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“Looking Forward Always to Africa”: William George Emanuel and the Politics of Repatriation in Cuba, 1894–1906

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2021

Philip Janzen Open the ORCID record for Philip Janzen [Opens in a new window]
Philip Janzen*
Affiliation:
University of Florida, Gainesville, Floridapjanzen@ufl.edu
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Abstract

This article examines a back-to-Africa movement from early twentieth-century Cuba. The leader, William George Emanuel, arrived in Cuba from Antigua in 1894, and over the next several years, he worked to unite the cabildos de nación and sociedades de color on the island. After independence in 1898, Emanuel and his followers rejected Cuban citizenship and began petitioning Britain, the United States, Belgium, and the Gold Coast for land grants in West and Central Africa. Each petition, however, told a different story. Emanuel skillfully tailored his appeals according to his audience, variously claiming that he and his followers were “British,” “African,” “Congolese,” or “Mina,” among other identities. Anticipating the rise of Marcus Garvey by over a decade, Emanuel's campaign reveals an overlooked pan-Africanist strand in the typical narrative for this period of Cuban history. Drawing mainly on the petitions themselves, the article analyzes how Emanuel blended the languages of empire, nation, race, and ethnicity to create a dynamic pan-African identity. More generally, the article demonstrates how marginalized groups have long negotiated the boundaries of identity in the pursuit of belonging.

Keywords

Cubaback-to-Africaempireracepan-Africanism
Type
Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 37 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History

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Footnotes

*

This article draws on research supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Many thanks to Jim Sweet for helpful comments on multiple drafts, to Rebecca Janzen for insightful interpretations, and to Christina Davidson, Lillian Guerra, and Dalia Muller for their enthusiastic encouragement. I would also like to thank the editorial board and anonymous reviewers of The Americas for their valuable feedback. Finally, I am grateful to Rachel Powers for her steadfast support.

References

1. William George Emanuel to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, via British Consul General in Havana, June 7, 1902, National Archives of the United Kingdom [hereafter NAUK], CO 96/401.

2. In addition to the voluminous work on Garvey and Garveyism, there has been a surge of scholarship on “reverse” migration in the last two decades. See for example Banton, Caree A., More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Byrd, Alexander, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Sidbury, James, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campbell, James T., Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006)Google Scholar; Blyden, Nemata, West Indians in West Africa, 1808–1880: The African Diaspora in Reverse (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Sanneh, Lamin, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. For an earlier example, see Jenkins, David, Black Zion: The Return of Afro-Americans and West Indians to Africa (London: Wildwood House, 1975)Google Scholar.

3. Aline Helg, for example, writes that “hardly any [Afro-Cubans] advocated black separation, pan-Africanism, or . . . return to Africa, which would have signified separating oneself from the Cuban nationality.” Helg, Aline, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 7Google Scholar.

4. For overviews of this period and the interplay of ideas about race, nation, and empire, see Sartorius, David, Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ferrer, Ada, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Scott, Rebecca, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Pérez, Louis A. Jr, Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Thomas T. Orum, “The Politics of Color: The Racial Dimension of Cuban Politics during the Early Republican Years, 1900–1912” (PhD diss.: New York University, 1975).

5. Indeed, political leaders considered organizing along racial lines “unpatriotic” and eventually rendered such mobilization illegal. See for example Guerra, Lillian, The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)Google Scholar. See also Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba; and Helg, Our Rightful Share.

6. Alejandro de la Fuente, for example, argues that “racial democracy” allowed African-descended people in Cuba to make claims on the state and manipulate the language of equality for their own ends. See Fuente, De la, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

7. Writing in the context of Caribbean migration to the United States, Michelle Ann Stephens argues that “early-twentieth-century Caribbean immigrants . . . had uncertain ethnic identities, unimaginable in solely national terms.” Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 2–3. On non-national forms of sovereignty, see Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Between 1900 and 1930, approximately 140,000 British West Indians migrated to Cuba for work, as did many laborers from Haiti. Whitney, Robert and Laffita, Graciela Chailloux, Subjects or Citizens: British Caribbean Workers in Cuba, 1900–1960 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 8CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For more on these migrations, see Giovannetti-Torres, Jorge L., Black British Migrants in Cuba: Race, Labor, and Empire in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, 1898–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marc McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens: Haitian and British West Indian Immigrant Workers in Cuba, 1898–1940” (PhD diss.: University of Texas at Austin, 2000); and Tracey E. Graham, “Jamaican Migration to Cuba, 1912–1940” (PhD diss.: University of Chicago, 2013).

