Hands unto Ethiopia: The First African Americans to Visit Nubia

Since at least the middle of the 18^th century, people of African descent in the Americas have invoked ancient Nubia—the “Ethiopia” and “Cush” of the Christian Bible—as exemplar of African history and signifier of a global racial identity. The prophecy in Psalms 68:31 that “Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God” became the shared slogan of political, religious, and literary movements on both sides of the Atlantic that are known collectively to historians as Ethiopianism. By 1902, Pauline Hopkins’s serial novel, Of One Blood, would cast a fictional African American traveler to Nubia as the harbinger of Pan-African liberation and mutual uplift of Africans and African Americans. Yet no published study has ever analyzed—nor even documented—the experiences of the first African Americans who actually traveled to Nubia. This silence is all the more remarkable, because such analysis has been performed for the first Europeans, white Americans, and Canadian Iroquois visitors to Nubia. This paper seeks to fill that historiographical void by reconstructing the history of the first African American visitors to Nubia from their private correspondence, interviews with their descendants, and an unpublished essay on the African past that was penned by one of the travelers following his return to the United States. If the story of their transcontinental voyage has thus far escaped attention in the academy, this may be attributed in large part to the fact that it does not belong to the traditional source material of either Ethiopianism or exploration; instead, the five Tuskegee graduates who sailed to Nubia arrived there as the agents of a cotton cultivation project—a plan dependent upon African labor, supervised by African Americans, and sponsored by a white American capitalist under the aegis of British colonial authorities.