The Diaspora Needs Unity Like Africa

             It has become fashionable in the developed world community to criticize Africa for the lack of unity among its component members, as evidenced by its inconsistent efforts to get African Union members to collaborate effectively on many issues and the somewhat disjointed implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area due to the differential in political will and capacity of individual African countries.

The African Diaspora also has joined in this criticism, but as the Bible says in Matthew 7:3: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”  We in the Diaspora have enough issues with working cooperatively in achieving economic independence that we cannot criticize Africa’s lack of collaboration while ignoring our own.

The Diaspora in the United States has long been divided by populist leaders who spoke for the middle and lower economic classes and those who championed leadership by the Black elites. The former was embodied in Booker T. Washington, who encouraged practical education and entrepreneurship as the key to Black success in America. His main opponent was W.E.B. Dubois, a Black intellectual who promoted leadership by a “talented tenth” of the Diaspora population.

Washington was listened to by white leaders in America but was reviled among some in the Diaspora for being accommodationist. In his 1895 “Atlanta Compromise” speech, Washington promoted vocational education, industrial occupations, stating that the learning of practical trades would give African Americans opportunities for economic advancement and wealth creation rather than other more intellectual pursuits such as higher education. “Cast down your bucket where you are,” he said, meaning that being the best at what you do would make you stronger and more self-sufficient.

Washington said that at least for that point in time, Black people would not focus their demands on equality or integration, and Northern whites should fund black educational charities. That view was initially accepted by DuBois and others…until the phenomenon of lynching began to proliferate. DuBois and others began to feel that Washington focused on economic empowerment over political empowerment, which was true, but economic power trumps political power. You cannot exercise independent political power without the ability to depend to the greatest extent possible on your own resources.

Certainly, there was much to criticize about not fighting against the violence of segregationists, but money powers politics. Decades prior, Black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without demand.”  He felt that “a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just.”

If only the wealth accumulation promoted by Washington and the political power building promoted by DuBois could have merged, there would have been a sustainable power base within the Diaspora. But they were focused on seeing that their theories of Black empowerment were predominant in the United States without much thought for how this would play out internationally among the global African Diaspora.

There was some thought of Diaspora unity beyond the United States in the early 20^th century, though. Between 1900 and 1945, there were six Pan-African Congresses led by visionary leaders from Europe, North America, the Caribbean and Africa, who opposed colonialism and segregation. Their efforts were constrained by the iron grip colonial powers (with support from allies such as the United States) exerted over the countries under their dominion. When anyone threatened that dominance, they acted quickly to stop their efforts.

As I have written before, Marcus Garvey created the Universal Negro Improvement Association to not only galvanize Diaspora members in the Western Hemisphere, but also try to forge an alliance with Africans, especially in one of the only two independent African countries run by its people at that time: Liberia. Unfortunately for Garvey and the delegation he sent to Liberia to share expertise, equipment and money, a combination of factors would prevent the UNIA success in that country. Not only were the colonial powers and their U.S. ally strongly opposed to an effort that could encourage battles against colonialism throughout Africa and even elsewhere, but indigenous Liberians saw the Garvey effort as another invasion of Diaspora outsiders like that which had birthed the country as an independent nation in 1847.

Throughout the next few decades, there were movements and leaders among the Diaspora who looked toward the continent to promote decolonization even as they fought for civil rights in the United States. Still, there was not then nor has there been since an equally strenuous effort to free Caribbean countries or fight for the rights of Diasporan people in Central and South America.

The kind of vision of global Diaspora unity championed by Garvey, DuBois, George Padmore and others was not paramount within the Diaspora. Local concerns were so all-encompassing that they couldn’t put together a successful movement to unite not only their own countrymen but also other elements within the global Diaspora.

In the late 1950s, civil rights leader Rev. Leon Sullivan began to combine the economic empowerment of Washington with the internationalization of Garvey. After successfully using boycotts to force companies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to interview and hire Black people, he went on to create organizations to prepare people (including non-Black people) for the jobs his boycotts created, and he created organizations that reached out beyond the United States to do capacity building in Africa.

Then he created the Africa-African American Summits in 1991 to bring together leaders throughout the global Diaspora. These summits produced recommendations for actions, but Sullivan didn’t stop there. He created the Peoples Investment Fund for Africa to facilitate to encourage Diaspora investment on the continent.

It later gave way to the Self-Help Investment Program. While neither have sustained themselves, they revealed a deep well of interest within the Diaspora for a continuing, durable financial relationship among the global Diaspora members.

There were Diaspora leaders who supported Sullivan and his efforts while he lived, but once he died in 2001, that support for his global outreach efforts dissipated. His death and the ageing of people such as Ambassador Andrew Young have deprived the Diaspora of leaders who could galvanize the opportunity the African Union offered in 2003 when it declared the Diaspora to be the 6^th region of Africa.

There is not now a figure in our community who can rouse the Diaspora to actualize this access to the African Union because of his or her successful efforts to acknowledge the various elements of the Diaspora and encourage collaboration. Failures in the past and even in the present make such outreach throughout the Diaspora unlikely. There have been few Diaspora leaders ever who could successfully attempt such a unity effort. Where are the leaders who could do so now? We should identify and support such figures if we can. They are desperately needed.