African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal

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A new generation of Ethiopianists: the Universal

Ethiopian Students Association and The African:
Journal of African Affairs, 1937–1948

Hillina Seife

To cite this article: Hillina Seife (2010) A new generation of Ethiopianists: the Universal Ethiopian
Students Association and The�African:�Journal�of�African�Affairs, 1937–1948, African and Black
Diaspora: An International Journal, 3:2, 197-209, DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2010.481973

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African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal
Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2010, 197
209

A new generation of Ethiopianists: the Universal Ethiopian Students

Association and The African: Journal of African Affairs, 1937 1948
Hillina Seife*


University of Toronto, New College, Canada

This paper explores the obscure Universal Ethiopian Student Association

(UESA) and the journal that began as their organ, The African: Journal of
African Affairs (1937
1948), as an example of modern Ethiopianism. It analyzes
The African for clues about what the UESA was, who was involved, who it
purported to speak for and to, and the kinds of cross-metropole (and metropole-
colony) networks and associations it fostered. The author asserts that unlike
many similar political and student organizations of the time, the UESA represents
a new generation of Ethiopianists: African nationalists in the traditional sense,
committed to the nascent decolonization and pan-african political movements of
the era. They also supported Ethiopia and Haile Selassie I at almost all costs,
championing both the nationalist and imperialist nature of the modern Ethiopian
state in the name of preserving its political sovereignty and role as a leader in
Africa and the black world.
Keywords: Universal Ethiopian Student’s Association; Ethiopianism; Pan-
Africanism

From the moment Africans in the New World encountered Christianity and the
Western literary canon, Ethiopia, whether qua Africa or Abyssinia itself, was a
powerful symbol of resistance, racial and historical pride, and served as a source of
identity in the Black World. Characteristic of ‘classical’ Ethiopianism, until the mid-
twentieth century this image actually had very little correspondence with the empire
in the Horn of Africa, its people, contemporary political affairs or history.1
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, Ethiopianism began to orient
itself towards particular parts of Africa, and to emerging nation-states on the
continent
South Africa, Liberia, Sierra Leone
and increasingly towards Ethiopia,
which began its consolidation as a modern state during the last decades of the 1800s.
Ethiopianism in the diaspora very literally reached out its hands to African
government and peoples, and political activity geared towards the continent of
Africa began to emerge in metropoles and colonial cities throughout the African
Diaspora. Called ‘modern’ Ethiopianism by some, this type of Ethiopianism shaped,
and was shaped by the historical events of early twentieth century and was
organically linked to the growing Pan-African movement of the period.2
In The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion, St. Clair Drake offers one of the
clearest and perceptive scholarly analyses of the development of Ethiopianism in the
African Diaspora. He maintains that the ‘ . . . black church in the United States can

*E-mail: hillina.seife@mail.nyu.edu
ISSN 1752-8631 print/ISSN 1752-864X online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2010.481973
http://www.informaworld.com
198 H. Seife

be analyzed as having institutionalized a form of pan-africanism early in the

nineteenth century without ever calling it that’ but also that ‘Ethiopianism’ became
more complex and secularized as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.3 He traces Ethiopianism from its roots as a vindicationist ‘myth’ in
Christian and syncretic spiritual traditions in pre-abolition United States and
Caribbean, through its role in nineteenth-century emigrationist and church move-
ments focused on the African continent, to its role in ‘religious-political’ movements
of the twentieth century.4 Pointing to Edward Wilmot Blyden’s vital role in the
development of modern Ethiopianism and its turn toward political and intellectual
activity focused on African independence, ‘for [him] Ethiopianism ceased to be either
an escapist ideology for people in the Diaspora or a spur to emigration, and became,
rather, an ideology sanctioning the development of Africa by Africans themselves’.5
Drake implies that there is an innate relationship between Ethiopianism, Pan-
Africanism and African self-rule and nationalism:
The Logical end of Ethiopianist thinking is the position that Africans, themselves, are
thoroughly competent to chart their own course of development and to manage their
own affairs. When shorn of Christian beliefs about ‘degeneration’ and ‘redemption’ . . .
Ethiopianist thinking leads to a belief that the forces are latent within Africa to ‘redeem’
it.6

In the first part of this paper I briefly outline some of the key works related to this
trend, and in the second I discuss the Universal Ethiopian Student Association and
the journal that began as their organ, The African: Journal of African Affairs (1937

