In 1894, Antiguan-born preacher William George Emanuel arrived in Cuba and helped unite many of the ethnically-defined African
cabildos on the island into a “Colonia Africana.” Then, in 1900, he began petitioning the British government for land grants in West Africa on behalf of 18,000 freed slaves: “On no account whatever would they agree to be naturalized as Cubans… Looking forward always to Africa, from which place they were brought…they [would] rather return to build up Africa their birthplace.”
[1] In his petitions, Emanuel rejected Cuban citizenship and embraced imperial subjecthood. He claimed that he and the “native Africans” he was representing should be allowed to “return” to Africa as subjects of the British Empire because they were born in regions that became British colonies. Negotiations with the British did not go as planned, however, and so Emanuel began writing similar petitions to the Belgian government. In these letters, he claimed that he and other members of the “Colonia Africana” were born in regions that became the Congo Free State and were thus entitled to land in Central Africa as subjects of the Belgian empire.
Emanuel’s back-to-Africa movement, while ultimately unsuccessful, reveals much about the tensions and malleability of race, nation, and citizenship in the Caribbean and broader Atlantic world. Emanuel tacked back and forth between racial, national, imperial, and other identities, variously claiming to be “African,” “Mina,” “Congolese,” “British,” and “Belgian”—though never “Cuban.” Drawing on testimonies of freed African slaves in Cuba, as well as correspondence between Emanuel and the U.S., British, and Belgian governments, this paper argues that the flexibility of “African” identity was a crucial tool in the often elusive search for belonging.
[1] Letter from William George Emanuel to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, London, 7 June 1902. NAUK, CO 96/401.
