regiment, 290 West India Royal Commission, 204 West Indian Federation, 204 West Indian Gazette, 658 West Indian Poetry, 743 West Indies Federation, 236, 1121–1123 The West Indies in 1837, 1133 Whaling, 962 “What the Twilight Says,” 1113

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1212 INDEX Wheat, 73 high-yield, 76 See also Green Revolution Wheatley, Phillis, 31, 698–699, 916, 1124–1126, 1125, 1130 When Rain Clouds Gather, 555 White, Jose Silvestra, 320 White, Portia, 229 White, Willard, 171 White Fathers of Africa, 214 White Man, Listen!, 1153 White Queen, 462–463 White Woman’s Christ, Black Woman’s Jesus, 691 Whitefield, George, 731 Whitehouse, William Fitzhugh, 1087 Whiteman, Paul, 648, 651, 1120 Whitfield, George, 1125 Whitmore, Cuff, 97 Whitney, Eli, 1001 Why We Can’t Wait, 673 Whylah Falls, 230 ital Wickham, John, 154 Wide Sargasso Sea, 238 Wideman, John Edgar, 702, 1126–1127 Wigbert, Raphael, 536 Wilberforce, William, 45, 64, 68, 639, 783–784, 1127–1129, 1127 Wilberforce House, 783–784 Wiles, Baba Olukose, 538 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 512 Wilkins, Roy, 316 Willem I, King of the Netherlands, 387 Williams, Bert, 378 Williams, Dolores, 691 Williams, Eric, 614, 1071–1072 Williams, Francis, 1129–1130 Williams, G. Mennen, 252 Williams, George Washington, 310 Williams, Gloria “Lady Heart,” 570 Williams, Henry Sylvester, 382, 861, 1130–1132

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Williams, James, 1132–1134 Williams, John A., 1134–1136 Williams, Raymond, 1068 Williams, Spencer, 1120 Williams, Stephen, 476 Williams, Sylvia H., 1009 Williamsburg, Virginia, 784 Willoughby, Francis, 1038 Wilmore, Gayraud S., 690 Wilson, August, 32, 380, 1069 Wilson, Dooley, 775 Wilson, George, 1108 Wilson, Harriet E., 503 Wilson, John Leighton, 493–494 Wilson, William, 153 Wilson, Woodrow, 605, 654, 684, 878 and Monroe Doctrine, 767 Windsor, Duke of, 1087 Winfrey, Oprah, 7 Winter, Paul, 652, 792, 888 Wizard of the Crow, 1059 Wolfe, George C., 32, 857 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 458 Wolof, 1136–1137 Woman of the Aeroplanes, 677 Women of Zimbabwe Speak Out, 456 Women, Race, & Class, 461 Women’s Action Group (Zimbabwe), 456 Women’s Charter for Effective Equality, 456 Women’s National Council (South Africa), 450 Women’s Rights Convention, 1138 Women’s War (Nigeria), 860 Women’s Writers Project (Zimbabwe), 456 The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands, 1069 Wonders of the African World, 502 Wood, Peter, 947–948 Wooding, Sam, 1119, 1120, 1121 Woodruff, Arthur H., 253 Woods, David, 230

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Woodson, Carter Godwin, 108, 658–659 Woodworking, 1046 Woolman, John, 911 Word Up!, 570 Wordsworth, William, 713 World Anti-Slavery Conventions, 1840, 1843, 1137–1139 World Bank, 184, 814, 1139–1140 and Cameroon, 226–227 and Congo, 311–312 distinguished from International Monetary Fund, 1139 loans to African countries, 340, 342 loans to Latin American countries, 624 loans to Nigeria, 624 on microfinance, 756 Sites and Services program, 266 and urban development, 265–266 World Community of Al-Islam, 765. See also Mosque Cares World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, 936–937 World Conference on Women and Empowerment, 941 World Health Organization (WHO), 590, 1141–1142 World Heritage Sites, 994, 1043 World Population Plan of Action, 940 World Social Forum, 1014–1015 World Summit for Sustainable Development (2002), 421 World Trade Organization (WTO), 740, 814, 815, 1142–1143 A World View of the Race, 209

