The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 32 (2021)
Copyright © 2021 Keiko Araki. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this noticeincluded, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

Transnational Nationalism:
Revisiting the Garvey Movement

Keiko ARAKI*

INTRODUCTION
In late May 2020, George Floyd, an African American man, wasmurdered by a White police officer in Minneapolis. When video footage ofthe scene began to circulate, it sparked the nationwide Black Lives Mattermovement against police brutality and racial injustice. As the movement
spread rapidly and heightened tensions between demonstrators and lawenforcement officers, the Ghanaian minister of tourism announced hernation’s invitation to African Americans to “return” to their homeland,
asserting that “Ghana is your home. Africa is your home.”1
Ghana launched its Year of Return campaign in 2019, which marked four
hundred years since the first documented enslaved Africans arrived on the
shores of Virginia in America. The campaign resulted in a 27 percent
increase in international visitors to Ghana compared to the previous year andresulted in $3.3 billion in income.2 In 2020, the government started its
Beyond the Return initiative to encourage members of the African diaspora
not just to visit but to settle and invest in Ghana. It is reported that the
government negotiated with local chiefs to obtain five hundred acres of land
for about 1,500 returnee families.3
The minister’s statement, “come home build a life in Ghana, you do nothave to stay where you are not wanted forever,”4 echoed a remark reportedly*Professor, Tokai University

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made by C. D. B. King, who attended the Paris Peace Conference and later
became the president of Liberia, almost one-hundred years ago: “If theAmerican Negroes were so thoroughly dissatisfied with the social andpolitical conditions, why they did not go to Liberia . . . and become citizens
there where they would have social and political equality.”5 In the same
year, Marcus Garvey, a Black leader from Jamaica, launched the Back-toAfrica movement, in which skilled Blacks were to be sent to Liberia to help
its development. Although his plan eventually failed, his vision survived
even after his death. One hundred years later, we see Ghana initiating thesame kind of plan as Garvey’s.
In this article I reevaluate Garvey’s movement, especially its nationbuilding programs in Africa, according to the international politics at thetime. In recent years, international relations scholars have reappraised theGarvey movement, with many positioning Garvey’s transnationalism as apioneering effort of liberal international cooperation. In contrast, I argue that
his transnationalism would be more aptly called “transnational nationalism”
because Garvey not only presented Blacks as a transnational entity but alsosought to establish a powerful nation-state on African soil. In that regard, hisworldview was more “realist” than “liberal” in terms of international
relations theory.
Garvey’s realist worldview was heavily influenced by Japan, the first
country of color to defeat a White empire, as it did in the Russo-Japanese
War. In becoming one of the post–World War I great powers, Japan gained
the admiration of many African Americans.6 Garvey saw Japan as a model
for a future Black nation, pointing out that Japanese immigrants and Blacks
in the United States were treated differently because the former had apowerful nation-state behind them.
Garvey originally started his movement in Jamaica by establishing the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). After he moved its
headquarters to Harlem, New York, in 1918, the organization attracted
numerous supporters at home and abroad and grew into the first Blackcentered mass movement, with more than 830 chapters in the United Statesand more than 210 abroad. Garvey’s movement was based on the idea of
Pan-Africanism, in that the advancement of Blacks across borders wasnecessary to improve the conditions of Blacks in every region. To achievethis, Garvey believed there needed to be a powerful Black nation-state
occupying a respectable position in the international community, which
could represent Black people as a whole.
During this period, Garvey’s harshest critic, W. E. B. Du Bois, also

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advocated Pan-Africanism. Du Bois’s Pan-African Congress, however,primarily appealed to the international community through meetings of eliteBlacks. The Garvey movement operated enterprises, such as the steamshipcompany Black Star Line (BSL), supported by the Black masses purchasing
shares of stock, and attempted to actualize the formation of a powerfulnation-state in Africa.
After World War I, as the right to self-determination and the establishmentof nation-states became the norm for the international community, Garvey
saw Blacks outside Africa’s shores as members of a quasi-nation and sought
to claim their right to self-determination. Initially, he appealed to theinternational community, including the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, tocede the former German African colonies to members of the African
diaspora. When the League of Nations decided to make the former German
Africa colonies into mandated territories, Garvey moved the site forhis nation-building scheme to Liberia, which—having declared its
independence in 1847—was one of only two independent nations in Africa.
The Garvey movement tended to have a reputation for being dreamy andunrealistic. Indeed, Garvey’s gigantic “African republic” never materialized,
and the BSL finally collapsed. After initial negative reviews and subsequent
high praise from Black nationalists, the Garvey movement in the late 1970s
began to be studied based on primary sources. Researchers after that time
have focused mainly on cities in the American South and elsewhere in theworld, where the movement was localized and developed in conjunction
with a variety of other factors, within the unique context of each place.7 This
makes sense since the Garvey movement was multifaceted and diverse. It is
still necessary, however, to analyze the core features of the movement,
especially from the perspective of international relations, since Garvey
himself recognized that the movement’s main battleground was international
politics.
The “decolonization” trend in the field of international relations has
highlighted phenomena that have been overlooked in conventional
narratives. This has led to a revisualization of the transnational aspect of theGarvey movement. Randolph Persaud, who specializes in postcolonialism
and race in international relations, affirms that Garvey and his organization,
the UNIA, “advanced counter-hegemonic discourses, which have been
fundamental to the emergence of global democratization,” by applying
sovereignty to “people.”8 Through its appeal to the international community,
he believes, the UNIA advocated “an international norm of human rights
which laid the basis for limiting sovereignty in instances of state-guaranteed

