Constructing a City on a Hill in Africa
IN ALL THESE VARIATIONS—fervently celebratory or sharply critical, patriotically enlisted or splattered across a mass of other references—“city on a hill” and “chosen people” circulated through the nations of the nineteenth century. Unrelated to their employment in “A Model of Christian Charity” centuries before, they formed a part of the stock vocabulary of a nationalist age.
There was one event, however, around which something especially close to Winthrop’s original use of the “city on a hill” motif cohered. That was not the U.S. Civil War, fraught though it was with attempts to read the hand of God’s providence in human events. It was not the Great War for civilization’s defense in 1914–18, saturated with talk of divine destiny. It was in discussions of a new, American-made, black republic in Africa: Liberia. Not only did the “city on a hill” phrase flourish with particular exuberance in Liberia, but there, more clearly than anywhere else in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Winthrop’s sense of living under the world’s scrutiny had its modern parallel.
Liberia did not begin as a nation-making project. It began as a means to offload onto the West African coast those black Americans whom other Americans wanted to be rid of. Although there were some African Americans in the early nineteenth century who envisioned returning to the continent from which their forebears had been stolen, the origins of the American colony in Liberia came from white Americans with, at best, deeply paternalistic relationships with those whom they hoped to colonize.
Free Negroes were the primary point of concern for the Liberia project’s originators. An anomalous people in a biracial society, confounding notions that some were naturally suited for mastership and the others for slavery, free blacks raised nightmares of racial discontent and social disorganization among many early nineteenth-century white Americans. Southern slaveholders worried that if free blacks did not themselves ignite resentment and revolt among the region’s slaves, their example could not but fuel dangerous ambitions and discontents. Slaveholders in the upper South, where slave labor’s profits were diminishing and where some had grown morally queasy about slave ownership itself, were particularly drawn to the colonization idea. For them, the project of establishing a charitable organization that would transport free blacks and emancipated slaves to distant Africa had both a self-exculpatory and self-preservationist appeal.
Southern slaveholders were joined in the colonization project by Northern philanthropists who saw free, poor blacks as in need of aid but who could not imagine them thriving in the cities of the early United States. “A people which are as injurious and dangerous to our social interests, as they are ignorant, vicious and unhappy,” the first secretary of the American Colonization Society called them. In the colonizationists’ eyes, free blacks constituted “a degraded, despised and oppressed” underclass in the nation’s midst. They would do better, the Society organizers insisted, if their return to Africa were organized, underwritten, and managed by those who had their best interests at heart.1
On this mission, the American Colonization Society’s first shipload of emigrants departed from New York City in 1820. Skirting past the settlements at Sierra Leone that British philanthropists had established for London’s black poor and for the slaves who had fled across the British lines during the war for American independence, searching the West African coast for a usable anchorage and a native chiefdom that would tolerate their disembarking, eighty-odd colonizers under the direction of their three white, American Colonization Society agents established a tiny coastal settlement. Within three months, a quarter of them had died of disease.
Relocating the project further south to a site they would rename Providence Island, the Society tried again. This time they soon faced not only disease but an alliance of West African chiefs and an army of several thousand warriors determined to drive the strangers out. Only the unexpected effectiveness of the colonizers’ cannon against the tightly massed ranks of the native African warriors, whose use of human walls of fighters proved deadly vulnerable to cannon fire, turned the effort back. But survival was still a close thing. Twenty years later, of the 4,500 emigrants the Society had succeeded in transporting to its Liberian colony to try their luck against disease, hunger, and recurrent war with the native peoples of the coast, fewer than two thousand remained.2
Yet in the reports of the American Colonization Society, dismay and disappointment were overwhelmed by a sense of realizing God’s promise both for the United States and for Africa. Surely God’s hand must have been at work in the ability of so few to cut down so many and send the native armies hurling back. New England’s earlier years, Society speakers reminded each other, had been full of trials and disease as well. Above all, the promise of bringing Christianity to Africa was not to be retreated from. Emerging out of the Society’s other goals, the task of converting pagan and heathen Africa to Protestant Christianity quickly became its principal rationale. And with it flourished the mission of being a “city on a hill”—not simply an example to the natives beyond the colony’s small string of settlements on the West African coast, but a lighthouse that would illuminate the whole of the African continent.
