Before going there to represent the Swiss government and defend Swiss interests, I would always read myself into the history and culture of the country of my new accreditation. Reading my way into Sierra Leone and Liberia, I fell into the history of another Back-to-Africa movement. It took place some 20’000 years after the Afro-Asiatic peoples returned from the Arabian Peninsula to North Africa, in the late Stone Age. Since then, the natural unity of mankind as hunters and gatherers had broken up into various civilisations, all with different cultures and values. Around the Mediterranean Sea, in cultural exchange between Africa, the Levant and southern Europe, the White Man’s civilisation had developed. And around the turn into the 16th century, the White Man had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and discovered the New World of the Americas. They established colonies and made it theirs. Slavery was part and parcel of European colonisation in the Americas. For their sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations they needed labourers. But the violence of the conquest and the imported European diseases had decimated the enslaved local Indians. So, previously also having navigated to the Sub-Saharan coast of West Africa, they started shipping African slaves from the region between the Senegal-, the Niger-, and the Congo-Rivers to the Americas. The transatlantic slave trade lasted for well over 300 years and brought 12 million slaves from Africa to North America, the Caribbean and South America. Today’s United States of America accounted for a third of them.
Slavery was first abolished in France in 1794, then in Great Britain in 1834. In the United States of America it was abolished in 1865, well after their independence and after the Civil War which was mainly over the issue of slavery – white Americans keeping African Americans enslaved. Parallel to the abolition of slavery in Europe and America, the Back-to-Africa set in. Contrary to the Back-to-Africa migration of the Afro-Asiatic peoples, which just happened, this was a deliberate movement. The human cortex had fabricated a theory. And this time the people who moved back to Africa were Afro-Americans, namely from the United States, and they returned to Sub-Saharan countries of West Africa.
Already in 1787, when European political powers, and particularly the British Empire, were still heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade, some English ships with a few hundreds of freed African slaves on board anchored on the coast of Sierra Leone. British abolitionists believed that the African diaspora could be re-settled in Africa and sponsored the Province of Freedom there. It was meant to become a colony where returning Africans could be the architects of their own destiny. And five years later under the guidance of an abolitionist Lieutenant of the Royal Navy, 1’200 African Americans founded a larger settlement there. It was built on the promise of freedom and equality in the ancestral homeland and was called Freetown. This was the beginning of the Back-to-Africa movement of modernity. Sierra Leone went on to become a Crown Colony where, ironically, the freed slaves who had come back to Africa to enjoy their freedom, would live side by side with – slaves. The colony abolished domestic slavery only in 1928. Sierra Leone became independent in 1961, and Freetown its capital.
Today, the descendants of freed slaves who returned to Sierra Leone from Great Britain and North America and later – Rule Britannia! – from slave ships captured on the high seas, are about 60,000. The Back-to-Africa settlers became the Krio pipul, Creoles. As one of 16 ethnicities of the mostly Niger-Congo peoples, they make less than 5 percent of the country’s population. They speak their own Krio language, a mixture of English, indigenous West African languages, and other European languages. Officially, they are categorized as non-natives and socially they are disparaged. But staying out of politics, being relatively well educated and serving in senior positions of the civil service, they have established themselves as an important part of the country’s elite. In the Civil War of 1991 to 2007, they abstained. But in the face of the growing tribalism, the politicisation of ethnic identity among the bigger native tribes of the country, their social situation is by no means granted.
There are only a handful of Western embassies in Sierra Leone, and I had one man of the Swiss Development Cooperation in Freetown who was responsible for the humanitarian assistance of Switzerland during the Civil War and its aftermath. The separation of diplomatic, consular and representation for development and other technical fields of activity in international cooperation never made much sense to me. So, I pulled a protocolar trick and upgraded his office to become the Office of the Swiss Embassy in Abidjan for Sierra Leone. It worked. He now had access to my diplomatic colleagues and was also responsible for visa and consular matters. He attended to the one or two Swiss nationals who would work for a few months in the Special Court for Sierra Leone of the United Nations. This court was established to prosecute persons who bear the greatest responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian law and Sierra Leonean law committed during the Civil War.
I loved my visits to Freetown out of Abidjan and I have fond memories of one evening. It was one of those cultural medleys only Africa can offer: My Man in Freetown, as I called him, proposed to get hold of the other Swiss, who was at that time with the Special Court, and to go to his favorite beach restaurant and order lobster. The restaurant only served beer, but if we wanted wine, we could stop at a supermarket on the way and get some. That’s how we did it and I found a Pinot Noir, Superior Selection, called The Great Wall, obviously from China. The restaurant was seated on the bank above the beach. From the parking lot, we went directly down to the tables standing in the sand, ready for the guests. As the waiter saw us coming, he asked how many we would be and brought us the corresponding number of chairs. He apologised for the circumstances, explaining that without someone sitting on them, the chairs would be stolen within minutes. The chairs he brought were those Chinese plastic ones you see all over Africa. You see them mostly in white, sometimes in blue and, more rarely, in green.
Having taken our orders, the waiter remarked that if we wanted music, we would have to pay extra for it. We ordered the music. He went back up to the restaurant, returned with two loudspeakers on tripods and placed them in the sand to the right and left of our table. Then he climbed the stairs back up to the restaurant and returned, pulling two cables which he connected to the loudspeakers. He went back up to the restaurant and disappeared for a while. After a few minutes two crackling loudspeakers started blasting Sierra Leonean Afropop, inspired by Caribbean and Western funk and soul, over our heads into the night’s breeze and the night blue sea.