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INDEX World War I, 1143–1146 and colonial armies, 291, 292–293 post-WWI European colonial policy in Africa, 297–298 World War II, 1146–1150 and colonial armies, 291–292 and Latin America, 761 post-WWII European colonial policy in Africa, 298 Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, 214 Worrel, Bernie, 652, 793, 890 The Wretched of the Earth, 444 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 117 Wright, Richard, 31, 697, 701, 978, 1150–1153, 1151 and Hurston, 594 influence on Wideman, 1126–1127 Native Son, 31, 697, 1150, 1152 Wright, Thomas Kenneth, 725 Wright Brothers, 139 Wyatt, Henry, 769 Xenogenesis trilogy, 72 Xhosas, 1023 XM Radio, 7 Yamamoto, Donald, 258, 370 Yambú, 321, 323 Yams, 20, 74 and Yoruba, 1156 Yanez Pinzon, Vincent, 601 Yasin Mosque (Brooklyn), 631–632 Yates, Rebecca, 476

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The Year of the Gorilla, 956 Yellow fever, 557, 558–560, 1141 Yerba mate, 865 Ylang ylang, 305 Yo soy, del son a la salsa, 473 Yohannes IV, Emperor of Ethiopia, 425, 429 Yoruba, 126–127, 161, 231, 1155–1156 bronze art, 825 and Cuban ritual music, 325–326 and hair, 545 as naturally entrepreneurial people 824 rhythm cells, 207 See also Gelede dance; Nigeria; Ogun; Orisha Young, Hubert Winthrop, 1157 Young, Trummy, 792, 888 The Young One, 474 Zaghlul, Saad, 406 Zagwe dynasty, 428 Zaire, 209 and CIA, 254, 255 and hair, 545 and Mobutu, 311 See also Congo (Kinshasa), Democratic Republic of; Hutu Zambezi River, 151, 799, 1158 Zambia, 1157–1158 and HIV prevention, 575, 579 and IMF, 626 rejection of Bt corn, 164 See also Barotseland Zambo, Italo, 536

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Zambos, 88, 182 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 708 Zammouri, al-, 50 Zanzibar, 54, 800 Zapatista Army of National Liberation, 457 Zapatistas, 1012, 1014, 1056 Zawahiri, Ayman al-, 1057 Zawditu, Empress of Ethiopia, 429 Zawinul, Joe, 892 Zayden, Suzette, 471 Zeig, Susan, 474 Zenawi, Meles, 430 Zenzele Clubs, 454 Zewail, Ahmad, 408 Zikism, 597 Zimbabwe, 285, 1158–1161 agriculture, 76 and AIDS, 509 and Congo, 1161 geography, 1158 history and politics, 1159–1161 and Marley, 731 people, 1158–1159 and sexual diversity, 508 truth and reconciliation commission, 1074 Zongo, Joanny, 215 Zouk music, 794, 891 Zulu, 54, 198, 1023, 1025 praise songs and poetry, 787, 795 resistance to colonialism, 296 Le Zulu, 1045 Zulu Wars, 55 Zululand, 203 Zwide, 54–55

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ABOUT THE EDITORS Noelle Morrissette is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She received her Ph.D. in African American studies and English literature from Yale University in 2002. Her publications include an introduction to James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and essays on black performance and black feminism. Forthcoming works include a book on James Weldon Johnson’s life and works and a study of feminism in post-soul black culture. Richard M. Juang, Ph.D., is an independent scholar living in Boston, Massachusetts, who has taught at Susquehanna University, Oberlin College, and Cornell University. A specialist in the transatlantic literature of eighteenth-century Britain and the Caribbean, he is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Britain and the Americas (ABC-CLIO). His writing also appears in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature, Contemporary Justice Review, Symbiosis, and New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies.

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