Book Review

Tunde Adeleke's book is largely an examination of the ideologies of Martin R. Delany, Alexander Crummell, and Henry McNeil Turner, arguably the most important ideologues of black nationalist and pan-African sentiments during the nineteenth century. Drawing primarily on their published writings and pronouncements, Adeleke is interested in how these men conceived Africa and how their beliefs affected the rationale behind the European partition of Africa. The author accurately argues that these African American nationalists had an ambivalent view of their ancestral homeland. On the one hand, they praised Africa for its moral and spiritual superiority, defended it against racist caricatures, and stressed a pan-African consciousness that transcended time and place. However, they also reviled Africa and its people as benighted, heathen, and generally lacking in the material progress and cultural refinements that were perceived as the hallmarks of modern civilization. Even further, these men, according to Adeleke, blended their nationalist proclivities, which were initially progressive and hostile to European racism and expansionist impulses, with Eurocentric interests and conceptions of the world to produce a contradictory, paradoxical ideology that eventually "articulated and forcefully defended the imperial ambitions of Anglo-Saxon nationalism."

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