The plastic chairs we were sitting on are cheap and light. You can easily stack them head high. They are relatively strong – but not built to stand in sand. Over the evening, not finding a solid mainstay, the legs of one chair were pushed into a spread that cracked the seating surface. With a short, sharp, snapping sound, one of us dropped into the sand. We were all still laughing, as the waiter came down from the restaurant and brought us a new chair. He placed it at the table and stacked the broken one into it. “Now it is even stronger,” he asserted.
At one point, it was my turn to climb the stairs up to the restaurant, I had to step out. In the restaurant behind the empty bar, I found the TV running, football of course, on the channel of the South African DStv dedicated to the English Premier League. That’s normal, all-over Africa. But at second glance, I detected on the wall an unknown dress, a white shirt with navy blue and red and navy shorts. On a scarf amongst photos and typical football memorabilia, I read Bolton and over all of this a placard: Home of the Bolton Wanderers in Africa. 150 years ago, the Bolton Wanderers Football Club was a founding member of the English Football League. Today it competes at the third tier of the English championship system. – But I assure you, the lobster I ate that evening was top of the league.
In 1820 the American Colonization Society brought a first group of freed African Americans back to Africa, this time to neighbouring Liberia. As those in Sierra Leone, these settlers were English-speaking, and many were literate and Christian. In their search of a better life, they would have to overcome hostility and hardship. The first settlers faced both environmental and political troubles. Tropical diseases, food scarcity, and conflict with the indigenous African communities whose land they had settled on made survival difficult. They had to learn that they were not welcome and remained foreigners. Not having any knowledge of the local African tribes’ languages and traditions, the settlers formed their own small, heterogeneous tribe. But they were isolated and the support from anti-slavery and Christian organisations in America and England was a vital lifeline. In spite of this help, in Liberia only 1’800 of the 4’600 African Americans who had returned to their ancestral homeland up to the country’s independence in 1847, survived. And the plan of the American Colonisation Society to make the independent Liberia a colony of the United States failed. But the US government did establish an informal protectorate over the country which allowed Liberia to maintain its independence throughout the colonial Scramble for Africa of the later 19th century.
The African Americans who returned to Liberia are internationally referred to as Americo-Liberians and locally, – in reference to most of the slaves shipped to the New World originally having come from there – they became the Congo tribe. With the support of the American Colonization Society and some political and economic protection from the US government, the Congo had established themselves as the political elite of the country in Monrovia, led the country into independence and controlled it for 150 years. Until in 1980, they were violently swept out of power in a military coup by one of the native tribes. Charles Taylor, who was a Congo, tried to regain power and became the perpetrator of two consecutive Civil Wars, from 1989 to 1996 and then from 1999 to 2003. He failed. Today, the Congo of Liberia are about 150’000 people, less than 5 percent of the population. They speak a Liberian version of English and by the larger native tribes, are considered domineering and abrasive, attempting to monopolize the political, economic, and social life of the country. It is barely imaginable that they can accede to power again.
The earliest Afro-American returnees to Sierra Leone and Liberia remained in their hundreds and over the generations, have grown into the thousands, not more. As a campaign of the abolitionists, the Back-to-Africa idea was a failure. But this was not the end of the theory. In the early 20th Century, it lit up again – but barely with consequences in Africa. When after the First World War the thousands of African American soldiers returned to the United States, they were frustrated by the segregation, social discrimination, and racial violence they faced back home. Marcus Garvey picked up on this exasperation and created a philosophy and organisation that blended political, economic and religious aspects as demands and ‘Rights for the Negro Peoples of the World’. And the ‘Back-to-Africa Movement’ was part of it. He founded the ‘Black Star Line’, a Black American shipping company that was to bring Afro-Americans back to Africa. It didn’t sail to the continent once and collapsed a few years after its establishment. But his ideas would give way to several other Black American movements, such as Black Nationalism, the Nation of Islam, and Black Pride. In Africa it gave rise to Pan-Africanism. And in 1939 in Paris, the poem of Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, started Négritude. Négritude was an intellectual and literary movement. Its philosophy was defined by opposition to colonialism, denunciation of Europe's inhumanity, and rejection of Western domination. And the idea of Back-to-Africa and Pan-Africanism.
As I grew up after the Second World War, the struggle of the African Americans for their rights and social standing, and against racism continued. I admit that I know the Civil Rights Movement more from its soundtrack than from its political events. In the 1960ies and 70ies, I listened to the music of artists who contributed to that soundtrack and one of them was Nina Simone. Her Mississippi Goddam is an anthem of the movement and she wrote the song “in a rush of fury, hatred and determination”, upon learning of the murder of four young Black girls in Alabama. But in 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated and Richard Nixon elected President of the United States, she lost hope. She stopped fighting and fled: “The America I’d dreamed of through the sixties seemed a bad joke now, with Nixon in the White House and the black revolution replaced by disco”, she wrote in her memoir. In 1970 she moved to Barbados. Not for long. In 1974 she flew to Liberia. “Africa, half a world away from New York. Maybe I could find some peace there, or a husband. Maybe it would be like going home”, she wrote.
The reaction of Nina Simone is symptomatic of the push and pull factors for those few Afro-Americans who actually move to Africa: Frustration and resentment over their situation in America at one end and romanticising Africa as their ancestral homeland at the other. In one of her songs, Nina Simone sang: She does not know her beauty; She thinks her brown body has no glory; If she could dance naked under palm trees and see her image in the river, she would know; But there are no palm trees on the street, and dishwater gives back no images. Even so, she did not stay in Liberia for more than three years and left in the dawn of the military coup. A coup is never romantic. And overall, the return of Afro-Americans to Africa never had a broad appeal, it was never more than a trickle.