9. On the cabildos and sociedades, see del Carmen Barcia, María, Los ilustres apellidos: negros en la Habana Colonial (Havana: Ediciones Boloña, 2008)Google Scholar; Howard, Philip A., Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Childs, Matt D., “Re-creating African Ethnic Identities in Cuba,” in The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, Childs, Matt D., and Sidbury, James, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 85–100Google Scholar. For earlier work, see Franco, José Luciano, Ensayos históricos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1974)Google Scholar; Chapeaux, Pedro Deschamps, El negro en el periodismo cubano en el siglo xix (Havana: Ediciones Revolución, 1963)Google Scholar; and Cabrera, Lydia, La sociedad secreta abakuá narrada por viejos adeptos (Havana: Ediciones C. R., 1958)Google Scholar.

10. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 30–31. See also Pappademos, Melina, Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 112–124Google Scholar.

11. On similar processes in North America, see Gomez, Michael A., Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Sidbury, Becoming African in America.

12. Ortiz, Fernando, “Los cabildos afrocubanos,” in Ortiz, Ensayos etnográficos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1984), 27Google Scholar. Also quoted in Sartorius, Ever Faithful, 198.

13. According to Jane Landers, King Melchor, “Rey Mago San Melchor,” was the patron of the Royal Congo cabildo from at least the late eighteenth century. Landers, “The Central African Presence in Spanish Maroon Communities,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, Linda M. Heywood, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 227–241. More generally, Philip Howard notes that most Congo cabildos associated with Melchor and held elections at Epiphany, January 6. Howard also suggests that the link with Melchor stemmed from the influence of Portuguese missionaries in West Central Africa. Howard, Changing History, 37, 44. See also Cabrera, Lydia, Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte Mayombe (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1986)Google Scholar.

14. Ortiz, “Los cabildos afrocubanos,” 26–27.

15. According to Fernando Ortiz, this “strange association” left “no trace.” Ortiz, “Los cabildos afrocubanos,” 27.

16. Howard, Changing History, 200. See also Helg, Our Rightful Share, 39–40.

17. “Au Congo: civilisation par les nègres d'Amérique,” Le Patriote, March 21, 1901; clipped in NAUK, CO 96/387.

18. Emanuel to Lionel Carden, British Consul General in Cuba, July 13, 1900, NAUK, CO 96/367.

19. Philip Howard cites a number of examples of the colonial government expropriating the property of cabildos in the 1880s. Howard, Changing History, 176–180.

20. In this first petition, Emanuel did not explicitly refer to a plan for repatriation to Africa, though he did make some gestures. For example, he stated that after emancipation many “would have gladly returned to their native Country Africa, but found it impossible to do so.” This was due in part to “exorbitant expense” but also because many feared they would be “thrown overboard” or killed upon return to Africa. Emanuel also referenced “an African Prince,” who in 1852 or 1853 “was kidnapped and brought to this country . . . [and] was reclaimed and sent back through the British Consul.” Emanuel to Carden, July 13, 1900, NAUK, CO 96/367.

21. US War Department, Report on the Census, 1899, 98; Censo de la República de Cuba, 1907, 211. For more on the 1899 and 1907 censuses, see Helg, Our Rightful Share, 24–29; and Pappademos, Black Political Activism, 102–103.

22. “Carta de Emanuel,” Diario de la Marina, March 16, 1900, 3.

23. Years later, Eric Williams famously summed up this hypocrisy: “The British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.” Williams, British Historians and the West Indies (New York: Scribner, 1964), 233.

24. Rodolfo Sarracino, “Interacción de las políticas Británica e Hispana de migraciones y el regreso de emancipados a África,” in Los que volvieron a África (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1988), chapt. 3.

25. See Voyage 46506 of the Slave Voyages Database, “Bruja (a) Luisa,” http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/46506/variables, accessed October 10, 2020.

26. Following the British Slave Trade Act of 1807, the British began targeting slave ships working north of the equator. As a result, these voyages were “illegal” and did not always leave documentation. Moreover, I have only found a typescript of Emanuel's petition. In the original, he may have written “Catalana” or “Catalina.”