Tiny though the Liberian venture might be, its destiny could not have been more grandly exalted. By the “wisdom of God’s providence,” an American Colonization Society speaker expanded on the theme in 1827, a people who could only be a source of malignancy at home were transformed into “a glorious beacon, beaming with broad, and vivid, and constant splendor, indefinitely into the interior of an extensive continent overspread with the darkness of heathenism.” They were to be “the means of kindling up on that wide and benighted continent, the beacon lights of science and Christianity.”3 Their moral example would defeat “the night of witchcraft and superstition” that enveloped Africa. It would stamp out the international traffic in slaves at its source.
The project had not only proved “a blessed asylum for a wretched people,” the Society’s publications insisted. It was “already to the African tribes, like ‘a city set upon a hill which cannot be hid.’ A thousand barbarians, who have long made merchandise of their brethren, and been regarded themselves, as the objects of a bloody and accursed traffick, come within its gates, and are taught the doctrine of immortality.… Heaven forbid that this Colony should perish; for its influence to the most abject, injured and miserable of our race, will be cheering as ‘the day-spring from on high,’ and salutary as the waters of life.”4 The first Puritan generation in New England had never raised visions this fervent or this expansive.
On the ground, the Liberian venture scarcely lived up to its organizers’ high promises. Between the mid-1830s and a brief upward spike of interest in the 1850s, few already free American blacks joined the emigrant boats to Liberia. More and more often the American Colonization Society’s vessels carried newly freed slaves who, by the tightening laws of most U.S. slave states, could not be emancipated unless their owners promised to transport them elsewhere. Discouraged by the difficulties of raising funds and controlling at a distance the often autocratic actions of its agents, the American Colonization Society engineered Liberia’s reorganization in 1847 as an independent state—the first free black republic in Africa.
But independence did not bring prosperity to Liberia. Its population hardly grew after the 1850s; by the turn of the twentieth century, there were barely twelve thousand Libero Americans clustered in a coastal string of towns on the fringe of the continent. Visions of evangelizing the native masses came to very little effect. The two million or more African peoples living in the territory the Libero Americans claimed as their own had no citizenship rights in the Liberian republic. Only the self-cancelling effects of their internal rivalries kept West Africans from driving the black American colonizers back into the sea—that and the assistance of British and U.S. naval vessels at timely moments.
Economically, Liberia struggled to find a footing in the global economy. Visions of a nation where onetime slaves could become free-standing land cultivators quickly evaporated. Trade in native export goods and government salaries sustained a political and economic elite—prideful and insular, fiercely protective of the race privileges of its lighter-skinned ruling families, and scornful of those over whom they claimed nominal sovereignty. In the capital city, Monrovia, a starkly divided double settlement quickly grew up: on the one side, a Libero American town of broad streets and wood-framed, veranda houses, and, right next door, a much poorer, segregated native town of narrow alleyways and tightly packed bamboo dwellings. Geopolitically Liberia sank quickly into insignificance. A loan for internal improvements negotiated in London through unscrupulous middlemen in 1871 turned out to carry disastrous economic consequences. Into the early twentieth century, Liberian governments were still going hat in hand to European and U.S. creditors hoping for debt relief.
