Literary Cultures

This chapter traces the influence of travelers like William and Lucy Gantt Sheppard on more conventionally fictionalized literary work by authors like Hopkins who never traveled to Africa themselves. Her novel Of One Blood, which was first serialized in the influential Colored American Magazine, where she was an editor, is indicative of the way that broadly internationalist culture circulating around the Congo, and other geopolitical spaces, was grounded in the black press. This chapter argues that connections between Of One Blood and the missionary careers of the Sheppards illuminate the transatlantic routes that have contributed to the development of African American literature and culture, further challenging common generalizations that, in the early twentieth century, modern Africa was unknown to African Americans. Early twentieth century American representations of Africa, such as Of One Blood, were informed by intellectual networks of writers and activists that were nurtured through the black press as well as literary societies, civic organizations, HBCUs, and religious institutions.

Missionary Cultures

This chapter examines the work of APCM missionary Edmiston, a Fisk University graduate and skilled linguist, who in the first decades of the twentieth century controversially wrote the first dictionary and grammar of the Bushong (Bakuba) language. Shortly after her fellow Fisk alumni Du Bois used African American spirituals as signposts for his groundbreaking tour through U.S. history and culture in The Souls of Black Folk, she also contributed to the APCM’s effort to translate religious hymns into Tshiluba by adding African American spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to the Presbyterian hymnal. The translations by Edmiston and her colleagues insured that Tshiluba developed not only as the language of the colonial state, but also as a language that was shaped by the sacred texts of postbellum African American culture.

Introduction

This introduction uses the popular James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson song “Congo Love Song” to consider the way that African American popular culture—in this instance a wildly successful vaudeville song—were integral parts of a larger culture of African American transnational engagement with the Congo. The song was written and first performed in 1903 at the height of an African American campaign against King Leopold II of Belgium’s colonial regime. The political significance of the song is further highlighted by the career of James Weldon Johnson, who was not only a songwriter, but also a novelist, journalist, lawyer, educator, diplomat, and political activist with the NAACP. His longer career trajectory points to the ways that the Congo is deeply embedded with a wide range of African American cultural and political engagements.

The Chickens Coming Home to Roost

This chapter presents Malcolm X’s travels in Africa during the months leading up to the Stanleyville (Kisangani) crisis of November 1964. Speeches, diaries, correspondence, FBI surveillance reports, and circumstantial evidence indicate that, during the final months of his life, Malcolm X may have been involved in recruiting African American volunteers through the OAAU (Organization of Afro-American Unity) and the OAU (Organization of African Unity) to serve in the Congo as mercenaries in opposition to white South African forces, a project that may have been a model for a similar effort soon undertaken by Che Guevara. In the wake of the 1964 U.S. airlift of Belgian paratroopers into Stanleyville to rescue white hostages, Malcolm spoke of the history of hand-severing, a reference which links him to Sheppard. Malcolm’s frequent commentary on the subject, in many of his most important forums during the final year of his life, locates the trajectory of African American involvement in the Congo at the center of his political vision and organizational praxis, and, by extension, at the heart of modern Black nationalism.

Visual Cultures

This chapter considers the significant influence of William Sheppard on U.S. visual culture. In 1890, soon after he arrived in the Congo, he expresses his intent to collect Congolese artifacts, mostly Bakuba, for Hampton’s “Curiosity Room,” which was the basis for its renowned art museum. In the early 1940s after Viktor Lowenfeld established the Hampton art department, John Biggers, Samella Lewis, Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, and other artists, who were students or teachers there, studied Sheppard’s textile collection. In particular, the color palette and geometry found in Biggers’s work recall both African American quilts and Bakuba textiles, indicating that, beyond political topics, Sheppard’s influence includes a wide aesthetic vocabulary. Twentieth-century African American visual artists developed an innovative cultural practice based on their immersion in a collection whose provenance links it to the movement for reform in the Congo.

William Henry Sheppard’s Country of My Forefathers

This chapter examines the work of a former Hampton student who also traveled to the Congo in 1890 as cofounder of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM). Sheppard’s articles and speeches circulated widely through networks of HBCUs, the press, and the church. In particular, his 1899 eyewitness report on the brutal practice of hand-severing became a foundational document for Congo Reform Association (CRA) activists like E. D. Morel and Mark Twain. Sheppard’s writings tell a different story than canonical literary portraits of the region like Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness by exhibiting an appreciation for the voices of the Congolese people, a point which was emphasized when, after being charged with libel by the colonial authorities, Sheppard arranged for Congolese witnesses to testify in his defense. After his forced retirement from the APCM in 1910, he continued to work on behalf of the Congo, speaking to prominent audiences throughout the United States.

George Washington Williams’s Stern Duty of History

This chapter begins at Hampton Institute in 1889 where Williams traveled after meeting in Belgium with King Leopold II. Williams, whose interest in the Congo predates the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, went to Hampton to enlist African American students to travel with him to Africa, which framed his Congo trip within a tradition of ongoing African American interest in Africa. Williams’s initial optimism for the Congo quickly soured, and he wrote a series of open letters--to Leopold, U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, and railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington--that inspired opposition to Leopold’s regime that continued well after Williams’s untimely death in 1891. An examination of Williams’s struggles to develop and define a relationship to the Belgian empire against the backdrop of the history of the transatlantic slave trade reveals an African American connection to Africa that is grounded in a global political landscape of emancipation and anti-imperialism.

Conclusion

The conclusion notes the ways that Malcolm X’s criticism of U.S. policy in the Congo, which he finds consistent with a larger disregard for the lives of Black people, globally conceived, is echoed in the words and actions of Black Lives Matter activists, who organized following the murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and the failure to prosecute his killer. Sanford is a town founded by Henry Shelton Sanford, who represented the United States at the Berlin Conference and worked as a lobbyist for King Leopold II, which helped to fund his Florida empire. This chapter notes that Sanford was directly at odds with George Washington Williams during their lifetime and up until their deaths, which suggests that the Congo appears as an integral part of the landscape of U.S. racial violence and that African American critics of colonialism have always been willing to use their voices to say so.

Booker T. Washington’s African at Home

This chapter examines Washington’s service as Vice President of the Congo Reform Association (CRA) as a means of considering more broadly the relationship of HBCUs to Africa. Although Washington never traveled to Africa, he was directly influenced by Sheppard, his former Hampton student. As the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Washington, the most prominent African American leader of his day, brings the Congo into relief as an important nexus for developing ideas about race, ideology, and empire in American culture in ways that are visible in everything from his famous 1895 address at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition to his influential collaboration with sociologist Robert E. Park. Washington’s professional mobility can help scholars expand Gilroy’s conception of the “Black Atlantic” to include HBCUs as critical contact zones for emerging understandings of a dynamic U.S. relationship with Africa.

Another Black Magazine with a Lumumba Poem

This chapter charts the influence of independent Congo’s first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on the poetry and culture of the Black Arts movement. Although Lumumba was assassinated less than seven months after independence, he lives on as an iconic figure in the poetry that emerged during and after the Black Arts movement. Poems like “lumumba LIVES!” by Ted Joans, “Festivals & Funerals” by Jayne Cortez, and “Lumumba Blues” by Raymond Patterson are part of a genre of elegiac meditation on the Congo in post-1960 African American literature that asks how to speak in the face of haunting silences and how to imagine new political possibilities through literary engagements. These writings employ decidedly African American musical conventions to construct an elegiac discourse that ultimately locates the Congo as a central figure in modern African American poetics. These formal dynamics allow for political crises in the Congo and martyred African leaders like Lumumba to be interpellated as American subjects.