Chief Sam's African Movement and Race Consciousness in West Africa

Abstract

THE DEATH OF EDWARD W. BLYDEN in 1912 can be taken as a convenient, though arbitrary, date to mark off the Pan-Negroism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century from the post-1918 Pan-African movements of W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey. This article attempts a reinterpretation, based on new documents located in London and West Africa, of a little known predecessor of the Garvey movement,1 led not by a Negro American or a West Indian, but by a West African-Chief Alfred Sam of the Gold Coast. This was the back-to-Africa or 'African Movement' of 1914-1916.