A successful Back to Africa movement?

The idea of freed african slaves in the US returning to settle in Africa was something that even Abraham Lincoln supported at one point. However it never became a very wide-spread idea and aside from Liberia, there was never any significant migration back.

Can anyone think of a scenario where migration back to africa would have become a more wide-spread phenomena in either the pre or post-civil war period? Perhaps some form of the "great migration" however to africa?

Perhaps something similar to the movement Marcus Garvey among some others before him attempted to organize. The idea that as Africans they would never be truly accepted in a "white man's land" so they have to return home.
 
Immigration really only happens if it's forced, or if it's economically beneficial.
You have to create appealing jobs in Africa. The problem is that there is already plenty of African labourers in Africa.
If you can get the boers to settle down, then it's possible for Africans to go north of the cape, then you might get them good labor. Otherwise, you need to use force.
 

Isaac Beach

Banned
If the Civil War lasts longer and Reconstruction is more violent and difficult, it may affect a belief within the US government that any kind of equity and integration is impossible, necessitating that they forcibly extradite all their African Americans back to Africa. That’d be a pretty dark timeline.
 
I think for this to happen, a large percentage of African-Americans would have to actually support this "Back to Africa" movement, similarly to the Zionist movement among Jews. Despite the horrible discrimination and violence they faced, this did not motivate black Americans to flee the USA for Africa in larger numbers.
 
Black Americans never saw themselves as as Africans in America. That's why it never took off. It's dumb to think black Americans left to Liberia and other lands because they saw themselves as Africans.

They saw themselves as Americans pushed to foriegn lands because those places offered more imagined possibilities than the US.

Most black Americans recognized the blood claim to the US and felt rightful and just ownership to the land their forebearers worked, managed and shaped.
 
Unlike Afro-Latino, African Americans lost the majority of their African roots so make the Southern less zealous/driven in depriving Slaves of their heritage?
 

elkarlo

Banned
What if colonialism was more settling and developing than resource grabs? Kenya only had like 2 million people in the early 1900s, maybe you could have a demand for labor, like tail roads and infrastructure, and instead of Indians, US blacks were recruited?
Even later pod, have decolonialism be smoother in transition. Have Africa develop with good instead of terrible dictators. Maybe that'd draw more blacks in the 60s? Becomes who went , we're true believers, as there want much there to offer
 
Unlike Afro-Latino, African Americans lost the majority of their African roots so make the Southern less zealous/driven in depriving Slaves of their heritage?
Uhhhhhh, it's not that simplistic. I'mma disagree on this assessment.
 
Well, apparently history is an incorrect assessment...

Or rather your clearly incomplete understanding of the African in transatlantic world: the Eurafrican, the Atlantic Creole, the Black Ladino/Crioulo.

You're perpetuating played and out disproven theories on the evolution of Afro-diasporic cultures.
 
Or rather your clearly incomplete understanding of the African in transatlantic world: the Eurafrican, the Atlantic Creole, the Black Ladino/Crioulo.

You're perpetuating played and out disproven theories on the evolution of Afro-diasporic cultures.
I would not pretend to be a professor in the subject, but in the most simplistic terms any Joe can walk around a Afro-Latino town in Brazil and make the comparison on how in root they are to African culture vis-a-vis African Americans. We all know how African American Colonists behaved in Liberia towards the West African natives as a carbon copy of the Southern Planters class.

But by all means do elaborate, esp. what Eurafrican has to do with this... or Atlantic Creole in the 19th century.
 
Ghana almost made an attempt to recruit African Americans to immigrate - have them do that, keep the economy growing like they thought it would (There was a time when folks would expect more from Ghana than South Korea).
 
Afro-Latino town in Brazil and make the comparison on how in root they are to African culture vis-a-vis African Americans
Many, many of them will be praying in Pentecostal churches, and will tell you that afro-brazilian religions and a good chunk of the culture that comes with that are a thing of the devil.
But yes, you will find many still practicing thr old religions, or being catholics whose saints are also manifestations of african gods that got a demotion after a change in management.
But again, those places are as full of white people as they are filled with black people nowadays, in particular those of less conservative political leanings.
Source: know an anthropology professor that lived in Salvador (aka the black rome or whatever) for quite a while.

Tl:dr i think i didn't clarify shit.
 
Unlike Afro-Latino, African Americans lost the majority of their African roots so make the Southern less zealous/driven in depriving Slaves of their heritage?

I would not pretend to be a professor in the subject, but in the most simplistic terms any Joe can walk around a Afro-Latino town in Brazil and make the comparison on how in root they are to African culture vis-a-vis African Americans. We all know how African American Colonists behaved in Liberia towards the West African natives as a carbon copy of the Southern Planters class.

But by all means do elaborate, esp. what Eurafrican has to do with this... or Atlantic Creole in the 19th century.