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racial oppression.”9 Today, those limitations on state sovereignty arestandardized under the name of “humanitarian intervention” or“responsibility to protect.”
Another postcolonial IR scholar, Robbie Shilliam treats Garvey’s “extraterritorial sovereign authority” as a predecessor of another modern-day
phenomenon: “multi-level governance encapsulated in the emergence of theEuropean Union.”10 Through the example of the Garvey movement, heshows that the concept of the change in the view of sovereignty fromterritorial to extraterritorial is multilinear, rather than unilinear, as is the
predominant narrative in international relations theory today.
Garvey’s transnationalism was ahead of its time. He represented
transnational Blacks as bearers of sovereignty in an “imagined community.”
Garvey, however, did not only seek to create a Black transnational
community. For him, territory-based nation building was also crucial. Froma realist perspective in international relations theory, he believed that astrong, substantive nation-state was essential for transnational Blacks toreceive respectful treatment everywhere. Garvey’s imagined community was
imperial, in the sense that the home country would protect its people even if
they do not reside within the home country. Both of his schemes,
transnational and national, were intertwined and to be implemented
simultaneously.
Garvey’s transnational nationalism, the building of a powerful nationstate in Africa that would represent and protect transnational Blacks, was thecore of his movement. I demonstrate this by examining how his movement
tried to accomplish his program in the contemporary international sphereand how other actors reacted.
Garvey’s Realist Worldview
Garvey defined Blacks as a transnational political group and sought toachieve their elevated status within the international community rather than
within their respective national societies. He had a worldview based on arealist perspective and believed that the world was based on a struggle
between the weak and the strong, and that power was necessary for a groupto occupy a dignified position. He was also aware of the international racial
order in which Blacks were positioned at the bottom. He believed that thecurrent order could be disrupted by the presence of a powerful Black nationstate.
Japan played an important role in Garvey’s conceptualization of theTRANSNATIONAL NATIONALISM

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movement. As mentioned, as the first nation of color to join the ranks ofgreat powers, Japan made its presence known in the international
community at the Paris Peace Conference. He believed that the low status ofBlacks in the United States was because Blacks did not have a strong
independent nation-state, unlike Japanese Americans who had higher status
and a strong nation-state in Japan. He claimed, “It is requisite for
400,000,000 Negroes to have a national home and a national government.”11
Garvey did not call for a single large Black nation in which all Blacks inthe world could directly belong as a substantial “nation,” nor was hespecifically aiming at the independence of Black people in each place
individually. His goal was to build a powerful nation-state that would
represent “Blacks” and be able to compete with Western powers. Such aBlack nation was, as Garvey often said, more akin to an “empire.”
Garvey said that there would be no peace in the world unless the “white
man confines himself politically to Europe, the yellow man to Asia and theblack man to Africa.”12 Note that he inserted the word “politically” here. Itmeans that each race is sovereign as a majority in its original region. Garvey
did not deny immigration but, rather, believed that the home nation-stateshould provide protection for immigrants residing in various places.
Although the three regions listed above were identified as belonging to theirrespective races, Garvey cleverly avoided making a clear statement about
which race belonged to the United States. On rare occasions, he did speak of
the United States as a White man’s country, but this only indicates his
awareness of the status quo that the government of United States was
dominated by White people.13
Taking a realist perspective, Garvey also ranked those who belonged tothe transnational Black community. Among Blacks, there were those who
were “advanced” and those who were “behind”; he believed that the former
had to lead the latter. Therefore, by extension, the Japanese expansion into
China was an attempt by the “advanced” Japan to lift up the “lagging”
China, and there was no problem with it. This worldview was shared by
Japanese leaders of the time, especially those who advocated PanAsianism.14 While Garvey’s view of the ideal “empire” did not endorse
violent aggression against other nations, the above ideas left room for adominant–subjugated relationship within the empire.
In Liberia, the destination of the Back-to-Africa movement, a small eliteclass of Americo-Liberians, who had colonized the country from the UnitedStates, ruled over many Africans. A strict application of the right to selfdetermination would have allowed for the self-determination of most

