parties, had heard enough. They, too, claimed a right to the Atlantic and its unfolding events, and would not accede to anything resembling a trans-national edict that locked them out of the anticipated riches of an enlarging oceanic world. They instead took matters into their own hands. According to one author, “the English … lacked any initial founding charter issued by an international authority. Henry VII’s letters patent to John Cabot of 1496 were to some degree an attempt to replicate the language of Papal legislation ….”14
The Atlantic Ocean would grow in its reputation for torrid affairs. It became a tricontinental theater involving Africa, Europe, and the New World that seemed to foment more disputes on the timeline to twentieth-century empire troubles. These would include the controversial charge by American patriot Thomas Jefferson in 1776 that Great Britain forced the slave trade onto his fellow colonists, then headed for independence. Or when that same British Empire and the United States declared an end to slave importations by 1808, with the British seeking its enforcement by patrolling the Atlantic Ocean, the waters of the Caribbean islands, and the West African coast. The British Empire was intent on maintaining their expansionist proclivities over the Atlantic World. They sought further control of the water highway when they sanctioned an end to slavery in their colonies with implementation of the Emancipation Act in 1833 (questionable, as it allowed for gradual ←26 | 27→freedom, contentious as disavowed by the U.S. government, but an inspiration that led to the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia). This Act would pose challenges to slave plantation owners in the Americas whose livelihood was derived from transporting goods produced by slave labor over the ocean. An innocence of the Atlantic Ocean was no longer sustainable. It soon would resume its role as a passageway for the European colonization of Africa with the U.S. government a quiet witness to the process.15
Traversing the ocean, finally, meant continuing its association with controversy when colonized peoples were dragged into two of the most devastating wars of the twentieth century. The second of these—World War II—was the culmination of five centuries of remarkable yet rancorous civilization for Atlantic World inhabitants. It metaphorically forced a reversal of the ocean’s flow to become a conduit for reinstituting previously discarded human rights. This new worldly conflict became “a war of competing empires and contradictory visions for transforming the global order.”16 As an example, representatives from America and Great Britain met on the HMS Prince of Wales, an Atlantic Ocean vessel, in September 1941 to produce the Atlantic Charter. This was an arbitrary but hopeful bilateral guarantor of freedoms from fear and want and the rights of free worship and speech for the world’s peoples.
That charter as the modern incarnation of what the ocean had come to mean for empires did not, however, completely settle the waters. Its third clause was of special regard for the African. “[T];he right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live; and … to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them” was interpreted differently by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his colonial secretary Oliver Stanley. They insisted the phrase did not apply to subject peoples of that empire. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt disagreed but eventually decided not to reject their views.17 Deputy British prime minister Clement Attlee, however, said the charter applied to Africans, somewhat rescuing any remaining chance to make good of an Atlantic metaphor. West Africans immediately denounced the Churchillian perspective through editorials, articles, and delegations to England demanding representative government.18
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There had been and would be other conferences by the same nations and their allies that issued statements interpreted by Africans as potentially capable of alleviating their oppression.19 These gatherings were launched by nations that had helped to define its symbolic meaning, and of course the British were ever present. Such were Bretton Woods in 1944 and Yalta and Potsdam in February and July1945, respectively. Decisions were made at these confabs by Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and the United States to maintain a united front. They hoped to put the finishing touches on the Axis powers, to disassemble the overlordship imposed on less powerful European nations by their expansionist neighbors, and to work out post-war European reconstruction. Emboldened by the attention to what was seen as a new post-colonial world, Anglophone Africans sent memoranda and other requests to the resident British colonial office seeking to present their case for an end to empire rule. This protest was organized by Nigerian nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe, owner of the widely read West African Pilot and later first president of an independent Nigeria. He, along with a delegation of other West African newspaper owners, submitted a request titled “The Atlantic Charter and British West Africa” to the secretary of state of colonies. It called for major reforms as a prelude to full independence. The petitioners received no consideration.20
Not giving up, Africans sought attendance to a conference announced in March 1945 and to be held in San Francisco for the establishment of a supra-national organization. The United Nations (UN) project was a highly ambitious gambit to foster permanent peace and cooperation among countries of the world.21 This seemed to answer African calls for international attention to their plight. They hoped—again—to denounce the colonial arrangement governing their lives if given an opportunity to appear at the affair.22
The odds that Africa could expect substantive assistance from the United Nations were unfavorable. For one, the proposed UN was not the first time in that century that a gathering of nations presented themselves as a forum for restitution of crimes suffered by colonized peoples. The League of Nations called into existence following World War 1 had disappointed Africans on the colonial question. The League refused to enjoin European colonialists to U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s ←28 | 29→principle of self-determination for subject peoples in Africa, an idea among his war-weary Fourteen Points. The world’s expectations for the success of this UN predecessor were small; even the United States withheld its membership. International relations during the inter-war years apparently never departed from Hobsbawn’s Age, remaining just as enticing but deceptive and volatile. Africans knew it from first-hand experience.
Rebuffs aside, other groups and individuals read potential into the new international formation of April 1945. These broad-thinking activists helped Africans remain vigilant about utilizing the sentiment of freedoms espoused in the Atlantic Charter and at Yalta.23 This, too, seemed baseless in retrospect. African Americans such as NAACP leader W.E.B. DuBois and UNIA founder Marcus Garvey, among a small coterie of activists, had also approached the League of Nations about ending colonial domination of Africans. Though admirable to both their supporters and Africans in need of an advocate, the spokespersons did not have the resource of a U.S. delegation to wrangle any concessions out of the European empire system. Would the UN be any different?
African hopes, therefore, for a complete reversal of their colonized status by the United Nations were premature, if the indifference of the League was any precedent. Indeed, Africans under British domination tried to gain admission to the UN founding conference several times but were blocked by the British colonial office. In that month African members of the Nigerian legislative council resolved that the British government should “approve the appointment of a delegation of two unofficial members to attend as observers at the … conference.” The British response was simply “no such observers were to be allowed.”24
What appeared to make a United Nations approach sensible was the granting of observer status to several African Americans attending the conference in San Francisco. This enabled them to lobby UN members about issues pertinent to subjugated peoples. After struggling with U.S. officials over African American representation in the delegate selection process, NAACP officials W.E.B. DuBois, Mary McCloud Bethune, and Walter White were retained as consultants to the American delegation.25 This advantage enabled them to present demands that called for ←29 | 30→an end to colonialism.26 The NAACP, founded as a U.S. progressive era organization, had expanded to include a geographical scope that promoted anti-colonial activity. Southern Africans, as much colonized as other regions, had a strong voice for freedom provided by the NAACP and the Reverend G. Michael Scott, a white ally from that area.27 Other formations, such as the National Negro Organizations of America for World Security and Equality, its spinoff Federated