Many, many of them will be praying in Pentecostal churches, and will tell you that afro-brazilian religions and a good chunk of the culture that comes with that are a thing of the devil.
But yes, you will find many still practicing thr old religions, or being catholics whose saints are also manifestations of african gods that got a demotion after a change in management.
But again, those places are as full of white people as they are filled with black people nowadays, in particular those of less conservative political leanings.
Source: know an anthropology professor that lived in Salvador (aka the black rome or whatever) for quite a while.

Tl:dr i think i didn't clarify shit.

As a brazilian, i can complement your conversation with my experience: The afro-brazilians , different from afro-americans, don't have a strong identity. Basically all the cultural aspects of african origin in Brazil are shared between blacks, pardos (self declared mixed race) and whites (seeing white people praying for orixás in some parties is normal). Also, genetics are so weird that some researches had show that the average black brazilian has almost 50% of white DNA.
For the premise, i think that, for a stronger "back to Africa", the circumstances in America should be more extreme (economic crises, more racism and violence towards blacks..)
 
Ghana almost made an attempt to recruit African Americans to immigrate - have them do that, keep the economy growing like they thought it would (There was a time when folks would expect more from Ghana than South Korea).
Ghana does not have independence and the Akan were still dealing in slaves even after the international slave trade legally ended.

I would not pretend to be a professor in the subject, but in the most simplistic terms any Joe can walk around a Afro-Latino town in Brazil and make the comparison on how in root they are to African culture vis-a-vis African Americans. We all know how African American Colonists behaved in Liberia towards the West African natives as a carbon copy of the Southern Planters class.

But by all means do elaborate, esp. what Eurafrican has to do with this... or Atlantic Creole in the 19th century.

In the 20th century, a variety of academic disciplines began to use the term creolization.

Linguists first used the term to signify changes in European languages produced in the Americas, and in 1972 American anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price adopted the linguistic model of creolization to argue that African slaves torn from their roots and scattered in the diaspora retained only basic elements of their original languages and cultures.

In 1982 sociologist Orlando Patterson took that idea even further, arguing that enslaved Africans experienced a “social death.” Scholars better versed in precolonial Africa, such as Paul Lovejoy and John Thornton, among others, responded that more African culture survived the Middle Passage than the creolization school acknowledged, and they found evidence of African retentions in language, architecture, religious practice, social structure, and patterns of warfare, among other cultural forms.

Historians who study Atlantic Creoles reject the older deracinated view of creolized culture as well as attempts to identify some essential and immutable African culture. Instead, they borrow from Mary Louise Pratt’s model of the contact zone: “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” They argue that despite subordination, Atlantic Creoles living on the African coasts, in Europe, or in the Americas were able to engage in a variety of cultural, political, social, economic, and even religious systems, without an implied loss to their original cultural base.

Rather than view culture as a zero-sum game, this school considers the added skill sets and experiences that altered, but did not eradicate, Atlantic Creoles’ original identities. Geopolitics and global economics propelled them through a variety of political regimes, geographies, cultures, languages, and religions that could not have but shaped them in some fashion. And although many of their peregrinations were forced, Atlantic Creoles made choices as well about how they self-identified and what they used of their background in particular situations—much as they probably did when still on the African continent.

As merchants, slave traders, linguists, sailors, artisans, musicians, and military figures, Atlantic Creoles interacted with a wide variety of European and indigenous groups and helped shape a new Atlantic world system.

Atlantic Creole was broadened after Paul Gilroy's tokening that embodies individuals and populations that are the result of the transatlantic slave trade.

That includes a number of interconnected populations of people "raced" as black and based in West/Central/Southeast Africa, the Americas and Caribbean as well as Europe.

The current idea of a disconnected Black American population erases Reconstruction, the Great Revival and the Great Migration in forcing a level of cultural assimilation to many but not all black american communities.

But up until about WWII there were many communities that had a clear and distinct socio-linguistic and cosmological tradition aligning with West and Central African religious/spiritual/magical foundations.

Still the basis of African populations of the U.S. and other nations within the Americas as well as communities of Creoles throughout Sub-Saharan Africa show similar and reoccurring themes of cultural adaptation.
 
The idea of freed african slaves in the US returning to settle in Africa was something that even Abraham Lincoln supported at one point. However it never became a very wide-spread idea and aside from Liberia, there was never any significant migration back.

Can anyone think of a scenario where migration back to africa would have become a more wide-spread phenomena in either the pre or post-civil war period? Perhaps some form of the "great migration" however to africa?

Perhaps something similar to the movement Marcus Garvey among some others before him attempted to organize. The idea that as Africans they would never be truly accepted in a "white man's land" so they have to return home.
You need to resolve the disease problem, it killed vast numbers of people who chose to resettle.
 
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