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Africans and, more precisely, of the various ethnic groups within them.
Garvey, however, disregarded this colonial domination found within thesame race and took the position that priority should be given to thebetterment of Blacks led by “progressive” people.
Observing that the post–World War I years were a time when the world
was “reorganizing itself,” Garvey asserted that Blacks were now demanding
their “portion of democracy,” which they had been fighting for throughout
the war, and he prepared the UNIA’s nine-point peace aims to appeal to theinternational community when the Paris Peace Conference took place in
1919.15 As Persaud rightly points out, the aims show “the dual character ofsovereignty—namely, the sovereignty of the state and the sovereignty of thepeople.” While emphasizing the UNIA’s “position that the African nation
cannot be delimited by state/territorial borders,” and explaining that“whenever territorial delimitations were fixed to political claims, theyreferred to the whole African continent,” Persaud omits from his full citationof the aims the ninth point, which is the focal point of the UNIA’s scheme.16
The ninth and final point demands that “the captured German colonies inAfrica be turned over to the Natives with educated Western and Eastern
Negroes as their leaders.”17
At the time, to be recognized as an actor in the international community, it
was necessary to meet the so-called standard of civilization. With the help of
the Westernized African diaspora, Garvey attempted to create a Black nation
on African soil that could be comparable to those in the West. There was apower vacuum in the former German colonies in Africa after Germany’s
defeat, and Garvey considered them the perfect place to achieve his plan.
The call for independence for these colonies under the leadership ofWestern-educated Blacks clearly differed from the proposals made by otherorganizations, such as the Pan-African Congress, which did not demand
immediate independence of those areas. For Garvey, gaining nationalsovereignty over a particular territory in Africa was essential formaterializing the sovereignty of Black people.
The UNIA sent Eliézer Cadet, a Haitian, to Paris, in an attempt topublicize the UNIA’s aims. He met the Japanese delegate to the Peace
Conference, Nobuaki Makino, and others but failed to make an impact on
the conference. In the end, it was decided that the former German colonies
in Africa would be governed by the mandate system as defined in Article 22of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Criticizing this mandate provision
as signifying a new African colonization by European countries, the UNIA
rejected the League of Nations itself as “null and void,” due to its

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powerlessness in the international arena, which was controlled by the great
powers.18 The UNIA distanced itself from the international organization andbegan its own business of nation building in Liberia.
Liberia in World Politics
Liberia was a new nation that had declared its independence in 1847, led
by Black emigrants from the United States under the auspices of theAmerican Colonization Society. These Blacks, who made up about 1 percent
of Liberia’s population, were known as Americo-Liberians and formed thedominant class. Although the nation had achieved independence through US
leverage, the fury of imperialism on the African continent threatened theirborders: British Sierra Leone in the northwest and French West Africa fromthe north to the northeast were still claiming territory in Liberia even after
the border was settled.
A militia was organized by emigrants to Liberia in the 1820s, and theLiberia Frontier Force (LFF) was formally established in 1908, in response
to a request from the British. The mission of the LFF was to defend theborders from French aggression and prevent resistance movements byindigenous Africans, and it was to be under the control of the AmericoLiberian commissioner in charge of each district. The British commander ofthe LFF, however, refused to deploy its forces under the authority ofAmerico-Liberians, which resulted in a riot in 1909. This led to abreakdown in cooperation with Britain, and, subsequently, Liberia sought
military and economic assistance from the United States. Beginning in 1912,
the LFF was commanded by Charles Young, a Black American who had
served as a resident military officer in Haiti and later became the first Blackcolonel.19
The growing influence of the United States, however, did not eliminate
pressures from the British and French governments. In the early 1920s,
alarmed by the Garvey movement that was spreading across Africa, bothgovernments repeatedly questioned the Liberian government about its
relationship with the movement.20
Liberia was forced to rely on Western countries for its finances. In 1871,
Liberia entered into a loan agreement with Britain for £100,000, but thisloan did not benefit Liberia, and, combined with the depression caused by
the fall in the price of coffee, it led to further economic difficulties. During
the negotiation of a new £100,000 loan in 1906, several British officers wereplaced in the Liberian customs administration. In 1912, the United States,

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Britain, France, and Germany made a joint loan of $1.7 million, and four
trustees were appointed by their governments to oversee the customs
department. When World War I broke out, Liberia declared war on Germany
under pressure from the United States, despite Germany having been an
important trading partner.21 This led to a sharp deterioration in Liberia’s
finances.
In September 1918, a $5 million loan from the United States wasapproved, but it imposed strict conditions that deprived Liberia of powerover its own financial and internal affairs. Liberia at first accepted theconditions but finally rejected them. The issue of loans to Liberia wasdiscussed during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, but C. D. B. King, amember of the Liberian delegation and future president of the country,
expressed his dissatisfaction that he had not been invited to the informal
meeting of the United States, Britain, and France: “We object to this
discussion going on at which Liberia is not represented. Liberia’s fate is
being determined and she has no voice in the matter.”22
The UNIA’s Back-to-Africa movement took shape in February 1919
during the Paris Peace Conference, when Cadet handed King a copy of
Negro World, the UNIA’s weekly newspaper and asked for cooperation with
the UNIA. As noted, King welcomed the migration of members of theAfrican diaspora to Liberia. This contact gave shape to Garvey’s plan tocreate a powerful nation in Africa with the help of skilled and educatedBlacks.
Liberia and the Back-to-Africa Movement
In June 1920, a UNIA representative was sent to Liberia to begin
negotiating with the government. He requested a grant of “lands forbusiness, agriculture and industrial purposes” in return for the UNIA’s“financial and moral assistance” to enhance the international prestige of
Liberia. In response, Liberia’s secretary of state, Edwin Barclay, stated onbehalf of President King, that the government of Liberia “has no hesitancy
in assuring” the UNIA that it affords “every facility legally possible.”23 In
August 1920, Garvey declared that the UNIA had “decided to concentrate on
the building of the great Republic of Liberia, and to make Liberia one of thegreat powers of the world.”24
In October 1920, the campaign for the Liberian construction loan was
launched with the goal of collecting $2 million. The loan was advertised as
essential to making Liberia a powerful nation by building railroads, schools,