Virtually from the first, moreover, the Liberian venture had been a lightning rod for critics. In 1831 the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had decided that the removal of free blacks to Africa was nothing other than a ploy to perpetuate the regime of slavery and had turned in fury against it. “This is our home, and this our country,” a free black convention resolved in the same mood early that year. “Here we were born, here we will die.” The colonization idea was a fraud and a foe to every American colored man, Frederick Douglass added with his powerful voice. “Our right to stay here is as good as that of … any man-stealer in the land.” “We say to every colored man, be a man where you are.… You must be a man here, and force your way to intelligence, wealth, and respectability. If you can’t do that here, you can’t do it there.”5
When in the 1850s the aggressiveness of Southern slaveholders’ designs for the expansion of slave territory and the tightening fetters of racial restrictions in the North caused some free blacks to think of finding a refuge elsewhere, Douglass insisted that Africa held nothing for American-born people of color but impoverishment and exile. “If we go anywhere,” he wrote discouragedly in early 1861, just before war broke out, “let us go to Hayti”—to the black revolutionary republic that had overthrown its slave owners and had successfully defended itself against the best armies Napoleon could muster. Haiti was close enough to the shores of the United States that it could continue to vex and disturb American slavery. We can “plant ourselves at the very portals of slavery” and perhaps around that germ organize all twelve million Negroes in the Americas, from the Caribbean islands to the mountain tops of South America. If there was a “city set on an hill” for African Americans, Douglass wrote, it was there, in “this modern land of Canaan,” where a free black republic stood as a rebuke to the racist contention that blacks were unfit to administer a government on their own.6
But in Liberia itself, despite the nation’s critics and setbacks, the “city on a hill” motif flourished extravagantly. There is no evidence that any of the project’s founders had read John Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity.” Nowhere else in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States and its dependencies, however, did the “city on a hill” phrase so heavily saturate the rhetoric of politics. To the colonization project’s organizers the mission of a new black America in Africa was that, in a sea of African paganism and immorality, it would bring the light of Protestant Christian religion. To the Libero Americans who made the trope their own, the mission of Liberia was that, in a world awash in racial prejudices, their new, black-led nation would demonstrate to the world the Negro’s political capacities for self-government.
The notion that a small, economically precarious nation in Africa could refute the assumption that only Europeans and their imperial administrators had the racial capacities for rule may seem quixotic now. But there is no missing the intensity with which the Libero American elite embraced the idea of a New Jerusalem and repurposed it in Africa. God’s “special providence has been as unmistakably manifest in Liberia … as ever were the pillars of cloud by day and of fire by night to direct Israel’s course to the land of promise,” Stephen Allen Benson, Liberia’s second president, declaimed in 1858. Edward James Roye refurbished the theme in 1870: “God has planted us here, and through all the vicissitudes of our existence, his hand has been plainly, visibly directing our affairs. God has set Liberia, as it were, upon an hill on this continent.” William David Coleman, assuming the presidential office in 1900, affirmed: “Our fathers, with the blessing of an all-wise Providence, have laid on these shores the foundation of a great Negro nationality that may in [the] future be the hope of the race and admiration of the world.”7
Liberia’s most celebrated writer in this vein, Edward Blyden, did not have an easy relationship with the Liberian merchant and political elite. A migrant from the Danish West Indies, he spent a brief sojourn in the United States in 1850, long enough to be turned away from the theological seminaries to which he sought enrollment on the grounds that no person of African descent could possibly possess the abilities a theological education required and also to catch wind of the Liberian project. A thorn in the side of the mulatto elite whose color prejudices he felt personally and acutely, he was driven out of Liberia by a lynch mob in 1871 at the height of a political party feud. But for Blyden, too, the natural language of Liberia was providential. As he told American audiences during a recruiting trip in 1862: “In a sense that is not merely constructive and figurative, but truly literal, God says to the black men of this country, with reference to Africa: ‘behold, I set the land before you, go up and possess it.’ ” Theirs was not to be a conquest but a return, an exodus out of captivity, a reclaiming of “consecrated ground.”8
Most striking of all in the rhetoric of Liberian nationalism was not the Exodus motif but its echo of the Model’s theme: that the success or failure of the Liberian nation makers’ work could not escape the world’s scrutiny. “The eyes of the whole civilized world are upon her, critically observing every step she takes,” Liberia’s first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, warned. “We are more eagerly watched than we have any idea of,” Blyden wrote. “The nations are looking to see whether ‘order and law, religion and morality, the rights of conscience, the rights of persons, the rights of property, may all be secured’ by a government controlled entirely and purely by Negroes.”9
Liberia might be on the margins of the world, but there, Liberian orators told each other, the very basis of the idea of white racial superiority lay exposed to scrutiny. There as nowhere else, assumptions “of the incapacity of the colored race for self-government” were brought to a test. “Fellow citizens! we stand now on ground never occupied by a people before,” Hilary Teage told a Monrovia audience on the eve of Liberian independence, whose declaration he was soon to write.