1948), as an example of modern Ethiopianism. Historians Joseph Harris and
Ibrahim Sundiata have made passing mention of the group in their works, but very
little is known about this organization, and for this reason this paper is exploratory.
From what has been written about the Universal Ethiopian Students Association
(from here on refereed to as the UESA), it appears that the group was formed
sometime in the early to mid-1930s in New York City.7 Prominent members included
John Henrik Clarke, David Talbot (journalist, close friend and relative of T. Ras
Makonnen), and renowned NYC historian and educator Willis Huggins. The last
two were very active in the pro-Ethiopia campaign during the Italo-Ethiopian War.8
George Schyuler and Amy Jacques Garvey were very closely associated with the
journal The African, though it is unclear what their relationship was to the
organization itself.
Taking my cues from the scant information found in secondary sources, I analyze
The African for clues about what the UESA was, who was involved, who it purported
to speak for and to, and the kinds of cross-metropole (and metropole-colony)
networks and associations it fostered. Though my argument can only be speculative
at this point, I assert that the UESA represents the new generation of vindicationists
described by Drake, and that the discourse found in the pages of their organ
exemplify the kind of Ethiopianist activity that would influence the nascent pan-
african, nationalist and decolonization movements of the time.
The UESA was one point in a constellation of similar organizations in the United
States at the time that included the Ethiopian Research Council (ERC), established
by students and faculty at Howard University in 1934 and guided by historian
William Leo Hansberry, and the Ethiopian World Federation (EWF), founded in
NYC by representatives of the Ethiopian state and pro-Ethiopia activists from the
 African and Black Diaspora 199

US and Caribbean. These two were also primarily ‘secular’ and political in nature,
though clearly influenced by classical Ethiopianism.9 Judging from published
correspondence, it seems as though their members and people belonging to the
UESA were not unacquainted: in 1946 one Miss Etelka Wade of Washington, DC
wrote a letter to the editor of the UESA organ, The African, ‘I harbor a great
admiration for Africa
the entire continent, though I think Ethiopia is my favorite
country. Last year I studied about Ethiopia under Dr Hansberry at Howard
University. I made a scrapbook and am still keeping it . . .’10
One of the only secondary source acknowledgements of the relationship between
the UESA and the EWF can be found in Walter C. Daniel’s entry for The African in
the guide, Black Journals of the United States. His four-page long description begins
with a short history of the Ethiopian World Federation and its organ the Voice of
Ethiopia, and the African leaders who tried to set up a communications network in
the US after Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and then continues,
. . . the agitation created by these native Africans gave rise to many organizations and
periodicals that called for Americans and the rest of the democratic world to rescue
Ethiopia . . . as their influence spread black scholars and activists spoke and wrote about
the aspirations of black people throughout the continent of Africa and the Caribbean.
The African was one journal of this orientation . . .11

Though overlooked by many historians of the period, The African has been
described as enjoying sustained success, and attracting the attention of many Afro-
American writers and public figures.12 I cannot fully discuss the historical and
cultural significance of the journal in a paper this length, but by way of introduction
here is a representative cross-section of some contributors: George Schuyler, Amy
Jacques Garvey and David Talbot had their own columns and acted as contributing
editors for nearly all 11 years; J.A. Rogers signed on as associate editor in 1943, and
contributing editor Willis Huggins directed the educational and historical install-
ments and wrote innumerable articles. George Padmore served as the London
correspondent in the mid-1940s, W.A. Domingo and E.A. Laing acted as the West
Indian Correspondents. In the spring of 1938 it was announced that ‘world-renowned
poet-novelist’ Claude McKay would take over the editorship, with Countee Cullen as
his associate, but ‘due to reasons not anticipated’ this seems to have fallen through.13
Cullen still contributed book reviews, however, and McKay, along with Langston
Hughes, published short stories. Perhaps more fascinating is the participation of
lesser-known contributors
Ofori Owoof, a student from the Gold Coast (now
Ghana) studying at Columbia University, who offered incisive political analysis, and
women like Gladys Graham, Vivian Belk, and a handful of others who wrote just as
passionately about world politics as they did about culture and women’s roles (and the
book reviews, which were written disproportionately by women). Finally there are the
ones I call ‘politico-literary snipers’: irreverent cultural and political critics with
names like Hope Justice, Africanus, Hominum Negrum, and the ‘Rover’ whose satire
lent the publication a controversial radical edge in its first years, before the editorial
claims in their final issue that ‘THERE IS NO ROOM FOR SUBVERSIVE IDEAS
WITHIN OR WITHOUT THE RACE’.14 And then there is the one renegade short-
story writer named ‘Levin Morris’, whom I suspect is George Schuyler in disguise.15
The journal enjoyed a circulation of over 30,00016 in its first year, and its
audience grew rapidly thereafter: in the letters to the editor page we see countless
200 H. Seife