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churches, factories, port facilities, farms, and the like. Garvey appealed tothe practice of Pan-Africanism based on self-help to urge Blacks tocontribute to the advancement of their status by purchasing these loans andcreating a nation backed by themselves. When the campaign did not succeed
as expected, however, the Pan-Africanist cause morphed into a rhetoric thatemphasized mass migration of ordinary Blacks with their individual
economic interests.25
A federal special agent who monitored the Garvey movement reported
that the Back-to-Africa movement was making “quite an unrest among the
Negroes, causing them to sell their belongings and quit their jobs.”26 For
Black Americans at the time, the image of Liberia as a promised land was
not necessarily unrealistic. Through the American Colonization Society’s
own Back-to-Africa movement, which continued until the end of thenineteenth century, emigration to Liberia was recognized as helping Blacks
gain their independence and restore their humanity that had been lost toslavery.27
It was widely reported that the Liberian government refused to accept
terms that would violate the sovereignty of the nation and continued tonegotiate with the US government regarding the process of signing loan
agreements.28 In March 1921, when a Liberian delegation headed byPresident King arrived in the United States, King expressed caution about
the US government intervening in Liberia in the same way it did in Haiti.
The great publicity given American intervention in Haiti made it
desirable that the aims and desires of the American Government beclearly defined. . . . The constitutional Government of Liberia must be
maintained, even if in form only. . . . An empire within an empire was
not desired; a financial administration coordinating with the Liberian
Government was desired. No foreign official might have the power toveto Liberian legislative acts.29
In the same period, a six-member UNIA delegation visited Liberia as anadvance team. When the UNIA representatives asked for land for the projectat a meeting with Liberian officials, Secretary of State Barclay again
allowed UNIA to use some of their already settled areas.30 The delegation
had to suspend its activities at the end of April, however, because offinancial difficulties, which reflected the deteriorating relationships among
the UNIA representatives. It was reported that the two African
representatives claimed that they were free to change matters decided at

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KEIKO ARAKIUNIA in New York to suit local circumstances, quoting “we Africans will
run things over here. We hold the trump cards; we can make or break them;
they have got to come by us.”31 Eventually, an American delegate, who was
the resident secretary of the delegation, resigned.
The disruption of the UNIA delegation in Liberia was followed by the
repudiation of the Garvey movement by the Liberian government. In June
1921, the NAACP newspaper Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, publisheda statement signed by President King that Liberia “has never considered thesurrender of its sovereignty to any nation or organization. . . . Under nocircumstances will she allow her territory to be made a center of aggression
or conspiracy against other sovereign states.”32 Next month, the Baltimore
Afro-American carried an interview with President King in which hedeclared that he did not approve of the “political propaganda” of the Garvey
movement and explained that he had told the UNIA delegation to “discard
their political propaganda and impossible talk about driving the white raceout of Africa.”33
King was not denying all the activities of UNIA. In his statement in
Crisis, while rejecting mass migration, he said he would welcome migrationand investment by those with skills. He said that “Liberia has always
regarded itself as the natural refuge and center for persons of Negro descent
the world over.”34 Additionally, in the interview with the Baltimore AfroAmerican, King said that if UNIA representatives wanted to help Liberia,
they should “enlist the aid of the American people in sending emigrants
there, building up the country agriculturally, commercially andfinancially.”35
Garvey judged this cautious attitude of the Liberian government to arise
from a need to receive loans from the United States government and that it
did not reflect its true attitude.36 He continued to offer to provide resources
and tried to relax Liberia’s concerns by demonstrating that the UNIA’s
objectives were “solely and purely industrial and commercial” rather thanpolitical.37 Nevertheless, President King reiterated his caution against the
propaganda aspect of the Garvey movement, saying that Liberia, “as asovereign state with corresponding international responsibilities, could not
permit its territories to be used as a center of hostile attacks upon othersovereign states.”38
In 1924, Garvey announced a new migration plan, which called for“members . . . who desire to go to Liberia . . . to settle and help in theindustrial, commercial and cultural development,” and reiterated the
movement’s Pan-Africanist objectives.39 The plan envisioned theTRANSNATIONAL NATIONALISM

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construction of four colonies within Liberia, by building facilities forgovernment, entertainment, education, and public utilities in each colony. It
stated that “all government buildings, however, [shall be] under the directionof the Liberian Government,” which shows Garvey’s intention to remove
Liberia’s anxiety.40
When the new delegation of five engineers arrived in Monrovia in
August, however, they were placed under the surveillance of the Liberian
police and forced to leave the country on the next ship that arrived in port.41
At the end of the month, it was announced, with Barclay’s signature
underneath, that the Liberian government was “irrevocably opposed both inprinciple and in fact to the incendiary policy” of the UNIA.42 In the face of
this series of rejections from the Liberian government, the UNIA delegation
and Garvey himself pleaded for support from the president of the UnitedStates and the Liberian parliament, but the situation did not change.43
Ultimately, Liberia signed a $5 million loan agreement with the Firestone
Tire and Rubber Company, which was backed by the US government withDu Bois as a special ambassador. Even after the agreement with Firestone,
however, the Liberian government sought to amend the contract on the
grounds that it threatened the sovereignty of Liberia.44 A compromise was
finally reached the following year, and it has been suggested by RaymondLeslie Buell, the first American political scientist who conducted fieldwork
in Africa,45 that the reason for this would be Liberia’s desire to avoid being
dominated by European powers through strengthening its relations with theUnited States. Buell quotes Barclay’s comment in his private letter to the US
secretary of state: “What it has been hoped . . . is a counterpois[e] to othermenacingly aggressive interests already established in this country, abalancing of foreign influences here and a new economic impulse.”46
In his annual message to the legislature in December 1924, President
King discussed UNIA’s project at relatively long length and made it clearthat he had vetoed it.
The loud and continued boasts of members of that association in
America . . . that the Republic of Liberia would be used as the pointd’appui whence the grandiose schemes of their leader . . . would belaunched made it necessary for the Executive Government of Liberia totake such concrete and effective steps as would show to our friendly
territorial neighbors, and the world at large, that Liberia was not in any
way associated or in sympathy with any movement . . . which tends tointensify racial feelings of hatred and ill will.47