However insignificant we may regard ourselves, the eyes of Europe and America are upon us, as a germ destined to burst from its enclosure in the earth … and swell to the dimensions of the full-grown tree, or (inglorious fate!) to shrivel, to die, and be buried in oblivion.… Upon you, rely upon it, depends, in a measure you can hardly conceive, the future destiny of your race. You are to give the answer whether the African race is doomed to interminable degradation—a hideous blot on the fair face of creation, a libel upon the dignity of human nature, or incapable to take an honorable rank amongst the great family of nations!
“The experiment we are now making concerns the entire Negro race,” others wrote. It would either prove “the old calumnies against the Negro” or be the foundation upon which “an abiding Negro Nationality” would take its rightful place in a racially hostile world.10
The Liberian republic was to be a beacon to others. But to dwell in that city upon a hill was to dwell in a site of intense visibility and vulnerability. Each step would be taken under the skeptical eye of its race-demeaning critics. The theme of trial and vulnerability that ran so palpably through Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” had no clearer expression in the greater America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than in the nation that a handful of its racial castoffs endeavored to make.
Liberia was a small and distant place. But by the turn of the twentieth century, a sense that the future of the black “race” might turn on its success had begun to infect the imaginations of a new generation of African Americans in the United States as well. Perhaps it was no surprise that Booker T. Washington should have found the project congenial to his conviction that in a prejudiced world the “Negro” must pull himself up by his bootstraps through work, education, and self-help. His own Tuskegee Institute for industrial and agricultural education was often described as a “city on a hill,” beaming a gospel of self-reliance far beyond its Alabama setting.11 By the turn of the twentieth century Tuskegee Institute had begun to dispatch small teams of students and faculty to colonial Africa to help train native Africans in more efficient cotton production techniques. When debt crisis broke over Liberia once again in 1908, Booker T. Washington himself intervened with Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft to help broker a new loan on much less avaricious terms than the British bankers had granted, secured by what essentially amounted to protectorate status for Liberia: U.S. government control over Liberia’s customs revenues and U.S. control over appointments to its army officer corps. Fittingly, not long after Washington’s death a clone of his Tuskegee Institute, the Booker T. Washington Agricultural and Industrial Institute, was established by his admirers in Liberia.12
Marcus Garvey’s vision for a new Liberia was far more flamboyant. Garvey cut a meteoric arc through African America between 1919 and 1923. Preaching a separatist version of Booker T. Washington’s gospel of self-help, he drew tens of thousands to the rallies of his Universal Negro Improvement Association. Through chains of factories, publishing houses, retail stores, and steamship lines, the movement promised to create a black-owned economy within an economy that had systematically suppressed and exploited the descendants of Africa. At the apex of this project, Garvey envisioned a massive return to Africa via a recolonization of Liberia. The Liberia that Garvey promised was a nation teaming with new race pride, new emigrants from American racial injustice, and capital raised from the black American masses. “We are coming four hundred million strong” from the United States, South America, and the West Indies, Garvey promised: to reclaim Africa for its people, to reunite a people in exile, and to build “a great state in Africa which … will make the Negro race as respectable as the others.”13
But the most unexpected of those who caught the sense that African Americans’ future might, in some critically important way, lie in Liberia’s possession was W.E.B. Du Bois. Booker T. Washington’s rival, Marcus Garvey’s nemesis, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s most eloquent voice for African Americans’ claims not simply to a side economy of their own but for full, equal rights within the U.S. nation, Du Bois was an odd figure to enlist in the cause of Pan-Africanism, and he came late to it. It was in watching the First World War spill over Europe in a contest for the spoils of the world’s resources that the importance of the global “color line,” as Du Bois called it, began to press itself on his acute and restless consciousness.