requests for subscription renewals and newsstand restocking. In 1944 and again in
1945 the editors urged readers to ‘share your African!’ as increasing demand
combined with wartime paper restrictions meant that they could not meet the
monthly demand.17 In 1946, a Nigerian reader writes in: ‘One copy of your
magazine . . . through my neighbor is in my possession. I was wholeheartedly
constrained to pass it on to my comrade in arms who later passed same to their
fathers etc.’18 Later the same year headlines notified readers: ‘The African Magazine
banned in the Kongo’. Apparently it was also banned in South Africa, stopped in
Djibouti before reaching Ethiopia, and delayed in Trinidad and Nigeria.19 Clearly,
the British colonial authorities were not amused.
Beginning in the 1930s
a decade which opened with the globally broadcast
Coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie I, and closed with his empire occupied by
Italian forces
increased mobility, circulation of information and contact with
Ethiopians and the nation proper transformed the ways in which Blacks around the
world could conceive of, and relate to Ethiopia, both on its own terms and in
relation to their own condition. Beginning slowly with Menelik II’s vigorous foreign
policy in the late nineteenth century, and crystallizing during the early years of Haile
Selassie’s reign in the twentieth, by the 1940s and 1950s the modern state of Ethiopia
was literally, and very self-consciously, ‘stretching forth her hands’ to the world, and
the Black world in particular.20 Take, for example, the small but influential group
who, at the invitation of the Ethiopian state, settled there to lend their professional
skills in the postwar reconstruction effort and Haile Selassie’s ‘modernization’
project after the departure of the Italians (and the arrival of the British) in 1941.
Young and formally educated, these women and men came from places like
Guyana, Trinidad, Panama, the American South and Urban Northeast; they passed
through institutions like CUNY and NYU, Tuskegee, Cornell and Howard
Universities (where, incidentally they met Ethiopian students sent abroad to study);
and landed in places like Addis Ababa and Harar to work with the Imperial Civil
Service as nurses and doctors, journalists and newspaper editors, musical directors,
engineers and pilots, and teachers.21
Attracted to Ethiopia for a number of reasons, their pre-existing conceptions of
Ethiopia may have been influenced by contact with classical Ethiopianism, but it was
most certainly informed by their own spiritual, intellectual, political and personal
development in a time when the world was going through convulsions. In the same
way that the encounter with the Biblical Ethiopia was a ‘momentous event’ for
Africans in the Diaspora in eighteenth century, so was this mid-twentieth century the
encounter with ‘real’ thing.
Vindicationist from the very beginning, the UESA made clear from the very first
that they established The African in order to ‘call attention to . . . the place of Africa
and Africans in the broad sweep of humanity, and to stimulate the world in
recognition of 400, 000, 000 people . . .’22 Its founders conceived of this magazine as
an antidote to racial ‘stereotypes and callous prejudgments’ and took on the
intellectual challenge of seeking to ‘examine and appraise . . . theories used by
‘‘religionists’’ to prove racial superiority and inferiority so as to superimpose reasons
for their economic and political stranglehold on the African people’.23 The pages of
this journal were a forum for debate and allowed the expression of a
wide variety of opinions. Although the publication cannot be characterized as
radical (in the socialist sense), or conservative (in the culturally nationalist sense) one
 African and Black Diaspora 201

thing the UESA makes clear is its commitment to a Pan-African, anti-(European)-

colonial, and a Black Nationalist vision.24
In a 1943 article entitled ‘Why African Nationalism?’, David Talbot outlines
three types of nationalism, based on ‘blood or race . . . flag . . . and religion’,
concluding that ‘one and only type of nationalism proposed when this question is
answered in the affirmative is one based on the blood-race concept’. His justification
is worth quoting at length:
Because the African is dispersed all over the world . . . which of necessity makes him
politically either a subject of a particular empire or citizen of a nations . . . he most
naturally he enjoys and participates in all these cultures, in all these nationalisms . . .
secondly, the African has partaken in all of the world’s religions, THUS . . . the African
and all people of African blood have a distinct and racial kinship, a common past, and
indissoluble future . . . The concept of race is biological and is no exact criterion to
determine the basis of effective group action. However, it is the tool which others are
using in the work-shop of world organization. Nationalism on the other hand is
psychological; it is the way people think that they are. It embraces the accepted rules for
effective participation and co-operation in world affairs. The African therefore must
either renounce any desire to take part in the world order and be a perennial believer in
wardship or he must conform to the rules of the game . . . Practical and thoroughgoing
race nationalism, while not an end in itself, would pave the way for the political and
juristic phase of the African’s national life . . .25