27. Additionally, a Spanish boat named Catalana owned by Jayme Tinto made at least five trips between West Africa and Cuba between 1829 and 1832.

28. For example, Joseph C. Miller estimates that more than one-third of Africans enslaved in West Central Africa (Kongo/Angola) died before arriving in the ports of Benguela and Luanda. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 384–385.

29. The fear of European cannibalism was widespread. Many Africans believed that European slave traders would eat their flesh and use their blood to make wine, their brains to make cheese, and their bones to make gunpowder. See Sweet, James H., Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 162Google Scholar.

30. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 199, 207.

31. Thomas Sanderson, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to Lionel Carden, August 14, 1900, NAUK, CO 96/367.

32. Emanuel to Lionel Carden, British Consul General in Cuba, July 13, 1900, NAUK, CO 96/367.

33. Emanuel to William McKinley, February 15, 1901, United States National Archives [hereafter USNA], Record of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, Record Group 350, File 2499, entry 5, quoted in David Sartorius, Ever Faithful, 217, 268 n2.

34. Guerra, The Myth of José Martí, 112.

35. Emanuel to Elihu Root, February 15, 1901; and Emanuel to William McKinley, February 15, 1901, USNA, RG 350, File 2499, both quoted in Guerra, The Myth of José Martí, 112, 274 n94. These letters, held at the USNA in College Park, Maryland, are cited by both Sartorius and Guerra. When I visited in January 2018, I made repeated attempts to request these documents. The archivists firmly denied my requests, citing a “moldy box” that was “unsafe” to consult.

36. Pappademos, Black Political Activism, 92–94. Pappademos also outlines the 1902 case of Domingo Julia and Leon Escobar, two Africans in Santa Clara who petitioned the governor for assistance with repatriation to Africa for themselves and 100 other former slaves. Unlike Emanuel, however, Julia and Escobar also claimed rights as Cuban citizens. Article 13 states that “Those who want to return to Africa will be transported there.” Translation from Pappademos, Black Political Activism, 254 n2. For more on the Moret Law and gradual abolition of slavery in Cuba, see Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba.

37. Sarracino, Los que volvieron a África, 224. In Chapter 8, “Migraciones de Cuba hacia África en la década del 50,” Sarracino uses an 1854 article from the Anti-Slavery Reporter to profile the remarkable lives of 23 emancipated Africans who returned to Lagos from Cuba via Southampton. This British support for repatriation was in part a response to the violent crackdown of the Spanish after the 1844 Conspiracy of La Escalera. See Reid-Vazquez, Michele, The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 162–163Google Scholar.

38. For more on the American Colonization Society, see Clegg, Claude A., The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Burin, Eric, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005)Google Scholar

39. Emanuel's arrival in Belgium also attracted attention in the United States. On March 23, 1901, the New York Times reported that Emanuel, “a negro born in the British Antilles, of Congolese parents,” was in Antwerp on behalf of “eighteen thousand negroes of Congolese origin who were taken to Cuba as slaves.” Emanuel, the article noted, hoped to lead a movement back to “the Congo State.” “Cuba's Slaves,” New York Times, March 23, 1901, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/23/opinion/1901cubas-slaves-in-our-pages100-75-and-50-years-ago.html.

40. “Au Congo: Civilisation par les Nègres d'Amérique,” Le Patriote, March 21, 1901; clipped in NAUK, CO 96/387.

41. “Au Congo,” Le Patriote, March 22, 1901.

42. Guridy, Frank, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chapt. 2, “Forging Diaspora in the Midst of Empire: The Tuskegee-Cuba Connection.”

43. Guridy, “Forging Diaspora,” 11–12. While there are similarities in the language used by Washington and Emanuel, Guridy's emphasis is on how such “diasporic linkages” were crucial for challenging and shaping national aims in Cuba and the United States. For Emanuel, such linkages were crucial for surviving—and leaving—the Cuban nation.

44. Zimmerman, Andrew, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Haitian intellectual Benito Sylvain reproduced this interview at the end of his 1901 book, Du sort des indigènes dans les colonies d'exploitation (Paris: L. Boyer, 1901), 515–519.

46. “La délégation cubaine à l’État du Congo,” Mouvement Géographique, March 31, 1901; clipped in NAUK, CO 96/387.