He helped engineer the first Pan-African Congresses in London and Paris and to write into their manifestos the imperative that Negroes everywhere be recognized as potentially fully civilized peoples. Imperialism needed to be recognized for what it was: a system of monopolization of the world’s wealth and resources and exploitation of its black, brown, and yellow labor, all justified by the cant of the impossibility of self-government by people of color. It was with that global struggle in mind that Du Bois sailed for his first glimpse of Africa in 1923. His destination was Liberia.14
The breathless reports that Du Bois filed from his four-week stay make a mass of contradictory reading now. Enchanted by the colors, the bare limbs, the sinuous, muscled bodies, the leisure and languor of African life, the deep silences and “great gold globules” of sunlight that enveloped the landscape, Du Bois seemed to have slipped on the robe and slippers of the purest bohemian aesthete. When “primitive men” outpaced those who now thought themselves fittest to rule, he wrote, “there will spring in Africa a civilization without coal, without noise, where machinery will sing and never rush and roar, and where men will sleep and think and dance and lie prone before the rising sons and women will be happy.” In this alternative to modern commercial-industrial society, “We shall dream the day away and in cool dawns, in little swift hours, do all our work.” This was a view of Liberia from the hammock of a beguiled tourist.15 In the meantime, Du Bois was working hard to help arrange the massive rubber plantation investment that was to make Liberia for the next fifty years what some critics would call a wholly owned subsidiary of the Firestone Rubber Company.
“The spell of Africa is upon me,” Du Bois confessed in the midst of these contradictions. Africa “is a great black bosom where the Spirit longs to die. It is life so burning, so fire encircled that one bursts with terrible soul inflaming life.” Can one blame Du Bois for being a little dizzy under its effects? In his circle of New Negro artists and writers, the allure of negritude was powerfully at work in the early 1920s in paint, dance, and prose. Langston Hughes, sailing down the west coast of the African “motherland” in 1923, could not shake from his mind the same images that overpowered Du Bois: the “market flashing with colors, the dark girls in bright bandannas … blue green twilight.… The hot, heavy African night studded with stars.” The ancient “witchery” of Africa, Du Bois wrote, was “burning” in his Massachusetts-born, Harvard-educated blood.16
But of one thing Du Bois was certain. Every power in Europe and every white supremacist at home was vitally interested in the failure of Liberia. In Liberia, he wrote, in a soberer mood, “political power has tried to resist the power of modern capital.” The outcome was not yet clear. But “if Liberia fails this justifies slavery, serfdom, autocracy and exploitation of a race ‘incapable’ of self-rule. If Liberia succeeds why should not the Negro succeed in self rule and democratic development and decent industrial organization in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, French Africa, South Africa, East Africa, Kenya, the Sudan and Abyssinia?”17 The eyes of a scornful world were upon Liberia, eager for its every misstep. Du Bois did not need to read “A Model of Christian Charity” to share, more intensely than any of the drum-beating patriots at home, what Winthrop meant by the anxiety of being made “a story and a byword through the world.” For all its contradictions and failures, Liberia was an experiment in black political capacity perched on a mountain peak of visibility and vulnerability.
The “city upon a hill” language flowed unforced out of his pen. “We fall down, down to the burning equator, past Guinea and Gambia, to where the Lion Mountain glares, toward the vast gulf whose sides are lined with silver and gold and ivory,” Du Bois wrote. “And now we stand before Liberia—Liberia that is a little thing set upon a hill—thirty or forty thousand square miles and two million folk. But it represents to me the world.”18