Fernando Po, home to the Bantu-speaking Bubi people, has an unusually complex history. Long touted as the key to West Africa, it is the largest West African island and the last to enter the world economy. Confronted by both African resistance and ecological barriers, early British and Spanish imperialism foundered there. Not until the late nineteenth century did foreign settlement take hold, abetted by a class of westernized black planters. It was only then that Fernando Po developed a plantation economy dependent on migrant labor, working under conditions similar to slavery. In...
Fernando Po, home to the Bantu-speaking Bubi people, has an unusually complex history. Long touted as the key to West Africa, it is the largest Wes...
Unprecedented in scope and detail, "Brothers and Strangers" is a vivid history of how the mythic Africa of the black American imagination ran into the realities of Africa the place. In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey--convinced that freedom from oppression was not possible for blacks in the Americas--led the last great African American emigrationist movement. His U.S.-based Universal Negro Improvement Association worked with the Liberian government to create a homeland for African Americans. Ibrahim Sundiata explores the paradox at the core of this project: Liberia, the chosen destination, was...
Unprecedented in scope and detail, "Brothers and Strangers" is a vivid history of how the mythic Africa of the black American imagination ran into the...