47. Constantine Phipps to British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, April 3, 1901, NAUK, CO 96/387. In a previous letter, Phipps had noted that “His Majesty does not view this project favourably and is inclined to regard these persons as likely to constitute a dangerous element in the Congo.” Phipps to British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, March 23, 1901, NAUK, CO 96/387.

48. “On the Congo: Movement to Colonize with Cubans,” Lewiston Daily Sun, April 26, 1901, 7.

49. Hervey White, “The Cuban Moses: A Negro Would Lead His People to the Promised Land,” Boston Evening Transcript, August 17, 1901, 18.

50. Hervey White, “The Cuban Moses,” Liberia, Bulletin No. 21, (November 1902): 75–80. Alongside White's story was an article from Booker T. Washington.

51. Emanuel to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, London, via Lionel Carden, June 7, 1902, NAUK, CO 96/401.

52. For more on slavery and providential design, see Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans are Coming!: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), esp. chapt. 1. See also Sidbury, Becoming African in America.

53. Lionel Carden to Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, June 9, 1902.

54. Foreign Office to Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, June 28, 1902, NAUK, CO 96/401.

55. C. P. Lucas, Under Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Foreign Office, August 2, 1902, Public Records and Archives Administration Department, Accra, Ghana (PRAAD), ADM 1/1/153.

56. Emanuel to Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, August 10, 1903, PRAAD, ADM 1/1/153.

57. Minute by F. D. Lugard, September 4, 1903, PRAAD, ADM 1/1/153.

58. Here Lugard may have been referring to the British Cotton Growing Association (BCGA). Inspired by the Tuskegee-Togo experiment, the “semi-philanthropic” BCGA had recently brought several Tuskegee scientists to Nigeria to “modernize” cotton production. On the BCGA, see Robins, Jonathan E., Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic: Britain, Africa, and America, 1900–1920 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. Secretary of State for the Colonies to Emanuel, November 12, 1903, PRAAD, ADM 1/1/153.

60. Emanuel to the Colonial Secretary of the Gold Coast, October 22, 1903, NAUK, CO 96/410.

61. Nathan to Secretary of State for the Colonies, December 3, 1903, NAUK, CO 96/410.

62. Alfred Lyttleton to Nathan, December 31, 1930, PRAAD, ADM 1/1/153.

63. Nathan to Lyttleton, January 26, 1904, NAUK, CO 96/416.

64. Emanuel to Carden, February 10, 1906, NAUK, CO 96/450.

65. Thomas Sanderson, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to Lionel Carden, August 14, 1900, NAUK, CO 96/367.

66. Notes in file on Emanuel and the “British Nationality of Cuban Negroes,” NAUK, CO 96/450.

67. There is a considerable literature on the changes and continuities of ethnonyms between Africa and the Americas. On the varied meanings of “Mina” identity in different places and times, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “African Ethnicities and the Meanings of ‘Mina,’” in Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, Paul Lovejoy and David Trotman, eds. (New York: Continuum, 2003), 65–81. See also Law, Robin, “Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora: On the Meanings of ‘Mina’ (Again),” History in Africa 32 (2005): 247–267CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68. Notes in file on Emanuel and the British Nationality of Cuban Negroes, NAUK, CO 96/450.

69. “¡¡Enseñanza rápida del Inglés!!,” Diario de la Marina, April 9, 1910, 11. Similar notices appeared in the newspaper on April 11, 1910, and April 16, 1910.

70. Ortiz, “Los cabildos afrocubanos,” 26–27. Emanuel's negative outlook would also have been fuelled by the May 1912 massacre of Partido Independiente de Color members in Oriente province by government forces.

71. “Una solicitud,” Diario de la Marina, October 21, 1920, 11.

72. Guridy, Forging Diaspora, 78–88.

73. McLeod, Marc, “Garveyism in Cuba, 1920–1940,” Journal of Caribbean History 30:1 (1996): 132Google Scholar.

74. See McLeod, “Garveyism in Cuba”; and Guridy, Forging Diaspora, esp. chapt. 2, “Un Dios, Un Fin, Un Destino: Enacting Diaspora in the Garvey Movement.”

75. It is notable, however, that Benito Sylvain of Haiti reprinted Emanuel's March 1901 interview in Brussels with Essor Économique Universel. Sylvain had helped to organize the July 1900 Pan-African Association conference in London, alongside figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Henry Sylvester Williams. Sylvain, Du sort des indigènes, 515–519.

76. Sweet, James H., “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review 114:2 (2009): 303–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.