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Although King was sympathetic to the plight of Black people all over theworld and continued to welcome their emigration to Liberia, he stressed that
“Liberia’s immediate object is towards nationalism, not racialism; themaking of a nation and not a race.”48 In conclusion, he repeated his concern
for the neighboring powers by stating that the Government of Liberia “could
not give countenance to any association whose avowed objects and widely
advertised plans are launching a race war against friendly states in Africa.”49
Liberia was one of the weakest states in the Eurocentric international
community, and its political and economic sovereignty was constantly
threatened by Western powers. When the Garvey movement was cautiously
being investigated by the US, British, and French governments, it was
acceptable insofar as it strengthened the sovereignty of Liberia. When
Secretary of State Barclay met with the UNIA delegation, he said it was not
wise to always make the Liberian government’s intentions clear to the
British and French governments: “We don’t tell them what we think; weonly tell them what we like them to hear—what, in fact, they like to hear.”50
A similar attitude was also taken toward the UNIA.
The Liberian government was negotiating with Western powers,
exercising the utmost initiative to ensure its survival as a nation. Preserving,and even consolidating, the sovereignty and independence that it had alreadywon was far more important than being a pioneer in the realization of PanAfricanism. The UNIA’s transnational movement was hampered by thisstrong Liberian nationalism.
UNIA’s Appeal to the International Community
While facing difficulties in the Back-to-Africa movement in Liberia,
Garvey continued appealing to the international community at important
conferences where leaders from all the great powers gathered. When thedecision was made to hold the Washington Conference on Disarmament at
the end of 1921, Garvey attempted to promote the demands of the Blacks at
this event. Again, the Japanese presence was used as rhetoric to justify his
realist program of racial uplifting: “They were prejudiced against theJapanese 70 years ago. . . . Since the Japanese have achieved what has
happened? Our proud and haughty President has is[su]ed an invitation fromthe White House to nations of equal standing to come and meet in
Washington to discuss the question of disarmament. Who are they inviting?
We have white France, Anglo-Saxon Britain, white Italy, and among themyellow Japan.”51

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He sent a telegram to the secretary of the conference “on behalf of thefour hundred million Negroes in the world not represented” to ensure thatthe conference would not become a repeat of the Paris Peace Conference,
which “made the awful mistake of legislating for the disposition of otherpeople’s lands (especially in Africa) without taking them into consideration,
believing that a world peace could have been established after such a
conference.” In the telegram, Garvey somewhat modestly stated that Black
people desired “a national independence all our own on the Continent ofAfrica” and asked the members “to realise and appreciate the fact that the
Negro is a man, and that there can be no settlement of world affairs, without
proper consideration being given to him with his right.”52
In mid-1921, the UNIA changed its policy of seeking the annulment of
the League of Nations and began seeking the cession of the former Germancolonies in Africa. In May 1922, Garvey sent a letter to Secretary-General
Eric Drummond requesting permission for the UNIA representative toattend the General Assembly to present the demands of Blacks. Garvey
reminded Drummond that “the Negro race is no longer disposed to betreated as children, but [shall be heard as] men” and also “as a people.”53
Drummond wrote back in his original draft that he would “endeavour tofind time to see them” himself “and would, in any case, put them in touchwith officials of the Secretariat.”54 An official at the Secretariat, however,cautioned Drummond about this promise, calling it “rather dangerous[because it might] arouse hope of results which will not, in fact, beachieved.” The official also pointed out, “As the presence of a Negro
delegation will be a novelty, it will be referred to by the press—especially
the American press—and it might antagonise many of our friends in
America, who might think that the League was meddling in the Negro
question in the States, where this question is a very burning one.”55
The actual reply sent to Garvey was “noncommittal,” as suggested by
Huntington Gilchrist, an American member of the Secretariat. It merely
informed him that the meetings were held in public and that seats could bereserved by application; however, only official representatives of themember states could submit agendas at the Assembly.56 After receiving
Garvey’s request to reserve seats, another American member at the
Secretariat, Arthur Sweetser, stated that the UNIA had “a real case which wecannot totally ignore and should not greatly encourage. Seats for the
Assembly would seem to be the least, and the most, we can do.”57
In 1922, the UNIA sent a delegation to the League of Nations to present
the UNIA’s petition, in which it declared that their “race is now seeking

