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From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton
Sven Beckert
| It was a stormy November morning in 1900 when the Graf Waldersee steamed out of the port of New York for its journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the German city of Hamburg. Among the more than two thousand travelers who glanced one last time at the receding steeples of Trinity Church, the towering Manhattan Life Insurance Company building, and the Statue of Liberty, four passengers stood out: James N. Calloway, John Robinson, Allen Burks, and Shepherd Lincoln Harris. All were the sons of slaves from Alabama, and all were connected to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Calloway was a Tuskegee teacher, and Robinson, Burks, and Harris were students or recent graduates. Perhaps even more remarkable was their mission: They had boarded the Graf Waldersee that morning on a journey to new jobs in a faraway land—the German colony of Togo. On the western coast of Africa, they were to instruct the German colonialists and their subjects on how to grow cotton for export, "to determine the possibility of a rational cotton culture as a native culture, and ... to show the marketability of the product for German industry."1 |
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Their journey from Tuskegee to Togo was the beginning of a volatile experiment that brought freedom, colonialism, and cotton together in novel ways. After changing steamers in Hamburg, Calloway, Burks, Robinson, and Harris arrived in Lomé, Togo, on December 30. "After many hardships on the ocean we at last got to the long looked for place," wrote a relieved Shepherd Harris to Booker T. Washington, a place "where we saw and are still seeing strange things." In a gesture perhaps surprising to African Americans used to increasing segregation from white Alabamians, they were welcomed by no less than the German vice governor of Togo, Waldermeer Horn. He promised the full support of his small colonial administration to ensure the success of their mission. Just as surprising, there was virtually none of the basic infrastructure that usually went along with cotton production in the southern United States—indeed, the vice governor met the Americans on the beach, since no port had yet been built. Upon unloading the machines, wagons, provisions, and seeds, the Tuskegee experts found it exceedingly difficult to move them to the place where their cotton experiments were to start: "We had harnesses and waggons, but no horses. It was impossible to obtain the latter and ... we decided to get natives to draw our waggons. But what was our surprise, the natives feared to draw the wagons." Calloway, Robinson, Burks, and Harris left the carts behind and proceeded inland with the help of one hundred porters, interpreters, a cook, and a washer. While the three Tuskegee graduates walked the distance, Calloway, as the leader of the group, stayed in his hammock, "slung to a pole fastened to two boards borne upon the heads of four men." In the evening of the fourth day, this unusual procession reached Agome-Palimé, "the largest trading post of Misahöhe district." A few days later, John Robinson penciled a letter to Washington describing the strange world they had encountered: "we are getting on as well as can be expected being so far removed from civilization. There are only ten really civilized persons with in a radius of 50 miles or more, or for that matter, there are only 107 whites out of the 2 1/2 millions of inhabitants of Togoland and that 107 are found principally along the coast."2 |
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Thus it was that in January 1901 the Tuskegee graduates began their advisory role to the German colonial administration. The experiment lasted eight years, until 1909, when the last of the African Americans, John Robinson, on a mission to spread cotton commerce into the Togolese hinterland, drowned in a "swift river." During all those years, as Shepherd Harris put it in May 1901, "we are all doing all that there is in our power to reflect credit upon our race in America, and above all, credit upon Tuskegee our dear old Al."3 |
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