Another reflection of this nationalist orientation is The African’s consistent

engagement with Garveyism and the UNIA. Activities and events of UNIA branches
throughout the Caribbean were announced and reported on, and poems written by
Marcus Garvey were reprinted far into the 1940s, as were poems submitted by UNIA
members. Ethiopian World Federation member and president of the Dominica
chapter of the UNIA J.R. Casimir published a number of poems in the magazine,
among them an ode to Marcus Garvey called ‘Marcus Garvey- Dead’.26 Beginning in
1944 full-page announcements for the Garvey’s ‘African Study Circle of the World’
were taken out, and in May 1945 Amy Jacques Garvey advertised her ‘Correlative
Memorandum to the United Nations on Behalf of the Black Peoples of the World’ for
1 dollar in advance of its publication. It came out in time for the 5th Pan-African
Congress in October.27
Six years after Marcus Garvey’s death and over a decade after his departure from
the United States, a portrait of the Garvey family graced the cover of the journal.28
In the same issue this letter to the editor was published:
Dear Sir,
This is to acknowledge receipt of my second issues of The African Journal, the only
thing which seems to satisfy my soul in the form of Journalism since the Blackman
magazine by the late Hon. Marcus Garvey . . . I was Torpedoed in the war and am now
suffering from convulsions in the head. So that is why I was unable to attend the dinner
that was given in raising funds for the establishment of a hospital in Ethiopia that is so
badly needed.
I have seen the conditions out there with my own eyes. I have brought back
hundreds of pictures in [sic] which I know might interest you.

Respectfully yours
STANLEY DAVIS
New York City
202 H. Seife

Though his case may seem unique, Mr Davis’s perspective represents a broader shift
in the terms of engagement between Ethiopia and the rest of the black world from
the late 1930s through the 1950s and characterizes modern Ethiopianism as it was
expressed in many young, urban, cosmopolitan circles.
The content of The African had always been diverse and broached all of the
major international affairs of the day. ‘Is Japan Justified in her Far Eastern
Program?’, ‘Why the Partition of Palestine?’, ‘The Status of the Conflict in Spain’
and ‘The Scottsboro Boys: Angelo Herndon as an example’ were lengthy articles
appearing in the first ten pages of the inaugural issue alone. Still, the subject of
Ethiopia dominated. Political analysis, historical installments, stories about business
and economic development and investment opportunities in Ethiopia abounded, and
images of Ethiopia, the Royal Family and/or the Emperor himself appeared on the
covers and inside a good third of the issues, if not more. Material reprinted from
Ethiopian and Ethiopia-oriented periodicals
the Ethiopian Word Federation’s
Voice of Ethiopia, Sylvia Pankhurst’s New Times and Ethiopia News, and the
Ethiopian government’s The Ethiopian Herald, for example
was carried regularly.
After his move to Ethiopia in 1943 (to succeed African American William Steen as
editor of Ethiopia’s only English-language newspaper, the Ethiopian Herald), David
Talbot contributed frequently as the ‘Ethiopian correspondent’. Long after blacks in
the US had arguably lost interest in Ethiopia, during the 1940s this journal’s
community still debated whether or not Ethiopians were, or considered themselves
black, and whether or not Ethiopia could legitimately annex Eritrea and the Ogaden.
The prevailing opinions on those matters were, not surprisingly, yes, and yes.
Most letters published were positive, even effusive in their praise for the journal
on these matters, but many were not. The very first letter printed, from a woman in
New York City, takes issue with The African’s editorial policy on international
affairs, asserting:
. . . You seem to resolve the Japanese question in terms of race prejudice alone. That
seems to be quite an unscientific analysis of the situation. I don’t understand why you
insist on racial prejudice as the original factor instead of pointing out to your readers
that such prejudice will always be fostered when the economic status of a particular
group is affected by other races . . .29

The focus on the geo-politics of empire and race is consistent with what the UESA
and their publication espoused generally. Not surprisingly, regular contributor and
political analyst George Schyuler was also a popular object of critique. In the
summer of 1943 one New Yorker lamented, ‘It is unfortunate that you permitted
the African to be used as a medium by George Schyuler for such a vicious attack on
the government of Liberia . . .’, and another admitted gravely, ‘Mr. Schuyler, too
long I fear, is an anti-Negro-freedom man . . . let your paper ring with optimistic
deeds and not throw it into a fit of pessimistic bile emanating from [him] . . .’.30
Schuyler did receive some positive feedback, however, like the sentiment from the
reader who wrote from Pasadena, California, ‘ . . . I look forward every month to
what George Schyuler has to say . . . I never used to like [him], as I used to believe
from his writings he was not a race man, but now I can’t get my magazine quick
enough to hear what he has to say . . .’31
Race man indeed. Arguing for Ethiopia’s right to trusteeship of Eritrea and
Somaliland in the aftermath of World War II, Schyuler wrote:
 African and Black Diaspora 203

Yemen, the original Sheba from which Solomon’s sweetheart journeyed to Jerusalem, is
about to be recognized by the United States for the first time . . . Yemen is an Ethiopian
country although on the southern coast of the Red Sea. Herotodus divided Ethiopians
into two groups: those west of the Red Sea and those east of it. Yemen is important to the
United States at this time because of its trade outlet of Saudi Arabia, the most powerful
Arabian country, and the site of valuable oil concessions held by American oil concerns.
The average Yemenite looks like the average person you see on Lenox Avenue, South
Street, Wylie Avenue, Beale Street, or South Parkway.32