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racial political liberty” and argued that Blacks who fought in World War I
should be taken into consideration because of their contribution. It reminded
the member states that independence was considered for Ireland, Egypt, andIndia as well as for the Jewish people in Palestine and equated Black people,
a transnational racial group, with a “nation” and a “people,” stating that
they, “as a people,” should have a government in their homeland of Africa.
While it represented Black people as a subject of sovereignty, it clearly
demanded a homeland for them, asking the League of Nations to “pass overto our control as a race the development of these two late German colonies:”
German East Africa and German Southwest Africa.58
The delegation met with a Haitian minister to Paris, Dantès Bellegarde,
who introduced them to William Rappard, the director of the Permanent
Mandates Commission. Bellegarde presided at the second Pan-African
Congress in 1921 and later presented the Congress’s resolution to theassembly of the League of Nations. Being more sympathetic to Du Bois, heconcurred with other attendees’ criticisms of Garvey, stating at the PanAfrican Congress “none of us want to follow Marcus Garvey to Africa.”59
Bellegarde was acting, in Du Bois’s description, as “an international
spokesman of the Negroes of the world,” of which he was proud.60
Although the delegation’s meeting with Rappard did not yield any fruitfulresults, the UNIA’s petition was distributed to the delegations attending theGeneral Assembly, with the help of Prince Mirza Riza Khan, therepresentative of Persia, the only Islamic state among the member states.
The UNIA delegates were assured of Khan’s “sympathy with the aspirationof the less favoured races of the world.”61 Not failing to meet their
expectation, Khan stated, in the letter addressed to Drummond, that “thePersian delegation believes . . . that it is in the interest of the League of
Nations not to deny a right of petition to numerous organizations that have
put a sincere hope in our Society,” while reserving his own opinion on thecontents.62
Although Drummond hesitated to distribute the document from someone
other than the official representative, Rappard determined that it was aspecific request from the Persian delegation and directed the distribution of
the petition and the publication of the title in the official journal of the
League of Nations.63
Garvey had sent a letter to some of the member states, asking for theirsupport for the petition. On receiving this request, the Belgian foreign
minister squarely refuted Garvey’s claim of the need for nation building forBlack people: “Where have we ever seen a ‘race’ claim, as a race, theTRANSNATIONAL NATIONALISM

85

judicial status of a State? It is within States that the fate of races is settled,
and the claims of the black race can only be expressed within thislimitation.”64
The UNIA petition was not mentioned in the League of Nations Official
Journal of 1922, but it was acknowledged in the journal of 1928, the year
Garvey himself visited Geneva.65 The League of Nations never specificallyconsidered the petition and continued the mandate system thereafter. The
cooperative attitude of Bellegarde and Khan suggests, however, that there
were other international relations in which actors, who had been pushed tothe periphery of the Eurocentric international community, sympathized with
one another. Their activities were overshadowed by the front stage ofinternational politics, where only the major powers played the leading roles,
but to underestimate those peripheral activities is to miss the whole pictureof international politics and the racial structure of the international
community that exists even today.
Throughout its appeal to the international community, the UNIA
represented transnational Blacks as international political actors and,simultaneously, demanded that former German colonies in Africa be given
to them. It clearly shows the dual sovereignty the Garvey movement soughtto achieve—both transnational and national.
CONCLUSION
Garvey believed that each group of people who sought to uplift theirstatus as a group, regardless of race or ethnicity, should have its own
independent state in what is considered its homeland, and only by being
protected by this status can individuals be sure of a dignified position in restof the world. Furthermore, he was convinced that only powerful states could
be treated as full-fledged national actors in world politics. This realist
worldview was influenced and supported by the status of Japan as a major
power recognized in prestigious international conferences.
The UNIA sought in two ways to build a powerful Black nation in Africa:
first, by appealing to the international community to grant the former
German territories in Africa to the African diaspora and, second, by
negotiating with the Liberian government in its Back-to-Africa movement.
Eventually, the UNIA’s appeal with regard to the former German colonies
was denied by the great power–led international community, and its PanAfricanist project was rejected because of Liberian nationalism, which was
threatened by the political and economic influence of Western countries

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KEIKO ARAKI

including the United States.
The Garvey movement, which represented a transnational racial group asa political actor, was rarely taken seriously in international politics, where
only nation-states were considered to be legitimate actors. As the Belgianminister rightly analyzed, race functions primarily as a domestic factor,
along with others, such as gender and class, by being incorporated into theformation of the modern state to define a legitimate “nation.” Garvey
positioned Blacks, who were excluded from the “nation” of every country,
as a pseudo-subject of a new nation, an imagined community with theappearance of an empire. He envisioned that eventually the whole of Africa
would be ruled by Blacks.
Nowadays, utilizing diaspora for national development is a realistic
strategy as we see in Ghana and other African countries. In 2003, theAfrican Union, in seeking to strengthen African unity, including the African
diaspora, inserted the following paragraphs in its objectives in its
Constitutive Act: We “invite and encourage the full participation of theAfrican Diaspora as an important part of our Continent, in the building of
the African Union.”66 The African Union Western Hemisphere Diaspora
Forum has an initiative to directly link the resources of the African diaspora
to African development, by stating: “Our forefathers, including Marcus
Garvey, envisioned this blending of our resources many years ago, but we
now have the opportunity to make those dreams real.”67
The Garvey movement has been rediscovered as a pioneer of liberalinternational cooperation, but in the original Garvey movement, both thetransnational community and the nation-state, with its territorial roots, were
inextricably linked. Building a powerful nation-state that stood behindBlacks was vital to the Garvey movement. It was not merely a transnational
movement but one of transnational nationalism in which nation building
played a crucial part.
NOTES
This article was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) number
JP19K01509.
1“Come to Ghana If You’re Unwanted—Tourism Minister to African Americans,”
GhanaWeb, June 5, 2020, https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/
Come-to-Ghana-if-you-re-unwanted-Tourism-Minister-to-African-Americans-971839.
2“Ghana Earned US$3.3 billion from ‘Year of Return,’” GhanaWeb, May 28, 2020, https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/business/Ghana-earned-US-3-3-billion-from-Year-

