Fernando Po scandal

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The Fernando Po scandal was a political scandal of international scope in the late 1920s. It concerned massive human rights violations on the part of the government and the ruling upper class of Liberia , which were investigated and proven by an international commission of the League of Nations .

The indictment was drafted by the United States ' African-American attorney Charles Johnson , the Secretary of State and later Liberian President Edwin James Barclay and the British Cuthbert Christy and denounced as a deliberate, criminal and in part racially motivated act.

history

Liberia's President Charles DB King

The island of Bioko off the coast of Cameroon was discovered in 1472 by the Portuguese navigator Fernão do Pó and carried his name until 1973. The island was sold by Portugal to Spain in 1778 , but was leased to Great Britain from 1827 to 1843 , which is on the island maintained a naval base. During this time, the British recruited a steadily increasing number of West Africans from the Kru people to the island, who were of use to the British as interpreters and assistants on their sea voyages. The Kru had a reputation for being good fishermen and having excellent knowledge of West African waters. After the British had left the island again, part of the Kru stayed on the island and now cooperated with the Spanish.

Encouraged by the economic success of the neighboring Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe , some Spanish planters on organic cocoa have tried to establish themselves since the turn of the century . The necessary labor could not be recruited from the indigenous island population in sufficient numbers. However, this changed abruptly when in 1916 - as a result of the defeat of the German colonial troops in Cameroon - besides the German soldiers and civilian members and a large number of Cameroonians over the border in Spanish territory in Rio Muni changed in order until the war ended there interning at to let. The Spanish colonial officials decreed, without objection, that the interned Cameroonians capable of work were to be used for plantation work during their stay in the colony. In this way, large-scale clearing areas were created on Bioko with minimal costs, on which new cocoa plantations were created by the planters. With the end of the war in 1918, however, the reason for internment ended and only a few Cameroonians voluntarily stayed on Bioko. The plantation owners faced economic ruin again.

At that moment, Kru living on the island intervened and offered to recruit the necessary workers from their home country Liberia. Indeed, with the approval of Liberian Vice President Allen N. Yancy , the Kru managed to bring a certain number of workers to the island.

In the spring of 1924, the doctor Albert Schweitzer arrived from Europe on a ship on the island of Bioko and noted in his diary:

“Wednesday, March 26th, we are in the small port of Santa Isabella on Fernando Po [...] the great difficulty on Fernando Po is finding workers to cultivate cocoa. There is no longer any indigenous colored population, so to speak. It has been worn out by the cruel forced labor previously practiced. Fernando Po, a true paradise, is therefore dependent on workers who move there. But no African colony allows their blacks to emigrate. The current governor has now managed to conclude a contract with the negro republic of Liberia, according to which every year so and so many Liberians are allowed to work in Fernando Po for a certain period of time. Thereupon he is considered the savior of the island, although the workers granted by Liberia are far from sufficient, and he erected his statue in bronze in front of his palace. "

What Albert Schweitzer could not have known at the time was the fact that the recruited Liberian "volunteers" had been sold into a kind of slavery through deception and with the active aid of the Liberian government . The Liberian recruiters involved received a head premium of 45 dollars for their services .

The officially denied trafficking system was based on criminal methods and false promises. The Kru involved in human trafficking and their American-Liberian assistants had attracted young men from the hinterland and promised them lucrative work abroad ( Ghana , Nigeria ). A second method was to force over-indebted families to give up their sons as workers for a period of time to pay off the debts.

The system was only exposed through credible reports and complaints from the European and American missionaries working in the Liberian hinterland, and the first investigations were initiated. Vice President Yancy has even been shown to use every opportunity to stir up tensions between the indigenous peoples in the hinterland. The government troops then sent "to pacify" had the task of taking as many prisoners as possible who were to be sold abroad as workers. Road construction projects and plantations in Liberia were also “funded” in the same way. Uncooperative villages were raided and burned down; Village elders were tortured in public. After the investigation, a trial took place before the tribunal of the League of Nations . This reprimanded the Liberian government. The colonial administration of the island of Bioko was also warned. The Liberian slave laborers and slaves were given their freedom back. However, the plantation owners quickly found replacement workers in Nigeria .

consequences

The international scandal resulted in the resignation of the Liberian government in December 1930. Relations with the United States and Great Britain were also heavily strained; these states imposed a five-year embargo on Liberia. Although the Liberian investigator Edwin Barclay was involved in the proceedings as a senior government official (State Secretary, at times also Foreign Minister) under the resigned President King , he was able to gain greater domestic political influence through his involvement in uncovering the scandal. As a presidential candidate of the ruling True Whig Party , he won the 1931 early presidential election. Barclay's election was thus further evidence of the undemocratically legitimized rule of the Ameriko-Liberians.

Web links

literature

  • Dolores García Cantús: Fernando Poo, una aventura colonial española en el África Occidental (1778–1900) . València Universitat de Valencia, Servei de Publicacions, València 2004, ISBN 84-370-5473-7 , p. 701 ( tdr.cesca.es [PDF]).
  • Ibrahim K. Sundiata: From slaving to neoslavery: the bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the era of abolition, 1827-1930 . The Univ. of Wisconsin Press, Madison (WI) 1996, ISBN 0-299-14510-7 , The search for labor, pp. 119-145 .
  • Cuthbert Christy: Report of the International Commission of Inquiry into the Existence of Slavery and Forced Labor in the Republic of Liberia (September 8, 1930) . Ed .: International Commission of Inquiry into the Existence of Slavery and Forced Labor in the Republic of Liberia. United States Government Printing Office, Washington DC 1931 (French, opensourceguinea.org ).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Raymond Leslie Buell: The Liberian Paradox . In: The Virginia Quarterly Review . 1931, ISSN  2154-6932 ( vqronline.org ).
  2. Albert Schweitzer : Self-testimonials. From my childhood and youth - Between water and the jungle - Letters from Lambarene . In: Books of the Nineteen . tape 60 . CH Beck, Munich 1959, ISBN 3-406-02537-4 , Reise, p. 223-224 .
  3. a b US Department of State (Ed.): Self Study Guide for Liberia . Washington DC 2003, The Early Twentieth Century, p. 12-13 ( governmentattic.org [PDF]).