For those of us familiar with the curmudgeonly, critical, often profane and usually
prescient George Schuyler however, it seems odd that someone as meticulous as he
would draw on Biblical and ancient geography and rely on Herodotus as a credible
source to advance a contemporary political position. If we think of him as a modern
Ethiopianist, however, representing a group with similar politics, it is not surprising
that he would take ‘Yemen’s [national] recognition’ and recast it into an Ethiopian
frame.
Eritrean historian Ruth Iyob tells us that in 1941 a diverse group of Eritreans
established the first political organization to communicate their wishes and beginning
in 1946, when the ruling British Military Administration lifted the ban on political
parties, a number of political organizations emerged in Eritrea, many of them
opposed to Italian, British, and Ethiopian rule and calling for some form of national
independence.33 Iyob argues that the anti-colonial struggles waged by Eritrean
nationalists in the 1940s and 1950s were ‘manifestly Pan-Africanist’.34 As Schuyler’s
words suggest we hear nothing of this in the pages of The African, however. Beginning
in the early 1943 until the last issue in 1948, contributors called for the newly formed
United Nations and the international community at large to ‘return Eritrea and
Somaliland to Ethiopia’. Living in Addis Ababa at the time and close to the imperial
Ethiopian government and its concerns, in June of 1946 Schuyler wrote from Addis
Ababa that he was Loyal to the Emperor, and that Ethiopia’s right to access to the
Red Sea was ‘. . . primordial, and elemental to the exercise of her sovereignty . . .’35
The editorial of the magazine two months later exhorted the UN and world leaders to
‘return Eritrea and Somaliland to Ethiopia and stop the power politics’.36 It is
possible, then, that this illustrates Iyob’s claim that the Ethiopianism of early Pan-
Africanism provided the building blocks of international support for Ethiopian unity,
symbolically institutionalized as territorial integrity.37
The letters to the editor page of the journal evidences also that The African was
reaching all parts of the African Diaspora, and functioned as a forum for readers to
share information with each other about what was going on in their neck of the
woods, as well as to engage the ideas and people presented in the publication. This
section of the journal served as the conduit of formal and informal discourse
and information-sharing not only between people in big cities in the United States
and continental Europe, but also in and between metropolitan and rural areas
throughout the African Diaspora. In 1943 a mother from Boston informed the
editors that she made her ‘high-school age kids’ read the journal, and later the same
year Melville J. Herskovitz, then Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern
University in Illinois, sent in a letter acknowledging receipt of the July issue, to
and say that he was ‘particularly interested in Mr. Ivy’s article. I shall be wanting to
get your journal regularly, I am enclosing my check for a year’s subscription’.38 Three
years later an impressed reader from Washington, D.C. wrote ‘I have planned to
204 H. Seife

distribute many hundred copies . . . in the rural South to country farmers. I go from
church to church with my lecture study illustrated course . . .’39 After the end of
World War II, an increasing number of readers expressed interest in cultural issues,
and shared their own activities in the letters to the editor page. In the fall of 1947
John T. Clarke, executive secretary of the St Louis branch of the Urban League
wrote:
We believe there is great field for a wide circulation in the middle west where the
American Negro has little or no knowledge of even the island and South American
Negro . . . I would like to read [economic and social articles] . . . aside from the emphasis
on the political aspects . . . What is happening in Ethiopia?40

In the same issue was published a letter requesting information ‘regarding games and
amusements of our Ancient forefathers . . .’, and another from a man thanking The
African for teaching him something ‘. . . about my black brothers and sisters around
the world’. In the summer of 1947 the journal transmitted what can only be described
as a call and response between ‘Trinidadian’ and ‘Nigerian’ readers on the topic of
African languages being taught in Trinidad. In May Mr Abiola Oke of Lagos wrote
that it gave him:
. . . immense pleasure to know from your September [1946] issue that Yoruba language,
which is my mother tongue, is being learned by some in Trinidad. I expect from all the
other states that they will follow the good example of the people at Claxton’s bay and
begin to learn some African language, so that when they come home, one day, they will
not be ashamed but rather will be proud of speaking at least one of the African
languages . . .41

