Black Diaspora and the Founding of Liberia Research Paper

Black Diaspora and the Founding of Liberia - Research Paper Example According to these people, the strength of the blacks lay in their own hands and not in the hands of whites. African Americans belonged to Africa and their movement from America to Liberia was expected to be the result of their freedom and not their further enslavement. The journey to the founding of Liberia is a long one and captures the vision of the elders of African America who eliminated the differences within the African community that still comprises of a variety of languages and cultures. They wanted to see Africa as a whole, united in its dream. Hence the term ‘Pan-Africanism’ has been coined. It is the ‘political project’ to allow those in African diaspora to return by way of unification of all the Africans in a single African state4 the intellectual roots of the movement strongly lie in the racial conception of Africa by its founders, the African American and the Afro-Caribbean intellectuals. Pan-Africanism aimed to challenge the anti-black racism on two fronts since it started off from the New World among the slave descendants spreading back to Africa. Firstly, in the diaspora it condemned racial domination and secondly it also challenged the colonial domination which eventually seemed to have taking a racial form in Africa alone. The great divide in the movement is mainly due to the â€Å"stresses and strains† caused by the aforementioned goals which pull it in different directions.5 Liberia eventually grew into a colony and then a commonwealth nation. It achieved independence in 1847 with the help of the American Colonization Society. It was not until the 1980 that the descendents of freed slaves, also known as Americo-Liberians, got away with the socio-political control of the... This essay declares that the journey to the founding of Liberia is a long one and captures the vision of the elders of African America who eliminated the differences within the African community that still comprises of a variety of languages and cultures. They wanted to see Africa as a whole, united in its dream. Hence the term ‘Pan-Africanism’ has been coined. It is the ‘political project’ to allow those in African diaspora to return by way of unification of all the Africans in a single African state the intellectual roots of the movement strongly lie in the racial conception of Africa by its founders, the African American and the Afro-Caribbean intellectuals. Pan-Africanism aimed to challenge the anti-black racism on two fronts since it started off from the New World among the slave descendants spreading back to Africa. This paper discusses that colonization was in many ways a missionary task which it quite a â€Å"benevolent project†. Hence the method of carrying out the plans was very much private and was done on a small scale. There was definitely a plan of colonization behind Thomas Jefferson’s plea to end slavery and allow the blacks to visit and enjoy their own lands. There was indeed evil arising from the slavery through which the Americans were benefiting. They did not know the anger they were breeding among the natives of Africa who learnt what was being done to their brothers abroad.