TRANSNATIONAL NATIONALISM

87

of-Return-964768.
3“Come to Ghana,” GhanaWeb, June 5, 2020: “Ghana to Black Americans: Come Home.
We’ll Help You Build a Life Here,” Washington Post, July 4, 2020. Endorsing thegovernment’s project, the chief of Achiase, in the Ashanti region, promised to give two
hundred acres of land to returnees if they would construct any type of factory. “Year of
Return: Achiase Chief Allots 200-Acre Land to Returnees,” GhanaWeb, January 2, 2020,
https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Year-of-Return-Achiase-chiefallots-200-acre-land-to-returnees-827950.
4“Come to Ghana,” GhanaWeb, June 5, 2020.
5
Harry F. Worley to William A. Phillips, May 2, 1919, RG 59, Central Decimal Files,
1910–29, file number (hereafter CDF) 763.72119/5119, US National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA).
6
Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (NewYork: State University of New York Press, 1998); Marc Gallicchio, The African American
Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945, (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
7
Mary G. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement
Association in the Rural South, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2007); Claudrena N. Harold, “The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban
South, 1918–1942” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2004); Jahi U. Issa, “The
Universal Negro Improvement Association in Louisiana: Creating a Provisional Governmentin Exile” (PhD diss., Howard University, 2005); Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are
Coming!: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregated South Africa (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2012); Ibrahim Sundiata, Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black
Slavery, 1914–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
8
Randolph B. Persaud, “Re-envisioning Sovereignty: Marcus Garvey and the Making of aTransnational Identity,” in Kevin Dunn and Timothy Shaw, eds., Africa’s Challenge toInternational Relations Theory (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 127.
9Ibid., 120.
10
Robbie Shilliam, “What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the Transformation ofSovereign Debate,” Review of International Studies 32, no. 3 (2006): 379.
11
“Address Denouncing W. E. B. Du Bois,” April 5, 1919, in Robert A. Hill, ed., The
Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, 10 vols. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983–2006), 1: 397.
12
“Editorials by Marcus Garvey in the Negro World,” November 30, 1918, ibid., 303.
13
“Report by Special Agent S-A-I-I,” November 9, 1920, in Hill, Papers, 3: 85; “Report by
Bureau Agent H. J. Lenon,” January 18, 1921, in Hill, Papers, 3: 134.
14
Keiko Araki, “Africa for Africans and Asia for Asians: Japanese Pan-Asianism and Its
Impact in the Post–World War I Era,” in Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals in the
Atlantic World and Beyond, ed. Kendahl Radcliffe, Jennifer Scott, and Anja Werner (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2015).
15“UNIA Meeting at Carnegie Hall,” August 25, 1919, in Hill, Papers, 1: 501.
16
Persaud, “Re-envisioning Sovereignty,” 122–23.
17“Bureau of Investigation Reports,” November 12, 1918, in Hill, Papers, 1: 288.
18
“UNIA Declaration of Rights,” August 13, 1920, in Hill, Papers, 2: 577.
19
Yekutiel Gershoni, Black Colonialism: The Americo-Liberian Scramble for the
Hinterland (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 33–34; United States Department of State,
Liberia: A Report on the Relations between the United States and Liberia (Washington, DC:
United States Government Printing Office, 1928), 41– 48.
20“Memorandum by the Division of Western European Affairs, Department of State,” April

