Chief Alfred Sam’s African Movement, 1912–17: Debating Pan-African Motives and African American Migrations to British West Africa

In 1912, Chief Alfred Sam, a businessman from the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) initiated what would become known as the African Movement to send African Americans back to Africa. Sam persuaded African Americans living in Oklahoma to financially commit to the African Movement despite opposition from the United States and the British colonial government in the Gold Coast. By January 1915, sixty African American delegates of the African Movement docked off the shores of Saltpond on the SS Liberia. However, by September that same year, the last batch of these African American migrants left the Gold Coast and returned to the US due to official restrictions, shortage of resources and poor planning on Sam’s part. Current debates on Sam’s African Movement have dismissed earlier characterizations of the scheme as fraudulent and a failure. Instead, scholars highlight how the movement raised race consciousness and debates about pan-Africanism in West Africa. Using West African newspapers, this paper centers West African perspectives and discourses of African American return movements and their expectations of these ‘returnees.’ Through the African Movement, African Americans and Africans ideologically debated and made ambivalent claims on what it meant to be African. For example, some elites in the pan-Africanist Gold Coast Aborigines Rights Protection Society ironically affirmed their true Africanness, and yet insisted that loyalty towards the British colonial government was the only condition for which they would support the African Movement. Some press reports even mocked assumptions that African Americans were related to Africans and thus dismissed ideas of return.