Return to the Motherland: Robert Campbell, a Jamaican in Early Colonial Lagos

Abstract

AFRICA ALWAYS HAS been important, both as a spiritual and a prospective actual homeland for blacks in plantation America. Yet a great deal is still unknown about the activities of the significant number of blacks from the New World who committed themselves to the development of Africa. An accurate evaluation of their contributions is difficult to piece together, as many of them left no diaries or notebooks. Even more difficult is the construction of a framework in which one can assess their efforts. One is confronted by many questions which create more problems than they resolve. Did the men and women return for purely personal reasons; did they develop any clear ideas of racial solidarity; were they concerned with the development of Africa, using European concepts of civilization; or did they create new ideas out of the indigenous experience?-to mention only a few. This paper seeks out to answer some of these questions in examining the life and activities of the noted Jamaican journalist, teacher and businessman Robert Campbell, who emigrated to Lagos in 1862. The 1820s and 1830s were turbulent years in the history of Jamaica, ones in which the old order of slavery was under constant attack by the local slave population and by economic and philanthropic interests in Britain. It was in the midst of this period of change and uncertainty that Robert Campbell was born May 7, 1829, of a mulatto mother and Scottish father. The Kingston of his youth was plagued by more than its share of nineteenth-century urban problems; bad housing and sanitation resulted in frequent bouts of cholera and smallpox which devastated the population. Emancipation (1833) and the failure of the Apprenticeship Scheme (1838) created even greater uncertainties for all Jamaicans. However, there were still some avenues open to young Campbell. For five years he was a printer's apprentice, at the end of which he enrolled in the newly established government Normal school, where he studied for two years, later becoming a parish schoolmaster in Kingston. The inadequate schoolmaster's salary and the growing economic and commercial distress in Jamaica forced Campbell to seek his fortune elsewhere, and in the early 1850s he took his family to Central America. But if Jamaica was bad, Central America offered nothing better, and after one year Campbell was on the move again, this time to New York. Here he was confronted by North American racism which, unlike that of the West Indies, recognized no subtle variations in color. He was black and as such was unable to find employment in any of the printing establishments except that of John