In the June
July issue of that same year Irma Parker of Trinidad informed
anyone who was interested that Mr David Moseste and Mr G. Springer were also
forming an African School in California, Trinidad, and thanked the editorial staff of
The African ‘for the alphabet sheets and primer books you sent . . .’42 As it turns out,
Modeste and Springer are identified by historian Fikru Gebrekidan as members of a
small group responsible for catalyzing the founding of the Ethiopian Orthodox
Church in the Western Hemisphere. In 1952 they traveled with a Bishop Mar Lukas
(described by Gebrekidan as a Ghanian born ‘religious mystic’) to Ethiopia in order
to discuss establishing an official tie with the Patriarchate of the EOC. Before their
audience with the Emperor Haile Selassie and church officials they were received by
the small West Indian community residing in Addis Ababa
among them David
Talbot who reported on their visit in the Ethiopian Herald. Gebrekidan reports that
in the end, ‘the trio was successful: they returned to Trinidad accompanied with two
Ethiopian Envoys, who by 1954 were permanently stationed at the EOC Western
Hemisphere headquarters in Arouca, Trinidad’.43
Recalling the types of announcements that were common in more traditionally
Ethiopianist publications, in August of 1944 ads begin to appear in The African for
Amharic lessons. Prof. Wingo Zimbi urged readers to ‘Wake up! . . . Buy a record in
your language AMHARIC, the official language of Ethiopia . . .’ In the winter of
that same year, the Coptic Orthodox Church, Inc. (Western Hemisphere) invited
readers to ‘join an international church organization, the light of inspiration to
Black Men everywhere. Study for the ministry. Prepare for service. Opportunity is
calling! God and Africa need you.’44 This is a great example of just how Ethiopia was
 African and Black Diaspora 205

‘stretching out her hands’ at this point in time, for it was the Ethiopian government
that, through the Ethiopian World Federation, placed these ads in The African.
These last few examples also illustrate how in modern Ethiopianism, as in all forms
of Ethiopianism, the sacred and the secular coexist.
Heir in part to E.W. Blyden’s legacy of racial and territorial nationalisms, the
Ethiopianism of the UESA reflects the tenor of the times in its commitment to anti-
colonial nation-building throughout the Diaspora. Unlike some of the other more
classically Ethiopianist groups, however, their form of modern Ethiopianism is
characterized primarily by the academic, quasi-academic and/or literary institutio-
nalization of a discourse still very much focused on the reverence of Ethiopia.45
Typifying the ‘professionally trained historians, anthropologists and archaeologists’
described by St Clair Drake this overwhelmingly metropolitan cohort was explicitly
concerned with educational endeavors and political activism related to Africa.
In his most recent book, Ibrahima Sundiata writes that ‘ . . . [in 1933] a dozen
student groups belonging to the Universal Ethiopian Students Association . . . asked
[Roosevelt] to condemn the past activities of Firestone in Liberia’.46 Sundiata says
no more about it, but indeed, in 1936, the UESA set up an ‘education fund’ which
provided scholarships so that students ‘may be aided and encouraged in carrying on
their educational work for the benefit of their race’. Publicized in a special section of
the journal, the fund had the expressed goals of fostering ‘a definite progressive
educational advancement between African students home and abroad’ and,
ultimately, of establishing a school in Liberia.47
The Universal Ethiopian Student’s Association was focused on ‘redeeming’
the continent from imperial European powers and certainly new institutions

educational, cultural and political
were part of the plan. At the same time
however, the group was committed to changing, not overturning
either in a
socialist, or religiously prophetic sense
existing global structures of power.
Although many people of color saw no contradiction between opposition to
European imperialism and championing non-white empires
Japan and Ethiopia,
for example
there were others who were ardent Pan-Africanists, against all forms
of imperialism, whether British, French, Japanese or Ethiopian.48 What distinguishes
the UESA as Ethiopianist
as opposed to more generally anti-colonial nationalist
Pan-African, like many other organizations of the period
is that the group
supported Ethiopia and Haile Selassie I at almost all costs, championing both the
nationalist and imperialist nature of the modern Ethiopian state in the name of
preserving its political sovereignty and role as a leader in Africa and the black world.
As discussed in the first part of this essay, the Ethiopian World Federation and
the Ethiopian Research Council, which could also be considered Ethiopianist
organizations, counted a good number of Ethiopian nationals among their ranks.
Interestingly enough, however, there do not appear to be any native-born Ethiopians
in the membership of the Universal Ethiopian Students Association or involved in
the publication of their organ. And so I close with a pertinent question: what might it
have meant for a group of young black intellectuals and political activists, from the
New World, in the twentieth century (and not the eighteenth or nineteenth, when
such nomenclature was common) to refer to themselves as ‘Universal Ethiopian
Students’? Hopefully this brief consideration of The African leaves markers for
further research and discussion, which in turn will surely yield new questions, and
206 H. Seife

tell us more about the nature of Ethiopianism in the twentieth century and its
relationship to a number of political movements in the African Diaspora.

