Abstract

"Between modernization and neocolonialism: African American Investment in West-Africa before the 'Decade of Development'"

Lewis d'Avigdor, Wesleyan University (ljd87@cornell.edu)

On June 5, 1951, in a speech at Lincoln University, then Gold Coast Leader of Government Business, Kwame Nkrumah, requested technical and financial aid from Americans, and especially, African Americans. Nkrumah wanted “a New Deal for Africa,” to develop the Volta River Hydro-Electric Power scheme and other modernization projects. Lincoln’s President Horace Mann Bond took up Nkrumah’s invitation as an invigorating call to action. With the help of other middlemen, including prominent corporate law firms, Bond brought together American capital and mining interests and enlisted government support to assist in the development of mining, tourism and education projects throughout West Africa.
While Bond was not successful in “winning” the Volta project for America, together with “the 5% man,” L. Edgar Detwiler, Bond formed the International African American Corporation. The IAAC won an exclusive mining concession from Liberian President William Tubman, in an unusual “joint venture” with the Liberian State. With American and Swedish backing and a loan from the Export-Import Bank, this concession resulted in the largest private investment in Africa, totaling some $225 million by 1959, and eventually exporting some $1.3 billion in ore. Nkrumah later singled out the Liberian American Mining Company (which took over the venture) in his 1966 book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, as a paradigmatic example of extractive “imperialist finance.” That Bond believed he was supporting African independence rather than undermining it, is the complex ideological knot this paper seeks to unravel.
Using a rich array of business documents from Bond’s personal archive, this paper unpacks both this business history and the underpinning ideology of development. Bond’s modernizing ethos combined a religious conception of black redemption of Africa, with an emphasis on education and uplift that cohered with dominant narratives of Cold War American exceptionalism. Bond believed that he was serving the public interest – multiple publics – including decolonizing nations, African Americans and U.S. Cold War security interests.