African American Liberation in Fin de Siècle South Africa

At the turn of the twentieth century, a period punctuated by the “Boer War” and “Rough Riders,” the Baptist preacher Charles Morris traveled from the US to South Africa.  A Wilberforce- and Newton-educated missionary, Morris sailed across the Atlantic during the height of Victorian- and Progressive-era imperialisms. The goal of his trip was to advance theologies of black nationalism and goals of Back-to-Africa, a social movement responding to racist violence gripping America in the 1890s.  This decade represented the high tide of lynching, Supreme Court support of Jim Crow legislation, and post-Reconstruction mutinies in opposition to black men holding economic power and elected office.  Our paper explores how the politics of race and gender in America drove Morris to South Africa with a paradoxical hope that the British Empire would offer African Americans opportunity and equality.  In Cape and Natal colonies, Morris evangelized among African communities, pursuing the aim of “redemptive expansionism” that encouraged converts to seek the franchise, commerce and Christianity.  He even approached Cecil Rhodes to fund Tuskegee education in both Natal and America.  Indeed, the Anglophilia of Morris highlighted the contradictory dimensions of black politics intricately linking South Africa and the United States.  We critically examine why Morris embraced the British promise of “equality before the law” in South Africa.  Was this promise Morris’ answer to white supremacy at home, particularly after the Wilmington Coup and racist jingoism incited by the US invasion of Cuba?  Along the way, we study how Morris deployed his technical and entrepreneurial abilities, as well as the gospel, to promote “manly redemption” and “civilizing uplift” across a global color line.    This paper engages with a number of historiographies: modern African and South African history, African Diaspora research, transnational studies, African-American nationalisms, as well as literatures on British imperialism and gender (“masculinities”) analysis.