Notes
1. The ‘Ethiopia’ of Psalm 68:31, ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch
out her hands unto God’ was generally understood to mean Africa and the black world as a
whole. Robert Hill, who has written extensively on the history of Ethiopianism in the
Caribbean context, describes Ethiopianism as a discourse of extreme heterogeneity which
can be an ideology, social and/or political movement, cosmology, and subculture. He has
also castigated scholars for leaning on the term as a ‘global omnibus . . . a catch-all for the
idea of Ethiopia’, and in many ways he is right: how can one lump phenomena occurring all
over the world and in different historical contexts and phases into one, undifferentiated
category. Moreover, the term is used as a category of analysis and of practice; and once the
province of scholars alone, it is now used by historical actors to describe themselves, their
beliefs and their activities. Thus, in an effort to be as clear as possible, I follow Hill (2005) in
differentiating ‘classical’ from ‘modern’ Ethiopianism in this study, and provide specific
historical examples to illustrate my argument about the latter.
2. In this paper I follow George Shepperson in using ‘P’ Pan-Africanism to refer to the
political movement related to the Pan-African Congresses, anti-colonial nation-building
and continental unification, and ‘p’ pan-africanism for all other types.
3. Drake (1970, p. 50).
4. Though not always as explicitly stated, much of the literature on twentieth-century pan-
africanist activity in European, North American and West African cities points to its roots
in an earlier, spiritually based, Ethiopianist tradition. Indeed, the histories of these two
cultural and political institutions are related, yet it is still unclear exactly how and when
‘modern’ Pan-Africanism the kind exemplified by the Pan-African Congresses for
instance, diverged from the more vindicationist, messianic pan-africanism of classical
Ethiopianism. Drake’s explanation is that between the end of the nineteenth century and
the outbreak of World War I in 1914, there was a gradual secularization of black
leadership in the United States, the West Indies and Africa, and as increasing numbers of
college graduates emerged who were not trained in theology, the ‘vindication of the Race’
passed from the hands of those who believed in Providential Design and Biblically
sanctioned ‘Ethiopianism’ into the hands of professionally trained historians, anthro-
pologists and archaeologists. ‘After 1900’, he argues, ‘Pan-Africanism gradually became
the dominant political myth of the black world
replacing the Ethiopianist pre-political
myth. But Ethiopianism was by no means dead . . .’
5. Drake (1970, p. 64).
6. Drake (1970, p. 71).
7. William R. Scott has written probably the most comprehensive and thorough body of
work on Ethiopianism to date. Curiously, there is not one mention of the group in his
meticulous account of Ethiopianst and pro-Ethiopian groups. He acknowledges the work
of ‘Black scholars who propagandized for Abyssinian justice in the Negro academy as
instrumental’ reporting that ‘At Howard University in DC, the Ethiopianist William Leo
Hansberry organized an Abyssinian aid group that generated local support for the Haile
Selassie government, and Bishop Reverdy Ransom led an Ethiopian society at Wilberforce
. . .’ (Scott, 1993, p. 209). He does not say much about students however, and nowhere in
the book is the Universal Ethiopian Students Association mentioned. The existence of the
group is acknowledged in Joseph Harris’s African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia
1936
1941 (1994), and he writes extensively on one of its founders and primary trustees,
Willis Huggins.
8. Names compiled from editorial notes from the first volume of The African: Journal of
African Affairs.
9. Influenced by a tradition of Ethiopianism they declared in their mission statement that
Ethiopia was ‘one of the oldest living civilizations in the world . . . in the Classical age it
was universally regarded as one of the greatest and most powerful nations on earth [and
that] Ethiopians of subsequent centuries succeeded in preserving their culture and their
 African and Black Diaspora 207

liberties, in the face of numerous attempted invasions’. They maintained that because
Ethiopia was playing a ‘prominent part in certain recent international developments they
concerned themselves primarily with the task of disseminating information about
Ethiopian affairs’ (Harris, 1994, p. 20).
10. Letters to the Editor, The African, June 1946.
11. Daniel (1982, pp. 12
16).
12. Daniel (1982, p. 12). Ula Y. Taylor addresses it briefly in the context of Amy Jacque
Garvey’s participation (Taylor, 2002, pp. 182
5). There are also are a few references to it in
bibliographical sources, but nothing substantive.
13. Editorial Note, July
August 1938, p. 122.
14. From the Managing Editor’s Desk statement, The African, January 1948 (Vol. 6, no. 1),
p. 8.
15. I have not conducted the research to prove this, so it’s a hunch based on the fact that 1)
I have not come across any other references to a Levin Morris, and whereas the editors of
The African often include biographical notes on their contributors, there is nothing on
Levin; and 2) his short stories focused on Ethiopia evince an uncommon familiarity with
Ethiopian customs, food and landscape, and include vivid descriptions that match real-life
accounts. ‘On Wazu Gaza’ (October 1937, written by ‘Lionel Francisco’, another pen-
name I am guessing) is about an Ethiopian guerilla fighter who, after his family dies in an
attack on his village, massacres a camp of Italian soldiers. ‘Romance in Upper Gotham’
(December 1945) is about a about a young African American woman and an Ethiopian
man studying medicine at Howard University who meet in a Harlem dance hall, fall in
love and end up married despite doubts raised by the young woman’s friends. Finally,
‘Winged Victory: A Gripping Story of Love in Liberia’ published in June 1944, has many
eerie resonances with Schuyler’s ‘Black Empire’ (1991). I have ideas about the other fiction
published in The African by other, equally obscure, authors, but I will leave further
speculation until I have conducted more research.
16. Editorial, ‘One Golden Harvest’, September
October 1938, p. 24.
17. Editorial, ‘Share Your African’, May
June, 1945, p. 4.
18. O.I.A Inyang, Letters to the editor, October 1946, p. 7
19. Editorial, ‘The African Banned in the Kongo’, September 1946, p. 16.
20. In this period Imperial Ethiopia’s foreign policy was heavily oriented toward the African
Diaspora for human resources (as well as the US and the ‘West’ generally for investments
in capital and infrastructure) Haile Selassie sent state representatives
from the Ethiopian
Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian World Federation, and his Imperial Cabinet
to the US
to encourage emigration and youth to study abroad and return with education and skills.
More than a few ended up at American historically black colleges. They didn’t always
return, and their experiences were transformative not only for them, but for those they
encountered. For more see Zewde (2002), Gebrekidan (2005), Scott (1993), Harris (1994)
and Shack (1974).
21. Joseph Harris names a number of New World Black Emigrants who moved to Ethiopia
during this period, for example: William Steen (teaching/journalism), David Talbot
(teaching/journalism), John West (Medicine), T. Thomas Fortune Fletcher (Professor of
English), and Vasquez-Delgado (Radio) John Robinson (aviation) (Harris, 1994, pp. 143

