African-Americans and the Defense of African States against European Imperial Conquest: Booker T. Washington's Diplomatic Efforts to Guarantee Liberia's Independence 1907-1911

Abstract

Some members of tine African-American community were aware of European activities in the African continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As early as the 1860s, Pan-Africanist Martin R. Delany and Henry Highland Garnet, a US ambassador to Liberia reacted differently to the British annexation of part of Yorubaland. In later years, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner also addressed the issue of the manner in which Europeans were taking over African territory, and chided African-Americans for not going back to re-take and protect the African continent from the European intruders (January 1882, 1). There were more responses from the community on the subject, during tine last stages of European imperial subjugation of Africa (Jacobs 1981, 38, 49, 53 and 75). Although some African-Americans condemned the European annexation of Africa, they were not physically involved in the resistance effort of the Africans. The Africans' heroic and tenacious defense of their states collapsed in the face of the superior military tactics and warfare technology of the invading European armies (Crowder 1971, 1-16). Thus by the first decade of the 20th century, most of the continent had come under effective European colonial domination, with the two exceptions of Liberia and Ethiopia. The Europeans wished and actually attempted to colonize these two states. Ethiopia saved itself, while Liberia eventually had to rely on the assistance of the United States of America to thwart European designs against the State.