The slogan “Back to Africa” usually evokes the mass movement led by Marcus Garvey, who called upon Black people in the Americas to relocate to Africa in the early twentieth century.
But even before Garvey, thousands of formerly enslaved African men, women, and children and their descendants had already been emigrating from the present-day United States to the African continent.
Emigration to Africa started as early as the late eighteenth century, continued after emancipation, and persisted during the entire nineteenth century. However, existing narratives of the movement of freedpeople relocating to Africa overlook the fact that thousands of freed Africans and their descendants also migrated from Brazil and Cuba to West Africa and West Central Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite specific motivations in each region and period, relocation to Africa was a response to anti-Black racism in the Americas. Individually or in groups, freed Africans and their descendants left the United States, Jamaica, Canada, Brazil, and Cuba to settle on the coastal areas of West Africa and West Central Africa over more than a century.Following the journeys of these free and freed men, women, and children, this chapter illuminates the shared and individual contexts that led them to leave the Americas and settle in various parts of West Africa and West Central Africa. African ancestry remained a problematic marker connecting Black men and women to slavery in the Americas; having a past associated with slavery followed Black migrants to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Returnees who settled on the Bight of Benin joined other freedmen and slave merchants established in the region, and some freedmen who settled in West Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century, as discussed in previous chapters, became slave traders themselves. Although to several African-born settlers the emigration to Africa was a return to the motherland, many of these free and freed men and women were born in the Americas and were therefore setting foot on the continent of their ancestors for the first time. Regardless of their birthplaces, conflict often marked the contact between these new Black immigrants and the various local populations.