50). Harris reports that all but Talbot returned to the US after the expiration of their
contracts in 1946, but I have found evidence in primary sources that contradicts this (to be
discussed in another paper).
22. UESA, ‘Why the African?’, September 1937, inaugural issue, p. 2.
23. Ibid.
24. Although the obviously frustrated business manager (Alfred U. Scott, signing with his
initials only) issued the following ‘Appeal’ reminiscent of the more ‘bourgeois’ as well as
socially conservative, or just downright frustrated, in a corner of the October 1944 issue:

After taking in consideration a few facts it seems logical to make this appeal to
African-Americans and all people of color: particularly those of us with lesser
education, to conduct themselves better in public places for their own good, and of
others. It is also our firm belief that only when one respects oneself that he or she can
208 H. Seife

ever hope to get respect from others. When one misbehaves in public, it does not
reflect on the individual alone, but on all of us. It also gives those that oppose us
greater weapons to fight with: thereby making the job harder for those of use who
must carry on the fight against injustice.
25. David Talbot, ‘Why African Nationalism?’, October 1943, p. 13.
26. J.R. Ralph Casimir, Marcus Garvey-Dead’, August 1946, p. 6.
27. Advertisements, June and August 1944 and October 1945.
28. September 1946.
29. Violet Goodman, Letter to the editor, July
August 1938.
30. W.A. Clarke of New York City, Letters to the editor, June 1943.
31. Letter to the editor, October 1943.
32. George Schuyler, ‘Yemen Recognition’, in his column ‘It Happened in Africa’, May 1946,
p. 15.
33. Iyob (1995, p. 70).
34. Iyob (1995, p. 51).
35. David Talbot, ‘Ethiopia as I Saw It’, June 1946, p. 18.
36. Editorial, ‘On Sharing the Spoils’, August 1946, p. 6.
37. Iyob (1995, p. 50).
38. Letter to the editor page, August 1943.
39. ‘Reader’s Opinions’, 1943; Letter to the editor, January 1947.
40. Letter to the editor, October
November 1947.
41. Letter to the editor, May 1947.
42. Letter to the editor, June
July 1947.
43. Gebrekidan (2005, p. 198).
44. Incidentally, this was the very same ad that appeared the issue of the EWF’s Voice of
Ethiopia nearly five years before.
45. Groups of this order might include the number of pro-Ethiopia organizations that sprang
up during the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis (1935
1941): the Ethiopian Pacific Movement, the
African Patriotic League, the Ethiopian Guild of the Latter Day Garveyites and the
Ethiopian World Federation, for example. For more information about these organiza-
tions please see Harris (1994) and Scott (1993).
46. Sundiata (2003, p. 188).
47. ‘The African Educational Fund of the Universal Ethiopian Students Assn’, The African,
March
April 1938, p. 93, inset.
48. Those associated with the Communist Party and/or international and labor politics

C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Cyril Briggs
are good examples of such types, even
though all supported Ethiopia during the 1930s (though not uncritically).

References
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Drake, St. C., 1970. The redemption of African and Black religion. Chicago, IL: Third World
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Gebrekidan, F.N., 2005. Bond without blood: a history of Ethiopian and New World Black
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Harris, J., 1994. African-American reactions to war in Ethiopia, 1936
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Hill, R., 2005, Ethiopianism: ideology, theology, or cosmology. Roundtable Discussion, Third
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