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This chapter discusses Domingo Julia and Leon Escobar's use of newly granted constitutional rights to petition the governor of Santa Clara province. At the heart of Julia and Escobar's request was a plan to repatriate to the African continent with government assistance. The two claimed to represent about one hundred Africans living in and around the central coastal towns of Remedios and Caibarien in Santa Clara province, a historic stronghold of sugar production since the mid-nineteenth century. African laborers, brought throughout much of the nineteenth century to work the region's cane fields, had increased the population of African descent. The 1899 census, for example, reports that about a third of remedianos were the descendants of Africans, while significantly fewer were African-born. The men's petition, submitted to local officials on the heels of Cuba's shift from colony to nation, suggests that for these diasporans, one's political identity was newly subject to negotiation.

This chapter analyses the partition of the African continent via treaties. It begins with an introductory examination of pre-nineteenth-century European–African treaty-making and references some classic writers to Africa. It then discusses relevant documents on the ‘scramble’ for titles to African territory. These demonstrate the extent to which normal institutions of the law of nations as originally applied to European–African relations degenerated into instruments of colonial penetration in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly after the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, which led to a multilaterally conceived plan of partition of the whole continent. Partition took place in two phases, i.e. the transfer of legal titles to territory from the African transferor to the European transferee wherein the ruler still played an active part, and then the absorption of territory by annexation. Effective occupation by the Europeans usually came much later than the acquisition of legal title.

This chapter summarizes the visual, cultural, and spiritual universe of Kongo Christianity, which had an impact beyond the confines of the central African kingdom. Its influences reached the American continent through the enslaved men and women who had witnessed its correlations and endured among their descendants a source of spiritual and political strength. Kongo Christianity is more than a singular historical occurrence that defined a part of the African continent, it is a phenomenon whose influence has resonated across the early modern Atlantic.

This book begins with the meeting of thirty eminent black leaders, representing the United States, Africa, and the West Indies, in London as European armies installed themselves on the African continent. There the leaders formed a permanent committee of the Pan-African Association and convened a Pan-Africanist conference—arguably the first of several twentieth-century, international, Pan-African congresses meeting to establish Pan-African unity and challenge the horrors of colonialism in Africa and elsewhere—on behalf of the “natives in various parts of the world, viz. South Africa, West Africa, the West Indies, and the United States.” W. E. B. Du Bois delivered the event's culminating address, “To the Nations of the World.” In the opening paragraph, he asked how long power would be used to deny the “darker races” opportunities and privileges in the modern world.