88

KEIKO ARAKI8, 1921, in Hill, Papers, 3: 348; “Report by Special Agent P-138,” May 18, 1921, Hill,
Papers, 3: 421–22.
21
Nnamdi Azikiwe, Liberia in World Politics (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press,
1970), 112–21; United States Department of State, Liberia, 85; Buell, Raymond Leslie, The
Native Problem in Africa, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 795–817.
22
Memorandum by H. F. Worley, April 22, 1919, RG59, CDF 763.72119/5122, NARA.
23
Document 1, Correspondence from Elie Garcia to President C. D. B. King, June 8, 1920,and Document 2, Correspondence from Edwin Barclay to Elis Garcia, June 14, 1920, in the
Petition to the Senate and House of Representatives of Liberia, RG59, CDF 882.5511/15,
NARA.
24Opening of UNIA Convention, August 1, 1920, Hill, Papers, 2: 478–79.
25“Report of UNIA Meeting,” November 13, 1920, in Hill, Papers, 3: 79–80.
26“Report by Special Agent P-138,” January 31, 1921, in Hill, Papers, 3: 146.
27
Barnes, Kenneth C., Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the
Late 1800s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 121–34.
28
New York Age, September 6, 1919, December 4, 1920; The Crisis, November 19, 1919.
29
United States Department of State, Liberia, 204–5.
30
Interview with the Acting President of Liberia, his Excellency Hon. E. J. Barclay, and his
Cabinet, by the Commissioners of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Tuesday
March 22, 1921, RG59, CDF 882.00/705, NARA.
31
Special Personal Report from Cyril A. Crichlow to Marcus Garvey, June 24, 1921,
Supplemental Report from Cyril A. Crichlow to Marcus Garvey, July 4, 1921, RG 59, CDF
882.00/705, NARA.
32
Crisis 22, no. 2 (June 1921), 53.
33“Article in Baltimore Afro-American,” July 15, 1921, in Hill, Papers, 9: 76.
34
Crisis 22, no. 2 (June 1921), 53.
35“Article in Baltimore Afro-American,” July 15, 1921, in Hill, Papers, 9: 76.
36“Report by Special Agent P-138,” February 23, 1921, in Hill, Papers, 3: 234–35.
37“Marcus Garvey to President C. D. B. King,” August 4, 1921, in Hill, Papers, 3: 619–20.
38“Gabriel L. Dennis, Secretary, Liberian Plenary Commission, to William C. Matthews,”
August 12, 1921, in Hill, Papers, 3: 655.
39
“Negro World Advertisements,” May 10, 1924, in Hill, Papers, 5: 581.
40
“Articles in the Negro World,” June 7, 1924, in Hill, Papers, 5: 596–97.
41
C. A. Wall, Monrovia, Liberia to the Secretary of State, Washington, DC, August 1, 1924,
RG59, CDF 811.108 G 191/37, NARA.
42“Enclosure,” August 25, 1925, in Hill, Papers, 5: 774.
43
Correspondence from UNIA delegation to President Coolidge, September 2, 1924, RG59,
CDF 882.5511/10, NARA; Petition to the Senate and House of Representatives of Liberia,
August 1924, RG59, CDF 882.5511/15, NARA.
44
Azikiwe, Liberia in World Politics, 107.
45
Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American
International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 56.
46
Wayne Chafield Taylor, The Firestone Operations in Liberia (New York: Arno Press,
1976), 51; Raymond Leslie Buell, Liberia: A Century of Survival 1847–1947 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947), 32.
47
Annual Message to the Legislature, December 9, 1924, in D. Elwood Dunn, ed., The
Annual Messages of the Presidents of Liberia 1848–2010: State of the Nation Address to the
National Legislature From Joseph Jenkins Roberts to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, vol. 2 (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2010), 664.
48
Ibid., 665.

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Ibid., 666.
Interview with the Acting President of Liberia, his Excellency Hon. E. J. Barclay, and his
Cabinet, by the Commissioners of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Tuesday
March 22, 1921, RG59, CDF 882.00/705, NARA; Memorandum by William R. Castle,
September 6, 1924, in RG59, CDF 882.5511/10, NARA.
51“Speech by Marcus Garvey,” September 7, 1921, in Hill, Papers, 4: 39.
52“Marcus Garvey to the Secretary, International Conference on Disarmament,” November
12, 1921, in Hill, Papers, 4: 168.
53
Marcus Garvey to Sir Eric Drummond, May 23, 1922, classement no. 1, document no.
21159, dossier no. 21159 (1/21159/21159), Mandate Section, League of Nations Secretariat,
League of Nations Archives, Geneva (hereafter, League of Nations Archives).
54
Secretary-General to Marcus Garvey, June 8, 1922, League of Nations Archives.
55
Commentaries Minutes to the Secretary-General, June 15, 1922, League of Nations
Archives.
56
Huntington Gilchrist to G. H. F. Abraham, June 17, 1922, League of Nations Archives.
57
Commentaries Minutes, August 12, 1922, League of Nations Archives.
58“Petition of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities
League,” July 20, 1922, in Hill, Papers, 4: 735–39.
59
Charles Tardieu, “Le Congrès des Noirs á Paris,” Le Figaro, September 5, 1921, in
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, Universityof Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312b018-i017.
60
Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, In the Shadow of Powers: Dantès Bellegarde in Haitian Social
Thought (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2019), xx.
61
G. O. Marke to Prince Mirza Riza Khan, September 28, 1922, League of Nations
Archives.
62
Prince Mirza Riza Khan to Eric Drummond, September 28, 1922, League of Nations
Archives.
63
Eric Drummond to William Rappard, October 3, 1922; and William Rappard to theRegistry, September 30, 1922, League of Nations Archives.
64“Henri Jaspar to Paul Hymans, Belgian Delegate to the League of Nations,” September
23, 1922, in Hill, Papers, 9: 610.
65
League of Nations Official Journal, Special Supplement no. 64, September 1928, 206.
66
Protocol on Amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union, February 3, 2003,
https://au.int/sites/default/files/treaties/35423-treaty-0025_-_protocol_on_the_amendments_
to_the_constitutive_act_of_the_african_union_e.pdf.
67
1st African Union Western Hemisphere Diaspora Forum, December 17–19, 2002,
Washington, DC, USA, General Report, 24.
4950